For the annual Hanukkah exhibition, the renowned artist and illustrator Maurice Sendak chose a group of Hanukkah lamps from The Jewish Museum's preeminent collection. Sendak’s work is characterized by a push and pull between beauty and sorrow, light and darkness. His art is triggered by memories and is also their repository.
When going through the collection, the sheer number and variety of lamps struck a nerve, underscoring Sendak's deep, lifelong sense of loss at the destruction of the prewar world of his Eastern European Jewish parents. Having movingly evoked that world in his drawings, he surprised himself by mostly avoiding its rich visual language when choosing lamps. “I stayed away from everything elaborate. I kept looking for very plain, square ones, very severe looking,” he explained. “Their very simplicity reminded me of the Holocaust.” The lamps Sendak finds most compelling and poignant are those that “go right to the heart,” whose “beauty is contained.”
Maurice Sendak, Final illustration for “Grandmother’s Tale,” in Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ink on paper, Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia
