Color | Joy | Eric Carle
I love color, and I have this one frustration that I cannot be even more colorful.Eric Carle
This exhibition celebrates the gifts of art and story that Eric Carle shared with the world. It features collage illustrations from his popular picture books, emphasizing his passion for nature and animals. The exhibition also showcases Carle’s love of color. Painted tissue papers, stage-set banners from The Magic Flute, and numerous abstract collages (which he referred to as his “art-art”) adorn the gallery walls. Over half of the nearly 70 artworks on view have never been publicly displayed.
This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Hsin-Yi Foundation.
What to Expect
Nearly 70 artworks by Eric Carle are on view in this exhibition. Four colorful banners that Carle created for an opera hang from the gallery ceiling. There is a reading area with two couches where guests can enjoy Carle’s picture books. Guests are invited to draw and write about the people and things that provide joy in their lives. They may add their pictures and messages to a “field” of red poppies on the wall.
This unpublished collage was likely for Animals Animals. Look for a similar image of a hippopotamus in the book.
This unpublished collage was likely one of Carle’s early endpaper designs for The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse. Its bright colors and serpentine shapes create a jazzy design.
Carle may have intended this collage as endpapers (the pages glued inside the front and back covers of a book). The punched-out holes recall those in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The reflective paper adds a lively optical effect.
A family visits a circus in this amusing counting book, now out of print. Carle replaced the figures of the mother and boy, probably because he was unhappy with some aspect of their design.
In the 1980s, Carle illustrated two covers for the popular children’s publication Cricket Magazine. One is this charming image of a lion and the other shows an ice cream-eating cricket, also on display in the exhibition.
Carle used a repeating triangular motif to connect the different squares of color in this sprightly collage. He considered red, yellow, blue, and green as his primary colors—just like the four murals in the Museum's Great Hall.
Carle may have created this collage for Animals Animals. He used the blunt end of a paintbrush to scratch wavy lines into the wet paint.
