“Illustrating Pierre gave me the privilege of doing a grown-up book,” Maurice Sendak told his biographer and friend, Tony Kushner, “which I said I’d never do. It was my commentary on the book. I loved it so much–it didn’t need illustrating.” Saying he’d never intended to illustrate a grown-up book is almost an understatement. Throughout his career, the man behind Where the Wild Things Are had passionately decried the very concept of anyone illustrating classic adult novels. But Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities was an easy exception to the rule– it’s one of Sendak’s favorite books and the namesake of his aggresively ambivalent Nutshell Library character. When esteemed Melville scholar Hershel Parker asked Sendak to lend his artistic talent to a revised edition of the book, Sendak pulled out all the stops, hiring John Dugdale to help him create the extravagant William Blake-inspired illustrations for Pierre. Writes Kushner:
As he had done before starting work on Outside Over There, Sendak met with a photographer and models and had them assume poses based on sections of Pierre. John Dugdale, a remarkable photographer and a friend of Sendak’s, used for the session the old daguerrotype camera with which he shoots his exquisite, evanescent still lifes. To the anachronistic presence of Dugdale’s plate-and-bellows camera; to the intoxicating effect of Melville’s swoony prose, never more fuschia or fustian than in this novel; and to Sendak’s decision to use, as the true parent and original visual midrash on the story, the strange mannerist art of Blake, can be attributed the serioso extravagance of the compositions, of the illustrations themselves.
Dugdale was the perfect choice to help Sendak realize his vision. After gaining commercial success early on and working for clients like Bergdorf Goodman, Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren, Dugdale suffered a series of AIDS-related health problems in the early 90s including seven strokes and CMV retinitis, a devestating disease that causes blindness. Miraculously for Dugdale, he emerged out of the ordeal with one eye somewhat functioning. While he was no longer able to shoot high-paying ad campaigns, Dugdale still had enough vision left to concentrate on his very personal body of work, which is comprised of haunting still lifes and breathtaking portraiture.
There’s a delicacy to the aesthetic produced through Dugdale’s nostalgic methods (he often shoots in the antiquated cyanotype process) that seems to reflect the artist’s own fragile nature. His tasteful nude portraits are a reserved and reverent pean to the beauty of the human form– the perfect foundation for a marriage with Blake’s tortured soul and Sendak’s cynically optimistic smirk that begot the elegant illustrations in Pierre.
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