Dr. Seuss: The Cat Behind the Hat
by: Smith, Caroline M.

Hardcover. Kansas City, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages. Everyone who grew up entertained, provoked, and enlightened by Dr. Seuss books will love this big, color-saturated volume covering 70 years of published and private art by the master of smart, loopy fun. Here are examples of Theodor Geisel's clever, now ironic advertising work, including a rambunctious campaign for Flit, an insecticide containing DDT. Geisel's political cartoons and magazine illustrations are animated by his phenomenal gift for line and color, mischievous humor, and humanitarian values. It is thrilling, too, to see the original drawings for Green Eggs and Ham and other Seuss classics. But the big discoveries in this bountiful and redefining volume are his "Midnight Paintings," surreal watercolors, oils, and acrylics featuring tiny figures in a vast, labyrinthine world, and private versions of his expressive characters, especially the Cat, his alternate identity. Geisel's vibrant, trippy, hilarious, and poignant art plays on Hieronymus Bosch, M. C. Escher, and Persian miniatures. Every creature, plant, architectural marvel, object, and landscape is wriggling, leaping, flying, arcing, tilting, and rolling. When he dives into abstraction, he plunges into a deep chromatic sea, while his taxidermic sculptures prove just how real his sweet and goofy invented critters were to him. Spectacular reproductions and excellent, if episodic, commentary map Geisel's exuberant, world-altering artistic journey on what he would call "long wiggled roads" into "weirdish wild space."