Laurent de Brunhoff, artist who made Babar famous, dies at the age of 98
Laurent de Brunhoff, the French artist who for almost seventy years cherished his father’s creation, a beloved, very Gallic and very civilized elephant named Babar, including sending him to a haunted castle, to New York City and into space – died Friday at his home in Key West, Florida. He was 98.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said his wife, Phyllis Rose.
Babar was born one evening in 1930 in a leafy suburb of Paris. Laurent, then five, and his brother, Mathieu, four, had trouble sleeping. Their mother, Cécile de Brunhoff, a pianist and music teacher, began telling a story about an orphaned baby elephant who flees the jungle and flees to Paris, which is conveniently nearby.
The boys were captivated by the story and in the morning they ran off to tell their father, Jean de Brunhoff, an artist; he embraced the story and began sketching the little elephant, whom he named Babar, and detailing his adventures.
In Paris, Jean imagined, Babar is rescued by a wealthy woman – simply called the Old Lady – who introduces him to all kinds of modern pleasures. Armed with the Old Lady’s bag, Babar visits a department store, where he rides the elevator up and down, which irritates the operator: “This isn’t a toy, Mr. Elephant.” He buys a suit in “an increasingly green shade” and, although the year is 1930, a pair of gaiters, the fine, gaping footwear of a 19th-century gentleman.
He drives the Old Lady’s car, enjoys a bubble bath and gets lessons in math and other subjects. But he misses his old life and cries for his mother, and when his young cousins Arthur and Celeste track him down, he returns with them to the jungle – but not before giving Arthur and Celeste nice clothes of their own.
At home, the old king of the elephants has died after eating a bad mushroom (these things happened often) and the rest of the elephants, impressed by Babar’s modernity – his nice green suit, his car and his education – make him their new king. Babar asks Celeste to be his queen.
“Histoire de Babar” (“The Story of Babar”), an oversized, beautifully illustrated picture book recounting Babar’s escapade in Jean de Brunhoff’s continuous script, was published in 1931. Six more picture books followed before Jean died of tuberculosis in 1937, when he was 37 and Laurent was only 12.
The last two books were only partially colored at Jean’s death and Laurent finished the job. Like his father, Laurent trained as a painter, worked with oil paint and exhibited his abstract works in a Parisian gallery. But when he turned 21, he decided to continue Babar’s adventures.
“If I became a writer and illustrator of children’s books,” Mr. Laurent wrote in 1987 for the catalog accompanying an exhibition of his work in the Mary Ryan Gallery in Manhattan, “It wasn’t because I set out to make children’s books; I wanted Babar to live on (or, as some might say, my father). I wanted to stay in his country, the elephant world that is both a utopia and a gentle satire on human society.”
His first book, ‘Babar’s Cousin: That Rascal Arthur’, was published in 1946. Mr. de Brunhoff would write and illustrate more than 45 Babar books. For the first few years, many readers did not realize that he was not the original author, so fully had he realized Babar’s world and its essence: his quiet morality and equanimity.
“Babar, c’est moi,” Mr. de Brunhoff often said. In every respect, artist and elephant shared the same Gallic urbanity and optimistic outlook.
In the 1960s, Babar was a very famous elephant indeed.
Charles de Gaulle was a fan. The Babar books, he said, promoted “a certain idea of France.” So did Maurice Sendak, although Mr. Sendak said he was traumatized for years by Babar’s origin story: the brutal murder of his mother by a hunter.
“That sublimely happy childhood was lost after just two full pages,” Mr. Sendak wrote in the introduction to “Babar’s Family Album” (1981), a reissue of six titles, including Jean’s original.
Mr. Sendak and Mr. de Brunhoff became friends, however, and the latter encouraged the former, as Mr. Sendak wrote, to abandon his “Freudian excavations.”
‘I reassured him’ Mr. de Brunhoff told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “I said bluntly that the mother died leaving the little hero behind to struggle with life alone.”
There were other criticisms. Many claimed that Babar was an avatar of sexism, colonialism, capitalism and racism. Two early works were particularly offensive: Jean de Brunhoff’s “The Travels of Babar” (1934) and Laurent de Brunhoff’s “Babar’s Picnic” (1949) both depicted “savages,” drawn in the brutal style of their time, as cartoon images of Africans . When Toni Morrison, then a young editor at Random House, Babar’s publisher, objected to the images in “Babar’s Picnic” in the late 1960s, Mr. de Brunhoff asked that it be withdrawn from print. And he made sure to leave out the racist scenes from “The Travels of Babar” when that title was included in “Babar’s Family Album.”
‘Should we burn Babar?’ author and educator Herbert Kohl wondered in the title of a 1995 book subtitled “Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories.” No, he concluded, but he nevertheless argued that Babar’s stories were elitist because they glorified capitalism and unearned wealth. Where did the Old Lady get her money from? Mr. Kohl asked, irritated by the implication “that it is perfectly normal and even wonderful that some people have wealth for which they do not have to work.”
Nonsense, Mr. De Brunhoff told the Los Angeles Times, responding to an earlier Marxist analysis of his stories: “These are stories, not social theory.”
They were also works of art, and critics compared Mr. de Brunhoff’s use of color and naive style to painters such as Henri Rousseau.
“With ‘Madeline’ by Bemelmans and ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Sendak” Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker wrote in 2008When the Morgan Library exhibited the sketches and models of the early efforts of both Jean and Laurent du Brunhoff, “the Babar books have become part of the common language of childhood, the library of the early mind.”
Like Babar, Laurent de Brunhoff was born in Paris on August 30, 1925 into a family of artists and publishers. His father’s siblings were all in the magazine business: his brothers, Michel and Maurice, were the editors of French Vogue and La Décor Aujourd’Hui, an art and design magazine, respectively; his sister, Cosette, a photographer, was married to the director of Les Jardins de Modes, a fashion magazine, and it was under that magazine’s imprint that Babar was first published.
Laurent worked differently from his father, who conceived his stories as a whole, narrative and photos together. (Jean had also wanted to involve his wife as co-author, but she adamantly refused. “My mother was absolutely against it,” Laurent said, “because she thought that even if she supported the idea, the entire creation was my father’s. .”) For Laurent, the idea and the images came first – what if Babar was abducted by aliens, or practiced yoga? – and then he started sketching and painting what that might look like. When he married his second wife, Mrs. Rose, professor emeritus of English at Wesleyan University, they often collaborated on the text.
The couple met at a party in Paris in the mid-1980s – Ms Rose was working on a biography of Josephine Baker – and fell passionately for each other. “After dinner we sat together on the couch,” Mr. de Brunhoff told an interviewer in 2015. “She said, ‘I love your work.’ I said, ‘I don’t know your work, but I love your eyes.’ And that was the beginning.”
Mr. de Brunhoff joined Ms. Rose in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1985, taking Babar with him. The couple married in 1990 and later lived in New York City and Key West.
In 1987, Mr. de Brunhoff sold the rights to license his elephant to a businessman named Clifford Ross, who then sold those rights to a Canadian company, Nelvana Ltd., with the understanding that Mr. Ross would remain involved in its conception . of future products. What followed was what The New York Times described as “an elephantine array” of Babar-abilia – including Babar pajamas and slippers, wallpaper and wrapping paper, perfume, fruit drinks, backpacks, blankets and bibs. There was “Babar: The Movie” (1989), which critics said was boring and violent, and, that same year, a television series, which critics said was less boring and less violent.
And then a lawsuit followed. Mr. Ross found Nelvana’s creations tasteless and demeaning to Babar’s wholesome image, as he charged in a lawsuit. Mr. de Brunhoff stayed out of the fray with typical equanimity.
“Celesteville is a kind of utopian city, a place where there are no robberies or crimes, where everyone has a good relationship with each other, so there really is no need for lawyers there,” Mr. du Brunhoff told The New York Times.
Federal District Court Judge Kenneth Conboy agreed.
“In Babar’s world, all colors are pastel, all rain showers are short-lived, and all enemies are more or less benign,” he wrote in his decision, ruling that Nelvana had wrongly excluded Mr. Ross from licensing. “The storylines celebrate the perseverance of goodness, work, patience and perseverance in the face of ignorance, discouragement, inertia and adversity. If only the values of Babar’s world were evident from the papers filed in this lawsuit?
In addition to his wife, Mr. de Brunhoff is also survived by his brothers Mathieu and Thierry-Jean; a daughter, Anne de Brunhoff, and son, Antoine de Brunhoff, from his first marriage to Marie-Claude Bloch, which ended in divorce; a stepson, Ted Rose; and several grandchildren.
“Babar and I both enjoy a friendly family life,” Mr. de Brunhoff wrote in 1987. “We take equal care to avoid overdramatizing the events or situations that arise. If we take the right, efficient steps, we both believe there will be a happy ending. When writing a book, my intention is to entertain, not to deliver a ‘message’. But still you can of course say that there is a message in the Babar books, a message of non-violence.”
Babar’s stories have been translated into 18 languages, including Japanese and Hebrew, and have sold many millions of copies. Mr. de Brunhoff’s last book, “Babar’s Guide to Paris,” was published in 2017.
“Laurent’s idea of a good story,” Ms. Rose said on the phone, “is this: something bad happens, no one panics, and it all works out.”