Later, not sooner

Where the Wild Things aren’t: A Sendak Museum

Maurice Sendak, the children’s writer and illustrator, on April 22, 1963. Plans for general access to the house where Sendak lived remain up in the air, despite Sendak’s wish that it be open to the public.
Maurice Sendak, the children’s writer and illustrator, on April 22, 1963. Plans for general access to the house where Sendak lived remain up in the air, despite Sendak’s wish that it be open to the public.

RIDGEFIELD, Conn. -- The characters of Maurice Sendak may live in the imaginations of children around the world, but many of those characters were born in a wooded residential neighborhood on the outskirts of this small town, in a rambling shingle house where Sendak lived and worked beginning in the early 1970s.

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The New York Times

A model of the archive planned by the Sendak Foundation, to be attached to the home of Maurice Sendak, the children’s writer and illustrator, in Ridgefield, Conn.

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The New York Times

The preserved studio of Maurice Sendak, the children’s writer and illustrator, at his home in Ridgefield, Conn.

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AP file photo

In this Sept. 6, 2011, file photo, children’s book author Maurice Sendak is photographed during an interview at his home in Ridgefield, Conn. Sendak died May 8, 2012, at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Conn. He was 83.

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AP/HarperCollins

This image provided by HarperCollins shows the book cover of "Where the Wild Things Are," by Maurice Sendak.

Since his death in 2012, his estate and foundation and a group of devoted local Sendakians have been working to make this town into what some day may be the primary pilgrimage site for his fans, the way Sante Fe, N.M., is for Georgia O'Keeffe or Amherst, Mass., is for Emily Dickinson, one of Sendak's favorite authors. The urgency to create a place for the public to visit increased in 2014 when the artist's estate, citing Sendak's wishes late in life, withdrew more than 10,000 pieces of original artwork and other material -- the heart of his archive -- from the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, to which Sendak lent pieces for decades and which organized more than 70 exhibitions of his work.

In his will, Sendak -- widely considered one of the most important children's authors of the 20th century and beloved for Where the Wild Things Are -- wrote that he wanted his home here to operate "as a museum or similar facility, to be used by scholars, students, artists, illustrators and writers, and to be opened to the general

public" as the Maurice Sendak Foundation's directors saw fit. In 2014, in an interview at the home, foundation members spoke of plans for small, scheduled public

group tours. But in recent interviews with the foundation's leadership and several Ridgefield Sendak supporters, it appears that it might be a very long time before the general-public part of Sendak's desire comes to pass.

The foundation is overseeing extensive conservation work on the trove of material retrieved from the Rosenbach, and it says it is close to seeking municipal approval for a modest archive building to be constructed near Sendak's home, attached to the house by a corridor. But Lynn Caponera, the foundation's president, said that whether the home or archive or both would ever be open to the general public -- not just to scholars or artists -- remained unclear. "His intention was someone would call up or make an appointment with me and then two or three people at a time would come up and I'd show them his studio and then his archives and that would be that," Caponera, one of Sendak's closest confidants and an executor of his will, said. "It would be sort of just like Maurice still being there. It would not be turnstiles and gift shops."

Donald A. Hamburg, a trusts and estates lawyer and a foundation board member, was more emphatic about the foundation not intending to operate the house as many other house museums around the country do, with public hours or public tours available by appointment. "We're following the wishes of Maurice, stated in his will," Hamburg said, "that the house become a study center for scholars, artists and others, to see what inspired him. And people of that ilk will be admitted one at a time with supervision and will be able to see the house."

Even as the foundation has been planning the archives building, a group of local residents has been courting the foundation to consider supporting and lending artwork to a stand-alone museum that would also be in Ridgefield. The group envisions an institution that could be a tourist draw and an economic boon to this town of 25,000.

But two locations for such a museum -- including a modernist former office building designed by Philip Johnson, near the town center -- were rejected in December by the foundation because of concerns about various practical problems with both sites.

And two local volunteers, who have pursued the museum idea with the encouragement of the town and the foundation, say that establishing a public institution -- which would need millions of dollars in private donations for staff, operations and a building -- could be years down the road. "Opening a museum is a five- to eight-year process -- we're at the very beginning still," said Jennifer Mathy, a former Morgan Stanley executive who, with Alison Greeley, another former Morgan Stanley executive, has led the proposal for such a museum. They imagine it including a walking trail with sculptures of Sendak creations, much like ones at the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden in Springfield, Mass.

Mathy, who first approached the foundation with Greeley in 2014, said the concept of making Ridgefield synonymous with Sendak's work seemed natural to them. "Why wouldn't it be here, his adopted home for 40 years?" she said. "He loved it here. We loved him."

However, she added, the withdrawal of the material from the Rosenbach had placed a brighter spotlight on town supporters and the foundation than most fledgling museum projects experience. "Most museums are allowed to do all this work and explore all these opportunities before people know they're working on it," she said. "But because of the nature of this project, it's been on every radar."

The Sendak Foundation, which gives grants to artists and numerous other causes, is now defending itself in probate court in an action brought by the Rosenbach, which contends that some of Sendak's rare books promised in his will to the library -- by William Blake and Beatrix Potter, editions worth millions of dollars -- are being withheld. The foundation has also faced questions from some who worry that Sendak's longtime home, which has been preserved almost exactly as he left it, may be too remote to serve as the site where his legacy is honored. "I really don't know who's going to go there," Judy Taylor Hough, Sendak's longtime British editor, said in 2014. "It's in the middle of nowhere." (Sendak, who was born and reared in Brooklyn and rose to fame in 1963 with publication of Where the Wild Things Are, bought the house in 1972 and lived there with his longtime companion, Dr. Eugene Glynn, a psychiatrist, who died in 2007.)

Caponera said that the foundation was proceeding slowly and cautiously with the archive project and the idea for a nearby museum because it wants to ensure that the things Sendak left behind -- his drawings, his personal art collection and the thousands of other items he collected that fed his imagination -- are properly maintained, documented and eventually seen.

"It's an enormous responsibility when you think about someone's legacy," said Caponera, for whom Sendak was a beloved father figure. "It's awful enough when your parent dies, but when your parent's work is loved by millions and millions of people, you have to be conscious of that and think about what this means beyond you, because they're not our things. They belong to everyone who loved Maurice's work."

Family on 02/10/2016

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