Maurice Sendak

original animation cel from PIERRE, "I DONT CARE" (CBS 1970s)

Ronald Brooks Kitaj RA 1932 – 2007 was an American artist with Jewish roots who spent much of his life in England. He became a merchant seaman with a Norwegian freighter when he was 17. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and the Cooper Union in New York City. After serving in the United States Army for two years, in France and Germany, he moved to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (1958–59) under the G.I. Bill, where he developed a love of Cézanne, and then at the Royal College of Art in London (1959–61), alongside David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield. Richard Wollheim, the philosopher and David Hockney remained lifelong friends. "Through an earlier pre-occupation with turn-of-the-century intellectual life in Vienna (where he had started his art studies in the early 1950s), as well as an admiration for the Warburg Institute approach to the history of art-in-its-intellectual-context (since after Vienna he had moved to Oxford to study with the art historian Edgar Wind, before going on to the Royal College of Art) Kitaj has come to identify most strongly with the central European Jewish writer Franz Kafka, and with his sense of estrangement and of hidden mysteries. Illustrations to Kafka's aphorisms, imaginary portraits of his fiancée Felice and Count West-West who owned The Castle, appear in the Little Pictures, as do rapidly sketched portraits of Karl Kraus, Paul Celan, Leon Trotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein, representations of Judeo-Christian mysteries of the hidden face of God. Kitaj settled in England, and through the 1960s taught at the Ealing Art...

Born in 1918 in Budapest, Hungary, Engel began his professional career in animation as a color designer at the Walt Disney studio. Although his credits include work on such classics as Disney’s Bambi and Fantasia and UPA’s Gerald McBoing-Boing, he is best known as a mentor to literally hundreds of students. Engel was also one of the original members of United Productions of America (UPA), where, during the ’50s, he worked on classics such as Mr. Magoo, Gerald McBoing-Boing and Madeline. According to his biographer, Dr. Janeann Dill, Engel has created more than 33 personal films and received five Golden Eagle awards, an Annie Award, a Winsor McCay Award, the Fritz Award, a Jean Vigo Award, and the Norman McLaren...