Maurice Sendak worked in a protean range of styles, crosshatched here, fluid there, cartoony on occasion, rococo when he was feeling it, with influences ranging from William Blake and Winslow Homer to Winsor McCay and Walt Disney—and that’s just the W’s. Yet Sendak never lost his own singular eye … or I, first-person singular, because no children’s-book creator ever revealed more of himself than this one, who seemed to peel back another layer with each new work. In the exhibition “Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak,” there are so many treasures it’s hard to know where to begin. Feast on sketches, storyboards, and paintings from biggies such as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, but also lesser-known gems. Sendak’s plentiful theatrical work is well represented, too, including his spectacular watercolor designs for scrims used in productions of The Magic Flute and Idomeneo—Mozart being another Sendak passion and muse. —Bruce Handy

Travels to: Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris (April 2023).