Visual arts review: Mr Gumpy and other outings

Published on Monday 27 July 2009 19:05

MR GUMPY AND OTHER OUTINGS: CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF JOHN BURNINGHAM'S WORK **** DOVECOT, EDINBURGH

CHILDREN'S literature in English includes truly wonderful books. Indeed some, like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit and Winnie the Pooh, have become universal. What is less often remembered is how we have also produced illustrators worthy of that tradition. You cannot imagine Lewis Carroll's Alice except in the visual incarnation that John Tenniel gave to her and all the bizarre inhabitants of Wonderland. It is the same with EH Shepherd and AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh. Not even the mighty power of Disney has dislodged this imagery from the place it took in all our imaginations when we first encountered it in childhood. As the stories are universal, so are the illustrations, and the wit and humour are a crucial part of their success.

This suggests their link with the mainstream of art is through the satirical tradition that goes back to Hogarth. If you look at contemporary children's illustrators like Raymond Briggs and Quentin Blake, you can see how that is still true; they have much in common with cartoonists like Gerald Scarfe, Steve Bell, or Martin Rowson who consciously invoke Hogarth's immediate heirs, Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruickshank.

In a good number of the most enduring books, the illustrators are also the authors; Beatrix Potter most famously – and if you say that contradicts the link with the satirical tradition, animals in human character have been a staple of satire since Aesop – and more recently Raymond Briggs, whose Snowman is already a timeless classic.

John Burningham, subject of a major retrospective at the Dovecot, began his career as illustrator with the poignant tale of Borka the Goose with No Feathers, in which he too was both illustrator and author. Its central character was inspired, he thinks, by a tattered favourite toy from his childhood and an open conduit to memories of childhood's imaginative world is surely essential to the success of any author or illustrator in this field.

John Burningham is the same generation as Raymond Briggs and Quentin Blake; born in the 1930s, but too young to serve in the war. Burningham did have to do National Service, but as a conscientious objector his service was in various civilian tasks, some of which he recorded in memorable drawings, notably several from time he spent working in Glasgow. These show him as already a sharp and frank observer of the human tragicomedy and it is no doubt because of this that his art since then has been enormously successful both with children and adults. In fact his first break was for an adult public with a series of posters for London Underground. They are comical and visually inventive. As this exhibition shows throughout, while he is certainly an illustrator, the implication that his art is somehow secondary to a given text, is quite wrong. In fact like the great illustrators of the past, his imagery brings the text to life and gives it an imaginative incarnation that becomes an indispensable part of the experience of the book.

In 1964 Burningham's Borka won the Kate Greenaway Prize for Illustration. Uniquely, it is a prize that he has won twice. The second time was in 1970 for Mr Gumpy's Outing. It's a delightful book. Again, as in several subsequent publications, he is both author and illustrator. Indeed he sees himself as Mr Gumpy. He also acknowledges his heritage. When the family sit down to tea with a motley assortment of animals, he pays a charming homage to Tenniel's Mad Hatter's Tea Party.

After Borka, Burningham's next big success was the illustration of Ian Fleming's only children's book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This seems to be the link that brings this exhibition to Dovecot. Ian Fleming was a member of the Fleming's Bank family and Dovecot has worked with the Fleming Collection in building up its own exhibition programme. Still, if he was a footballer John Burningham himself is enough of a Scot to play for Scotland. His maternal grandparents were Scottish and he went very briefly to Naemoor School, an institution whose improbable name might have been dreamt up hopefully by Oor Wullie.

In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and throughout Burningham's work, there is wit in the sharpness of his observations. Much later, for instance, he created a series on England that includes a wonderful image of moustachioed husband and dumpy wife sitting down to tea in a rowing boat. These observed details also often make exquisite little passages in much bigger compositions, a spider's web in the corner of a desolate room in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or a white horse at a stable door in a wide, wintry view of London in Humbert, Mr Firkin and the Lord Mayor of London, but the wit is in the execution as much as the imagery. When still a student, Burningham produced a drawing of jockeys whose horses' legs and backsides are vividly rendered by prints of the palms and fingers of his hand. Economy is the soul of wit and this kind of visual shortcut recurs constantly in his work. Paint is sprayed or roughly brushed on and then an image evolves out of it. A train chugging through a snowstorm is just a tiny graphic passage in a field of dragged white paint. "My true interest is in landscape and light", he says. Drawings like this and a wonderful series of the Seasons suggest that while we acclaim him as an illustrator we should also enjoy his work simply as painting.

Until 5 September