“No loans”, it says on the sign above the hut at the harbor of the pirates’ nest. As if to emphasize, a lightly clad woman chases away an apparently poorly well-heeled customer with kicks, while a colleague of hers pulls a bottle over the head of another customer. You don’t have to wonder about their trade for long. The hut stands in a kind of shop row, surrounded by shops where you can buy pirate flags from a painter and next door environmentally friendly pets such as monkeys or parrots. In front of the painter, a man relieves himself, the drinking bottle still in his hand, he looks at us happily. And in a hiding place between palm leaves, two pirates kiss.
This can be seen on a panorama double page in “My Pirate Wimmelbook” by Ali Mitgutsch. It is part of a unique success story that began in 1969 when a co-voucher for “All around in my city” received the youth literature award. Since then, around seventy hidden object books – such as: “Here in the village”, “Here in the mountains” or “Our big city” – have appeared in different editions, and according to the Ravensburger Verlag, the artist’s entire oeuvre has meanwhile sold a good eight million times , including three million abroad.
Mitgutsch’s hidden object books hardly contain any consistently told stories. Rather, the pages refer to each other through the subject of the respective book. In contrast to the large-format cardboard picture books from the fictional place “Wimmlingen”, which Rotraut Susanne Berner also uses, one does not find intricately interwoven narrative strands that would be tied to individual characters or their constellations or even emerge as stories continued across the boundaries of the respective books published with great success, or on the “Torte” books by the illustrator Thé Tjong-Khing.
Better to discover than to be amazed
Mitgutsch’s approach is different. In that part of his picture book, for which the genre title “Wimmel Books” later became established, every turning of the page is a small new beginning. Then the view opens onto a stage without a central point, the artist’s intention is undoubtedly to send small and large viewers on a journey in his picture, to move from station to station and thereby dissolve the forest into nothing but trees. They fare like the townspeople on the farm, which Mitgutsch also once depicted: they explore the world with curiosity and surprise that the crafty artist opens up to them, and sometimes they stumble like the boy in urban clothes on the fenced-in pasture a cow dung, if, guided by your ideas, you only recognize essential things at second glance. And as adults, having to explain some things to their questioning children, for example in the pictures of the pirate book they have bought unsuspectingly.
With these panoramas, which summarize a section of the world, Mitgutsch ties in with venerable children’s book traditions, which he also transfers into the present of his book – that is the reason why, after half a century of publication history, one does not want to call them timeless – and deconstructs them at the same time through a painting style that expressly avoids the sublime of earlier such works: Mitgutsch’s readers should rather discover than be amazed, they should be involved rather than overwhelmed.
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