Va faire un tour (1995)

From the first wordless illustration onwards in Kitty Crowther’s Va faire un tour, you don’t have to know French to know that the book’s title means imperatively “take a walk” — or maybe even “take a hike” — in English. There is no mistaking the tone of Maman’s character nor the reaction of her little one stomping along, circling the globe, even under bodies of water, oblivious to characteristic scenery and inhabitants.

Headline: Qu’en est-il? “What’s going on?”

While Papa has his nose in the newspaper, Maman enjoys a peaceful evening at the table with their little one, whose sidelong look at us wordlessly comments on the only text in the story besides its title, the newspaper headline Qu’en est-il?, which translates as “What’s going on?”

That glance and the foreground answer the question of why there are children’s books in this collection of artists’ books. Va faire un tour‘s self-reflexivity about the nature of looking, of reading, and even of the book as book recalls the deep levels of self-reflexivity encountered in many artists’ books. The newspaper’s headline photo not only reflects an earlier scene, it is itself the product of the photographer hiding in the bushes of that earlier scene. If that reflection doesn’t create enough pause, the little one’s cocked eyebrow triply suggests that maybe he or she was not so oblivious, that maybe the adults reliant on text aren’t so superior to little ones reliant on images, and that the artist is suggesting that the narrative imagery has been, and is, what is going on.

By comparing and contrasting certain children’s books — especially wordless picturebooks — with artists’ books, we can find more enjoyment and appreciation of both..

Books like Perry Nodelman’s Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (1988) or Sandra Beckett’s Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages (2013) offer useful ways of seeing how some artists’ books work. Many of the approaches to depicting action that Nodelman explores can be found in Va faire un tour: pictures imply motion by manipulating context, by “linear continuance” (parallel action lines), by difference in shading and coloring, by bodily distortion, by following and by playing against our left-to-right reading convention (Western), by figurative continuance (differing instances of the same figure), by combining effects that stop motion with effects that imply motion, by suggesting cause and effect, by relying on our narrative assumptions, by having a subsequent image change the meaning of a preceding image, by visual rhythms created by sequential images of similar shapes (repetitive form cuts and addition to or subtraction from them), by dynamic framing (changing the size, shape, angle and distance of images), or by varying the number of sequences or number of images on the spread, (pp. 158-92).

As much fun comes from also finding them in artists’ books such as Johanna Drucker’s Stochastic Poetics, Karl Kempton’s playground, Ellen Lanyon’s Transformations, Karl Schwitter’s Die Scheuche, Jan Voss’s Detour, or any of Warja Lavater’s works.

Further Reading

“Johanna Drucker“. 28 May 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Karl Kempton “. 29 October 2022. Books On Books Collection.

“Ellen Lanyon“. 25 June 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Warja Lavater“. 23 December 2022. Books On Books Collection.

“Kurt Schwitters“. 23 June 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Jan Voss“. 25 June 2024. Books On Books Collection.

Beckett, Sandra L. 2013. Crossover Picturebooks : A Genre for All Ages. London: Routledge.

Cave, Roderick, and Sara Ayad. 2017. A History of Children’s Books in 100 Books. London: British Library Publishing Division, pp. 26-27.

Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. 2007. How picturebooks work. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Nodelman, Perry. 1988. Words About Pictures : The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Nodelman, Perry, Naomi Hamer, and Mavis Reimer, eds. 2019. More Words About Pictures : Current Research on Picturebooks and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People. London: Routledge.

Scott, Carole. 2014. “Artists’ books, Altered books, and Picturebooks”. In: B. Kümmerling‐Meibauer, ed., Picturebooks: Representation and Narration. London, New York: Routledge.