Since the middle of September, The Morgan Library & Museum has been hosting an exhibition to celebrate one of the most beloved characters in the history of children’s literature. Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors is a must-see for fans of the French elephant, art history buffs, and just about anyone with a soul—or at least a piece of imagination still intact. The exhibition features promised early drawings and art work (with creator Jean de Brunhoff’s original hand-drawn text preserved), as well as loads of historical information. There are even copies of the Babar books on hand, and designated story times for children, where a museum worker reads the original French and translates it into English.
To coincide with the opening of the exhibit, The New Yorker published a piece by Adam Gopnik discussing the cultural impact of Babar, as well as the books’ contested historical connotations. From Freeing The Elephants: What Babar Brought:
Yet those who would burn “Babar” miss the true subject of the books. The de Brunhoffs’ saga is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination. The gist of the classic early books of the nineteen-thirties—“The Story of Babar” and “Babar the King,” particularly—is explicit and intelligent: the lure of the city, of civilization, of style and order and bourgeois living is real, for elephants as for humans. The costs of those things are real, too, in the perpetual care, the sobriety of effort, they demand. The happy effect that Babar has on us, and our imaginations, comes from this knowledge—from the child’s strong sense that, while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park.
See also the Morgan’s digital facsimile of de Brunhoff’s Histoire de Babar Maquette.