Just as there is trouble in paradise and a worm in the bud, so have dark crimes been committed in the land of Miffy. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the cartoon bunny devised by the Dutch graphic designer and children’s book writer Dick Bruna, and a touring exhibition to celebrate Bruna’s life and work is soon to open in Manchester.
When I visited, it was just coming to a close in Hull where an installation has been set up at the Ferens Gallery that looks like a maze of garden trelliswork. Pictures of Miffy adorn the walls. There is early Miffy, with floppy ears, and mature Miffy, with pointed ears. There is Miffy on commemorative stamps, Miffy starring in a range of her books, and original prints of a host of Miffy’s friends, from Poppy Pig to Boris Bear and Snuffy the Puppy. Here is Miffy playing in the trees, here she is tucked in bed, and here she is at a fashionable art gallery contemplating geometric abstract art (Miffy occasionally takes time off from entertaining pre-school children in small picture books and enjoys moments of sophisticated irony when she appears in big silkscreen prints). And, finally, we come to the centre of the installation, in which children decorate a cake to celebrate Miffy’s birthday.
Inevitably, it is a scene of devastation, with plastic decorations thrown thoughtlessly across the imaginary lawn outside. But this is not the problem. Christine Brady, the exhibitions manager, has to apologise because someone has stolen the DVD of Dick Bruna working on his books. “The things people steal!” she sighs, and then extracts a teddy bear from a box. “Oh well, at least the bear is back,” she says. “Someone must have had a guilty conscience.”
Staff at Ferens have been quite shaken by the public’s enthusiasm for Miffy. Usually tranquil galleries have been packed. So they will probably relish the peace when the show moves on. As well as Manchester, the show is also going to London to be the inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Childhood when it reopens in the autumn.
Some people look blank when you mention Miffy, but show them a picture of the cartoon rabbit and grown men sigh nostalgically. This is not surprising, as Miffy has been a friend to generations of children. She has now appeared in 28 books; nearly 100 more feature her friends, and more than 80 million books have been sold in 40 countries.
Merchandising has added to the huge earnings of the modest, avuncular Dutchman who, at the age of 79, still draws her, and a museum dedicated to his life and work recently opened in his home town, Utrecht. He inspires devotion: when I speak with him, he tells me of Japanese children baking a cake and flying for 13 hours to present it to him.
The genius of the exhibition is that there is enough in it for both adults and children. It contains a good deal of Bruna’s pre-Miffy creations: smoky, traditional ink-drawn landscapes, and jaunty, line-drawn still-lifes that he drew on his honeymoon, and which warmly evoke the atmosphere of a 1950s hotel — the soda siphon and old clothes horse. Bruna spent his early career as a book designer in his father’s publishing company, and the show also includes numerous examples of this work.
In his covers for Simenon’s Maigret novels and Leslie Charteris’s The Saint series, Bruna established motifs that left the reader to imagine the hero — Maigret’s pipe and the stick man and halo for The Saint. He also developed a cut-and-paste technique that makes his covers appear to be collages of torn paper, full of bold shapes and dynamic colour contrasts.
Then, in 1955, on a rainy seaside holiday with his one-year-old son, he drew a picture of a little white bunny and began to devise adventures for him. Thus Miffy was born. One might wonder if Bruna was content to draw such simple forms after the complexity of the book jackets, but looking at the prints in the show one soon appreciates that Miffy inhabits a world whose vibrancy is deceptively simple. There isn’t just complexity in the novel compositions that show Miffy hiding behind trees, or in landscapes framed by a window, but throughout, in the bold arrangement of colour and line. This simplicity, this “art of omission” as Bruna calls it, is what gives free rein to the children’s imagination.
Early on, Bruna was influenced by Picasso, Matisse and Léger, and looking at some of the book jackets and silkscreen prints one can see their shadow. In one silkscreen, the thick ink-drawn lines of cartoon characters appear over large rectangles of colour, just like Léger’s.
But Miffy has changed over the years. She even changed sex in 1970 when Bruna found he preferred drawing skirts to trousers, but otherwise Bruna says her evolution has been slow. “A few years ago I had an exhibition and the curator put all the Miffys next to each other. Then, for the first time, I saw how much she had changed. She is more human now, more like a little child. I see her maybe as my granddaughter.”
And as she has changed and grown more popular, Bruna has become more ambitious. In 1996 he decided it was time something bad happened to Miffy — just as children’s lives can have upsets — so he wrote a story in which Grandma bunny dies. The book, on display, is boldly effective. It even tackles a moment when Miffy sees the body in an open casket.
More recently, Bruna has tackled race, which he explained to me in touchingly simplistic fashion. “One day I was reading children’s books in a school and realised that more than half the class wasn’t white, so I decided to give Miffy a little brown friend. She lives in Africa and is Miffy’s penfriend. One day she comes to visit, they have a wonderful time and later on they go to bed and Miffy sees that her friend has a brown tummy, too. And Miffy says, ‘ Oh! I’d like to have a brown tummy!’ ” For Miffy, and Bruna, too, it has been a long life in a changing world. After all this time one wonders whether Miffy has become a little bit like her creator, whether she is, perhaps, a secret self-portrait? Maybe not. “I’m like Boris Bear,” he says to me. “A little bit naughty.” Now that I cannot believe.
Happy Birthday Miffy! A Celebration of the Art of Dick Bruna is at Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street, Manchester (www.manchestergalleries.org 0161-235 8888), April 15-Sept 3
