ヴァージニア・リー・バ－トンの絵本や布のデザインを見ていると、作品からにじみ出るユーモアのとりこになって、いつのまにか微笑んでしまいます。『ちいさいおうち』の庭の池で、夏の間裸で泳いでいた子どもたちが、秋に大慌てで学校へ行く様子や、デザインの「ゴシップ」や「減量」の中で噂話に夢中になり、またせっせと体操している女性たち。このユーモアはいったいどこからくるのでしょうか？
ヴァージニアは、アメリカが世界の超大国として急激に変容を遂げようとしていた20世紀はじめ、1909年、ボストン近郊に生まれました。父はMIT（マサチューセッツ工科大学）の初代学部長でした。当時、ニューイングランドと呼ばれるこのあたりには、勤勉実直なピューリタン的価値観が色濃く残っていたと思われます。母はイギリス人の自由な精神の詩人で、父より20歳以上年下の二度目の妻でした。母は米国北東部の寒い気候が健康に悪いと考え、子どもたちを連れてはるばるとアメリカ大陸を横断し、カルフォルニア州カーメルに移ります。
半ば引退した芸術家たちが暮らすのどかで自由な海辺の町で、ヴァージニアは絵を描いたり、オペレッタでダンスしたりしながら、西海岸の底抜けの明るさを身につけることになります。やがて父もMIT を退職、家族と合流するのですが、母は24歳年下の若者と恋におち、家族を捨てて出て行ってしまいます。
ヴァージニアは別の家族に預けられて高校をつづけ、卒業後はサンフランシスコの美術学校の奨学金を獲得、有名な先生についてバレエのレッスンも受けながら、絵の勉強に励みます。持ち前の勤勉さと明るさで、絵とダンスに熱中して、母の出奔という苦しみを乗り越えていったのでしょう。
やがて、ニューヨークで舞台ダンサーになっていた姉のように舞台に立ちたくて、東海岸に戻ってきますが、父が足を骨折。彼女は父の面倒を見ながら家にとどまり、新聞に人物のスケッチを描く職を得ます。そしてボストン美術館の素描のクラスに登録、指導者であった彫刻家ジョージ・デメトリアスと出会い、翌年結婚。2人は、夫ジョージが師から遺贈されたアトリエがある、大西洋に飛び出した半島の突端、フォリーコーブに移ります。きらめく海と、深い緑に囲まれた自然豊かなこの村で、彼女はその後終生暮らすことになります。
当時アメリカは大恐慌の真っただ中で、ジョージは絵画彫刻学校を開いていましたが、庭には野菜を育て、羊を飼いました。不況が全米に蔓延した暗い日々にも、二人は友人たちや近所の人たちを招いて、羊の丸焼きと畑からとれたてのグリーンサラダで、ダンスやスポーツに興じる野外パーティを楽しみました。そこにはジョージとヴァージニアの、人を包み込むような暖かい場があり、多くの人たちが二人の命の輝きに勇気づけられたと言います。パーティは、コミュニティの社交の中心となって長く続きました。
やがて男の子二人に恵まれたヴァージニアは、息子たちのために絵本を描き始めます。『いたずらきかんしゃちゅうちゅう』を長男アリスのために、『マイク・マリガンとスチーム・ショベル』を次男マイクのために。絵本を描くときはいつも近くの子どもたちを集め、絵を見せ文章を読んで、彼らが完全に満足するまで何度でも描きなおしました。第二次世界大戦最中には厳しい灯火管制が敷かれていました。ヴァージニアは夜明けに起きて、裏に毛を張ったブーツをはき、ストーブで暖をとりながら『ちいさいおうち』を描きました。自然の中で暮らしていた「ちいさいおうち」は、周りが急速に都市化し、間もなく高層ビルや高架鉄道のはざまで押しつぶされそうな状態で忘れられてしまいます。ある日、この家を建てた人の子孫がそんな「おうち」を発見、トラックでけん引してビルの谷間から救い出し、田園の小高い丘に移すのです。「おうち」は再び自然の中で、星や花をながめて暮らす日々を取り戻します。人間の真の幸福は、自然と調和して暮らすことだと、彼女は考えていたのでしょう。この本は1943年、絵本の最高賞であるコルデコット賞を受賞しました。
彼女の絵本に描かれるのは、ハイウエイを作り、空港の土をならし、大雪の町を救い出す除雪車など、発展していくアメリカを作り上げた機械たちや、あるいは悪漢をやっつける暴れ馬など、行動力のある力持ちの主人公たちです。しかもみな女の子の名前が与えられ、she で書かれているのです。当時、女性は結婚して家庭に入るものと思い込んでいた女の子たちへ、女性だって何でもできるのよ！とエールを送るかのように。また、「ちいさいおうち」の入り口には、英語のhistoryがhis storyから来ているのを、男性だけが歴史を作ったのではないという思いのこもった、herstoryという言葉が書きこまれています。
そんな機械たちは、時代の進歩のあまりの速さにとり残され、廃棄処分にされそうな危機に直面してもいるのです。彼女は長い間頑張ってきた機械たちを愛おしみ、絵本の中で彼等の生き延びる方法を見つけようとします。
当時のアメリカの効率本位の消費的風潮に承服できず、長く真面目に働いてきたものたちを大切に思う気持ちが伝わってきます。
やがて近所の人たちの要望でデザイン教室を始めたヴァージニアは、持ち前の完璧主義で独特のデザイン技法を編み出し、徹底して指導しました。多くが子どもをもつ主婦であった生徒たちは、戦時下で物の不足する家庭に、手作りの美しいものを飾りたくて、完成したデザインをリノリウム版に彫り、染料で染めて、テーブルマットやカーテンを作りました。ヴァージニアのアトリエで作品展を開くと、見に来た人たちが欲しがったので、今度は「フォリーコーブ・デザイナーズ」というグループを結成してビジネスに乗り出すことにしたのです。ちょうどアーツ・アンド・クラフツ運動が盛んな頃でもあり、多くの雑誌にこのユニークな活動が紹介され注目をあび、全国から注文が殺到しました。グループの人たちは各々家庭で子どもを育てながら、デザインし、彫り、染めて、収入を得て、より質の高い作品を作り出すために研鑽に励みました。ヴァージニアは、何度かの機械生産の誘いを断わり、デザインから染めることまで手作りにこだわって、グループの中心的指導者として活動し、彼女自身も34のデザインを作りあげています。ユーモアに溢れ、日々の暮らしやあたりの風景、海の生物などこの地域独特のデザインは、アメリカ的と評判をよびました。けれど何もかも手作業で多くの注文をこなすのは、時間と労力のいる仕事でもありました。
戦後の作品には、ヴァージニアのデザイン技法の集大成ともいえる『ロビンフッドの歌』があります。信じられないほど手の込んだ、精密な技法を駆使したこの本は、再び、次点ではありましたがコルデコット賞を彼女にもたらしました。
妻、母、絵本作家、デザイナー、染色家と過酷なスケジュールを、彼女は勤勉で忍耐強いニューイングランド精神で耐え抜きました。そんな時彼女に生きる力を与えたのが、日常の愉快なことを見つけては面白がるユーモアの精神だったと言えるでしょう。けれどタバコとコーヒーをひと時も手放せない暮らしは、次第に彼女の健康をむしばんでいきました。
やがて彼女は『せいめいのれきし』に取り掛かります。8年をかけて調査し、何枚も絵を描きなおし、宇宙の始まりから地球の誕生、恐竜やマンモスが現れ、滅び、氷河期を越えて人類は生き残り、やがて新大陸アメリカに人々が入ってきます。そしてその人たちは東海岸から西部に移って行き、ヴァージニア一家はそんな人々が残していった土地に一家を構えるのです。彼女の家族の日常と、自然の四季の移り変わりが美しく描かれ、新しい夜明けが訪れます。「さあ、ここからはあなたのおはなしです。主人公は、あなたです」と未来を生きる子どもたちにメッセージを込めて、この壮大な絵本は終わっています。ヴァージニアはこの本を完成させて6年後、全力で生き抜いた59年の人生の幕を閉じました。
Picture books and textile designs done by Virginia Lee Burton have always attracted me with their humor and their sense of fun. And I cannot help but find myself smiling. We see children swimming naked in the pond of the garden in “The Little House” during the summer time, and going back to school in a wild haste in the fall. We also find women busily engaged in exercise and absorbed in gossiping as in the designs of “Reducing” and “Gossips.”
Virginia was born in a little town near Boston in 1909 when America began to experience its rapid transformation to a world power. Her father was the first dean of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Around that time, New England was strongly influenced by the Puritan values of diligence and perseverance. Her mother was a British poet with a liberal mind. She was her husband’s second wife and was more than twenty years younger than he. Telling her husband that the cold climate in the North East of America was bad for the health, she took the children, including Virginia, all the way across the continent and settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. At that time, Virginia was only eleven years old.
It was a peaceful and liberal town along the coast where many semi-retired artists lived freely. Virginia loved painting pictures and dancing in operettas. She had an effervescent personality and was also very diligent. Her father joined them after retiring from MIT, but her mother fell in love with a man 24 years younger than herself and left home leaving her family behind.
Virginia lived with an acquaintance to finish her high school there. After graduating from high school, she got a scholarship at an art school in San Francisco. She also took ballet lessons from a famous teacher, while studying painting. With her innate diligence and effervescent personality she devoted herself to painting and dancing to overcome the pain of being abandoned by her mother.
She returned to the East Coast to join her sister who was already in a dance company in New York City. But then, her father broke his leg, and she decided to stay with her father taking care of him. She got work as a sketcher for the newspaper Boston Transcript. She enrolled in a drawing class at Boston Museum School, where she met George Demetrios, a teacher and a sculptor. They got married the following year and moved to Folly Cove at the tip of Cape Ann. George had a studio there, which he had inherited from his mentor. Virginia lived the rest of her life in this village by the sparkling ocean and the deep green woods.
It was the time of the Great Depression in America. George opened a school of drawing and sculpture there. He also grew vegetables and kept sheep in the yard. They invited their friends and neighbors to have parties even during that gloomy period in American history. They served roasted lamb and crisp fresh green salad from George’s garden and people enjoyed dancing and playing sports. George and Virginia’s warmth embraced all who came and their joie de vivre encouraged them. They continued hosting parties for many years which became the center of the community’s social life.
Virginia started to write picture books for her two sons. “Choo Choo” was for Aris, her oldest son and “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” for her younger son Mike. She always told the stories and showed the pictures she was writing to her sons and children in the neighborhood. She watched their reactions and rewrote again and again until the children were completely satisfied. During World War II, windows near the coast had to be blacked out for security. Virginia woke up at dawn, wore fur-lined boots, and kept herself warm with a coal stove to write “The Little House.” In this story, a little house was built in the country, but as the city grew, the house was almost crushed by high-rise buildings and elevated railways. The house was forgotten for years. One day, the great-great-great daughter of the person who had built the house came and took the house from the crowded, busy city to the top of a hill in a pasture. Finally the house could enjoy seeing the stars and the flowers again. Maybe Virginia thought that true happiness lies in living in harmony with nature. In 1943 the book was awarded the Caldecott Medal, the highest prize for a picture book.
The protagonists of Virginia’s picture books are the machines that laid the foundation of America including a power shovel that built the highways and smoothed the land for runways, a snowplow that rescued the town from heavy snow. One book was about a powerful horse fighting against villains. Virginia gave these characters girl’s names, and they were called “she.” In those days, girls took it for granted that women would stay home after marriage. Virginia was sending them a loud message that women were capable and could do whatever they wanted just like men. At the entrance of “The Little House” the word “Her-story” was engraved showing Virginia’s idea that history (his-story) was not made only by men.
The machines she wrote about had been left behind in the rapid advancement of society and were in peril of disposal. Virginia cared about these machines that had worked so hard and so long, so in her stories she tried to find a way for them to survive.
In these books we can see her strong protest against the efficiency-centered consumerism of America and her belief in the value of diligence.
She started teaching design in response to the request of her neighbors. She was a perfectionist and developed innovative and unique design techniques which she taught to her students, most of whom were housewives raising children. They wanted to decorate their houses with hand-made items because there was shortage of goods during the war. They carved designs into linoleum blocks and used these to print patterns on fabrics for tablemats and curtains. They had an exhibition at Virginia’s studio. People who visited the exhibition wanted to buy the products. That was the beginning of the business of “Folly Cove Designers.” It coincided with the arts and crafts movement and the unique activities of Folly Cove Designers were featured in many popular magazines and attracted people’s attention. The group received orders from all over the country. The members of the group raised their children at home, created their designs, carved them into linoleum blocks and printed them on fabrics to earn their income. They continued learning to create products of higher quality. Virginia declined several offers of mass production since she wanted to maintain hand-made processes from design to printing. She was a group leader and she herself created 34 designs of humorous moments, daily living, dance, landscape and sea creatures. They gained a high reputation for being very local and at the same time very much American.
Her post-war work “Song of Robin Hood,” can surely be called Virginia’s artistic tour de force. She used unbelievably elaborate fine techniques in the book and she received the Caldecott run-up award.
She lived a hard and busy life as a wife, mother, picture book writer and fabric designer. She lived her life with New England diligence and perseverance. She enjoyed finding small but fun moments in everyday life which gave her the power to live. But habitual heavy smoking and drinking too much coffee, which she needed to survive years of early rising and long days of work, gradually eroded her health.
She started to write her last book “Life Story.” She spent eight years researching and drew a large number of pictures again and again to write the story starting from the beginning of the universe, the birth of the Planet Earth, the emergence and disappearance of dinosaurs and mammoths, to people surviving the Ice Age and arriving in the New World, America. Then the first settlers went West and Virginia’s family lived on the land that the settlers once farmed. The book goes on to describe the family’s daily life and the beautiful changes of the four seasons. The story ends at the dawn of a new day with the words “And now it is your Life Story and it is you who plays the leading role.” Thus this magnificent story ends with a message for the children of future generations. Virginia passed away at the age of 59, six years after the completion of the book.