The artist understood that children can be scared by books – safely
Like all great children’s storytellers or illustrators, the Polish-born artist Jan Pieńkowski instinctively understood that fear is an unavoidable and necessary part of childhood – and that how a child’s emotions are contained and held is crucial when it comes to an individual’s learning to operate in the world. Pieńkowski, who died on Saturday, used fear to great effect in his works: one of his early books with the writer Joan Aiken, with whom he had already collaborated on her story A Necklace of Raindrops, was a collection of central and eastern European fairy tales with many fantastical and terrifying elements, not least in his pictures of Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in a house that stands on chicken legs and flies about in her pestle and mortar – a character who was also a scary presence at Little Bulb’s children’s Christmas show, Wolf Witch Giant Fairy, at the Royal Opera House, London, last year.
Pieńkowski was no stranger to fear – real, terrible fear. As a child in rural Poland, the son of a country squire, his existence had at first been idyllic and, from a 21st-century, post-industrial perspective, almost impossibly distant (the farm grew its own flax for cloth, which would be handspun before being woven). The coachman’s wife would tell him scary witch stories and then stop on a cliffhanger – only continuing when he’d drunk a hated cupful of boiled milk. But then came the war. The family moved to Warsaw. Frightening stories became frightening reality. He witnessed awful things in the city: “I have blotted out the screams. The noise has been obliterated,” he told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs in 2009. But as an adult he could never bear “shrill noises”, or screaming or people stampeding.
