Jan Pieńkowski: Something Extraordinary

Jan Pieńkowski is best known as a pioneer of the modern pop-up book and the creator of Meg and Mog.

He won the Kate Greenaway Medal for his silhouette illustrations for Joan Aiken’s The Kingdom Under the Sea and again for the pop-up Haunted House.

Pienkowski spent his early childhood in the Polish countryside until the Second World War forced his family to leave. They moved to Austria, Germany and Italy before settling in England after the war, when Pienkowski was 10.

Although he has lived here for six decades, his childhood remains very much in his heart. Indeed, Pienkowski’s books feature the places, traditions and stories that he loved in Poland; reading them, it almost seems as though he is telling the story of his life through his work.

His latest book, a sort of companion piece to his gift edition of The Fairy Tales, is The Thousand Nights and One Night, more commonly known as The Arabian Nights.

The more formal title comes from the 12-volume translation by the Victorian explorer and linguist Sir Richard Burton that David Walser drew on for his retellings.

‘He was a very learned man; he has fascinating footnotes which explain all sorts of interesting things,’ says Walser. ‘For instance, in Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves I started off being rather pedantic about the 40 and when two were killed I had the maid saying, “But there are still 38 thieves”, and then I read the footnotes and it turns out that 40 is an expression meaning ‘a lot of’, so I just cut out all that nonsense and didn’t specify a number.

‘Only by reading the footnotes would you discover that 40 just would mean a lot of thieves.’

Although Pienkowski was always fond of the stories themselves, it was a hunch that he was connected to them on a more personal level that made his fascination all the greater.

‘I’ve got these Asiatic features,’ he explains. ‘I think that was Gengis or Tamburlaine, or one of those hordes that thundered across the steppes and across Poland. There were no obstacles.’ And indeed, a photo of the artist in profile, wearing a turban, suddenly and startlingly transforms him from London sophisticate into central Asian nomad.

Pienkowski’s famed silhouette art is inspired by the tradition of paper-cutting from Poland, Switzerland and southern Germany.

‘We used to do them at Christmas. Even the curtains in the kitchen - a woman would come round and she would hold all this paper up and cut, cut and open it out and it would have birds and flowers and it would go up in the kitchen window.’

He has kept one of his first attempts at paper-cutting, a scene he made when he was eight, depicting a Polish midsummer tradition in which boys jump over a fire.

Despite his use of silhouettes in much of his work, he did not use paper cut-outs until the new book, and the decision to do so came as the solution to a crisis.

‘I got this tremor in my right hand and couldn’t draw a straight line,’ he explains. ‘So I would say that it didn’t occur to me to use cut-outs until The Thousand Nights and One Night, and that was because of the tremor.’

Pienkowski still draws the images, but a colleague with a steadier hand cuts them out with a knife.

Like the silhouettes in The Fairy Tales, some of the images in the new book are prevented from being too gruesome by their humour.

The framing story of The Thousand Nights and One Night tells of the vengeance wrought by King Shahryar, whose wife has been unfaithful.

Pienkowski draws the lovers, chopped in half after being caught in the act. In an illustration from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the maid is pouring boiling oil into pots. The skeletons of the dead thieves can be seen inside.

In another, a quartered corpse is hanging from a tree and is later shown being stitched back together.

‘When I was at Cambridge one of my best friends was a medical student and he took me to the medical schools. I saw these corpses lying about, and I saw these young people about to faint, and they didn’t bother me, somehow. I suppose I got that from that experience.’

The art in The Thousand Nights and One Night is multilayered, with silhouettes, elaborate borders, silver ink and strange, colourful backdrops that look like lava or lumps of paint.

These mysterious backgrounds are taken from images that Pienkowski found in the Science Museum when he was trying to write a science fiction book twenty years ago.

He selects a fragment and enlarges it on the computer until it is unrecognisable, although it is impossible to tell what the original images are in any case. He points to the illustration of Aladdin in the laundry, in front of a pinkish purple sky with the trace of a rainbow in it.

‘Something like that will be something extraordinary like stainless steel. These are tiny, tiny inorganic molecular structures. They’re not what they look like.’

The full-page colour illustrations are framed in silver. ‘When you see Persian manuscripts they frequently have this arrangement where they have a decorative border and then the picture in one corner. It’s quite a standard feature.

‘Because Ali Baba is quite primitive, I did the frames like rugs, so the designs are all geometric. Rugs always have stripes because nomadic people only dye a certain amount of wool because they don’t want to carry it around.

‘They go to the next place and they buy a new batch of wool and they dye it and it’s never quite the same colour, so that’s why there are always stripes like that. The feature here is that in every case the creatures are not the same.

‘One has got three eyes, one has got one, this bird is different to that bird. Some children will notice, and once they notice they’ll go through every single image.’

For the occasional use of decorative Arabic writing, Pienkowski was aided by one of his paper cutters, Lois Bulow Osborne, who studied the language at university.

In Aladdin she uses Kufic script, the oldest type of Islamic calligraphy. ‘In Ali Baba, when the maid goes to the chemist, that word is an antiquated form for chemist, something like “apothecary”.’

Before embarking on The Thousand Nights and One Night he went on a grand tour of the cities in the tales. To do so, he says, was common sense.

‘The trouble with most of The Thousand Nights and One Night that I’ve seen is that people obviously hadn’t been there - in those days people didn’t travel - and therefore they didn’t understand.

‘I’ve been, especially, to central Asia, to Uzbekistan, Iran, Syria. It was wonderful seeing the buildings.

‘In the first Aladdin picture, the grille comes straight out of a sketchbook. That’s a real thing. The wall is from a place in Libya and it’s an amazing city of clay bricks, and so it goes on. That building is from Morocco. So it’s all cheating, it’s all mix and match.’

‘With The Fairy Tales, the research wasn’t important because I had my childhood to fall back on. I have a very good visual memory, so I’d done my research.

‘With this one the colour and the light are completely different, and also the way that people dress. Of course you couldn’t do that in silhouette because it would look ridiculous if the ladies were covered from head to foot, so you have to have them not dressed that way.

‘Nevertheless, for example, in Uzbekistan, in Bukhara there were two girls and one was sweeping the piazza with a broom. She had on scarlet sneakers, fluorescent green socks and a purple velvet gown with spangly embroidery at the top, and she was just sweeping the road! I always have a sketchbook with me. Therefore I draw people in the streets.’

‘I’ve seen these beautiful things, wonderful things, and this beautiful colour. And because I’ve got it inside me, because of the funny eyes, I’ve got it there,’ he says, putting his hand on his heart.

‘So it was really important to do it. I don’t think I chose The Thousand and One Nights. I think The Thousand and One Nights chose me.’