An Interview with Marc Simont

Illustrator Marc Simont was born on November 23, 1915, in Paris, France. His childhood was spent in France, Spain, and the United States. Sickly, he taught himself to write by tracing the text of the Spanish picture book El Ginesello. His schoolwork was also hindered by his travels, and he never finished high school. He studied art at the Academie Julien, the Academie Ranson, and New York's National Academy of Design. Even at that, he considered his father, an illustrator for L'Illustration magazine, his most influential art teacher. Simont worked as a portrait painter, designed visual aids, and worked for magazines and advertising firms before becoming a children's book illustrator in 1939. His work had a characteristic loose line and saturated watercolor; his lively interpretations earned a Caldecott Honor in 1950 for The Happy Day by Ruth Kraus. He received the Caldecott Medal in 1957 for A Tree is Nice, and again in 2002 for The Stray Dog. His most recent book, The Beautiful Planet (published by Easton Studio Press in 2010), is a collection of Marc's political cartoons that have been published in the Lakeville (CT) Journal newspaper since 1947. Simont's art is in collections as far afield as the Kijo Picture Book Museum in Japan. Marc was particularly touched when he was chosen by AssociaciO Professional d'Inustradors de Catalunya (Professional Association of Illustrators of Catalonia; APIC) as Catalonia's Illustrator of the Year for 1997, and when he won the Good Egg Award from the Hughes Library in West Cornwall, Connecticut, where he lives. The following interview was conducted by telephone in May 2010. DW: In 1952, you worked with Red Smith on a book called How to Get to First Base: A Picture Book of Baseball. The publisher was Henry Schuman. What got you to do this book in the first place, and how did you meet Red Smith? MS: The fact that we had done a book on opera and it didn't sell very well was the impetus to go into baseball, because that has a much bigger audience, a much bigger public, than opera. We also agreed that I was no expert on the ins and outs of baseball, so we'd have to find somebody to do the text. And as long as we had such a big blank on that we might as well start at the top and work our way down, and we thought Red Smith was somebody that everybody looked up to and that if we could get him that would be one plus. So we approached him, and to our delight and surprise he said, "sure," he'd do it. So we waited for him to come up with an outline of some sort, of some kind, and time went by and no word from Smith, so finally I called him up and said, "Hi, how ya doing?" He said, "Tell ya what, you do some drawings and I'll put in the captions." So we said "okay," all right, that was okay with me. And so there I was in the owner's box sketching away and eventually I came up with an outline that went through a baseball game, from the beginning when there are people milling around, with reporters and so forth, and the pitchers from both teams are warming up and so forth and so on, and then on to the game. And this is the way it ended up, and I made all these pictures, these drawings, of situations like the gyrations of the pitcher on the mound, with his resin bag, and so forth and so on and then the hit and the activity around the bases, the double play, and all that stuff. So this is the way the process went through the whole thing. I grew up in a different ambiance because my interest in sports was soccer. I was brought up in Europe and this was very different, very Anglo-Saxon to me. For instance, those interminable waits until, I mean when I started to play a little bit with my friends, the wait for my turn at bat. This was an experience that I hadn't had with games. DW: Right, because soccer moves continuously.... MS: It's absolutely fluid and even if you don't have the ball, the ball is on the opposite side of the field, still the whole team moves up and then when, whoever, in soccer, has the ball he is the quarterback at that moment and he initiates the next play and so it was all very different. …