Rapunzel

Surely among the most original and gifted of children's book illustrators,

Paul O. Zelinsky has once again with unmatched emotional authority, control of

space, and narrativecapability brought forth a unique vision for an age-old

tale. Few artists at work today can touch the level at which his paintings

tell a story and exert their hold.Zelinsky's retelling of **Rapunzel** reaches

back beyond the Grimms to a late-seventeenth-century French tale by Mlle. la

Force, who based hers on the Neapolitan tale **Petrosinella** in a collection

popular at the time. The artist understands the story's fundamentals to be

about possessiveness, confinement, and separation, rather than about

punishment and deprivation. Thus the tower the sorceress gives Rapunzel here

is not a desolate, barren structure of denial but one of esoteric beauty on

the outside and physical luxury within. And the world the artist creates

through the elements in his paintings the palette, control of light,

landscape, characters, architecture,interiors, costumes speaks to us not of an

ugly witch who cruelly imprisons a beautiful young girl, but of a mother

figure who powerfully resists her child's inevitable growth, and of a young

woman and man who must struggle in the wilderness for the self-reliance that

is the true beginningof their adulthood.

As ever, and yet always somehow in newly arresting fashion, Paul O. Zelinsky's

work thrillingly shows us the events of the story while guiding us beyond them

to the truths that have made it endure.