(Adapted from Philip Nel's book, Dr. Seuss: American Icon)

Some artists will tell you who influenced their work, but Dr. Seuss was more likely to tell you what was wrong with his.

"I still can't draw," he would say.  "I always get the knees in wrong, and the tails.  I'm always putting in too many tails.  I just can't draw, I guess.  Take people like the Grinch.  I started out to draw a kangaroo and it turns out to be a Grinch.  I don't know, all my creatures seem to turn out catlike." 

He could draw, but his perfectionism led him to be self-critical, a trait which in turn has helped prevent his art from gaining the acclaim it deserves.

Though the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s Lorax exhibition is a notable exception, Seussism has been slow to find its way into the museums of respectability. However, as his arts and books show, Dr. Seuss was a cultural sponge.

He absorbed the styles of twentieth-century artistic movements and transformed them into his own unique style -- an energetic cartoon surrealism.  Whether drawing Who-ville in Horton Hears A Who!or painting A Unicorn Every Girl Should Have, Seuss has a dynamic sense of line, with a verve and curves that give his landscapes their sense of relentless movement. These squiggles, swoops, zigs and zags seem to be going somewhere, inviting our eyes to follow along and find out where.

Stylistically, something in Seuss's twists, turns, and slipperiness brings to mind the drippy and leaking objects in the works of Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy.  Though Seuss might not have called himself a surrealist, there is definitely surrealism within Seussism.

Indeed, some paintings refer directly to the avant-garde: The oppressively angular, geometric shapes of Seuss's Minor Cat in a High-Yield Emerald Mine bear a stylistic similarity to those in Oscar Domínguez's Nostalgia for Space (1939).

More often, though, Seuss does not seem to have any particular surrealist work in mind, and instead paints in what might be called "Rube Goldberg Surrealism," complete with unusual gadgets like the Bad-Animal-Catching Machine of If I Ran the Zoo (1950), the Utterly Sputter of The Butter Battle Book (1984) and his painting of an Impractical Marshmallow-Toasting Device.

Or perhaps "Krazy Kat Cubism" might be a better term.  On a rare occasion when he did not mock his artistic abilities, Seuss described his paintings as "fragmented modern,"  and he displays Cubism's influence in Cat Detective in the Wrong Part of Town (1969), which juxtaposes multiple perspectives of angular apartment buildings.

In this and other works, Seuss gives us a cartoonist's approach to cubism.  He so admired the "beautifully insane sanities" of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" (1913-1944) that the legendary comic strip's backgrounds sometimes become Seussian foregrounds.

It is as if Seuss headed for those chunky, curvy rock formations sprouting along the horizon of a Herriman cartoon, and, upon arriving, so liked what he saw that he decided to set up shop there.  In that shop, Seuss adds the visual paradoxes of M.C. Escher -- whose motifs of interdependent figures emerge in "The economic situation clarified" (1975) -- and the architecture of Antonio Gaudi.  Gaudí once answered critics of his work by claiming that "there are no straight lines in nature," a phrase that aptly describes Dr. Seuss's round, billowing buildings, which one reviewer compared to "sculptured ice cream."

The many styles Seuss synthesizes all have one thing in common: they emphasize the subjectivity of perception, an idea nicely illustrated by a story Seuss told when asked whether he had any formal training as an artist.  At one point during his high school art class, he said, "I turned the painting I was working on upside down -- I didn't exactly know what I was doing, but actually I was checking the balance: If something is wrong with the composition upside down, then something's wrong with it the other way." 

His teacher saw what he was doing and told him, "Theodor, real artists don't turn their paintings upside down."  

They do, of course, and, knowing this intuitively, the young Theodor Seuss Geisel walked out of the class, never to return. Rather like turning his picture upside down to ensure that it works when rightside up, Seuss's art embodies the idea that everything depends on its opposite: Reality depends on fantasy, and fantasy on reality.  Seuss brings these two sides into close proximity, creating a tension that invigorates his work.

Imagining worlds that are both recognizable and utterly foreign, Seuss's pictures estrange the familiar, inviting us to see through his slightly "upside down" perspective.   He was fond of saying, "I have a Seuss astigmatism in both eyes so that I see things as if they've been put through a Mixmaster or viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
It's not intentional. That's just the way I see things."  

When we look at his art, we get to see things the way Dr. Seuss did.  As the Cat in the Hat says in I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978), "Young cat!  If you keep / your eyes open enough, / oh, the stuff you will learn! / The most wonderful stuff!"  So, all you young cats and older ones, turn the page, keep your eyes open, and start looking through the lens of Seussism.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
This essay adapted from Philip Nel’s Dr. Seuss: American Icon (Continuum Publishing , 2004) Philip Nel is professor of English and Director of Program in Children’s Literature, Kansas State University.  His books include The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (Picture Book) (Random House, 2007) and Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (co-edited with Julia Mickenberg, NYU Press, 2008).