Dick Bruna

Dick Bruna: The Hardest Simple Lines in Publishing

Museum curators have tried to draw Miffy's head. It is, after all, a circle, two ears, two dots and a small x. What they discovered, and what a Rijksmuseum curator described as evidence of true genius, is that they could not do it — the apparent artlessness turns out to sit on a knife-edge of proportion and weight that almost nobody can find by accident. Dick Bruna found it in 1955, kept finding it for another sixty years, and never once let anyone else's hand near the line.

The Son Who Would Not Publish

Hendrik Magdalenus Bruna was born in Utrecht on 23 August 1927 into the Dutch book trade. His father, A.W. Bruna, ran the family publishing house A.W. Bruna & Zoon with his brother Henk, and the succession was assumed. During the German occupation the family sheltered in the Dutch lake country, and it was there, out of school and out of the world, that the boy's drawing became something more than a hobby.

The refusal, when it came, was not a rebellion against the family business so much as a redirection of it. He would work for A.W. Bruna & Zoon — for decades, prolifically — but as an artist rather than a publisher. His formal training was brief and unhappy. He enrolled at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam and quit, later assessing himself with a bluntness few artists manage: he had no talent as a painter and could not draw perspective.

Paris, and the Right Kind of Wrong Talent

He went to London and then to Paris, and Paris rearranged him. What he found there was not the academy but the moderns: Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, and above all Henri Matisse, whose work made the case that flat colour and a decisive edge could carry more feeling than modelling and shadow. Layered on top of that was his own national inheritance, the graphic discipline of De Stijl, with its primaries and its right angles and its faith that reduction is a form of honesty.

For a man who could not draw perspective, this was liberation rather than consolation. Perspective was the thing he did not need. A Bruna image has no depth, no shading and no horizon; it has a flat plane, a black contour drawn with a brush, and a small number of very loud colours.

Two Thousand Book Jackets

From 1951 he worked as the family firm's designer, and the output was enormous: roughly two thousand book jackets and more than a hundred posters. The most celebrated were the covers for Zwarte Beertjes, Bruna's paperback line, where a cover had to be legible at a glance from across a shop. It was the ideal apprenticeship for what came next — years of solving, at commercial speed, the problem of how few marks a picture can survive on.

The Rabbit on the Holiday

In 1955, on a family holiday, Bruna sketched a rabbit to entertain his small son, and told bedtime stories about it. The first picture book, *Nijntje* — a Dutch child's diminutive for little rabbit — appeared that year from Bruna & Zoon. When the British publisher Methuen took the character on in 1963, the translator Olive Jones judged the Dutch name unpronounceable for English readers and renamed her Miffy.

The design settled almost immediately and then barely moved for six decades: a heavy black outline, flat primaries, two black dots for eyes, a mouth reduced to an x. Marja Kerkhof, who worked with him at his publisher, described the effect precisely — very clear pictures, almost like a pictogram, no clutter, very strong, powerful primary colours. Bruna's own account of the appeal was characteristically unglamorous: "I think it is because I spend a long time making my drawings as simple as possible." Miffy, he insisted, was not a rabbit standing in for a child but simply a little girl, living through everyday experiences.

Miffy Goes Global

The core Miffy series runs to thirty-two books. Bruna's children's titles number around a hundred and twenty by the count most often published, and they have sold more than eighty-five million copies in over fifty languages. Around the books grew an industry: merchandising estimated at some three hundred million dollars a year, a television series, a feature film in 2013. Miffy turned up on New York subway posters after 11 September 2001, and on tulip fields planted in her shape in Japan, where the affection borders on the religious.

Bruna announced his retirement in 2014, and made one condition explicit: the rights to Miffy would not be sold. In March 2016 he received the Max Velthuijs Prize, the Dutch honour for a lifetime's work in children's illustration. A final book, *Miffy is Naughty*, appeared in 2017.

Why Dick Is Called a Genius

The word has been used, and by someone with standing to use it: a Rijksmuseum curator applied it to Bruna after museum staff attempted to reproduce Miffy's head and failed. That failure is the whole argument. The specific faculty is subtractive judgment — an almost pathological willingness to keep removing until only the irreducible remains, combined with the eye to know when one more removal would collapse the image into nothing. It is a discipline of refusal, and it is far rarer than invention. His own explanation was a description of labour, not inspiration: he spent a long time making the drawings as simple as possible. The simplicity was the output of the effort, not a shortcut around it.

Two honest qualifications. First, this is a genius of craft and eye rather than of intellect: Bruna proposed no theory, wrote no manifesto, and kept his texts as spare as his drawings. What he had was a hand and a standard, and he applied them to one problem for sixty years. Second, the vocabulary was not his invention. The flat planes, the black contour and the primaries are Matisse and De Stijl, and Bruna said so himself; his originality lay in aiming that adult modernist apparatus at three-year-olds and refusing to condescend once he got there. He also disqualified himself from the conventional artistic pantheon on the record — no talent as a painter, no perspective. The claim that survives all of it is narrower and stronger than genius-in-general: nobody has ever been better at drawing very little.

Legacy

Bruna died in his sleep in Utrecht on 16 February 2017, of natural causes, at eighty-nine, survived by his wife, three children and six grandchildren. He had worked almost to the end, in the city he was born in, and *Miffy is Naughty* reached shops after he was gone. What he left behind is unusual in commercial illustration: a body of work no assistant ever touched, a character whose rights he refused on principle to sell, and a graphic language so thoroughly absorbed by Dutch and Japanese visual culture that it now reads as a natural fact rather than one man's decision. The books remain what they were — the shortest possible distance between a line and a feeling.

Achievements

• Commander of the Order of the Netherlands Lion
• Max Velthuijs-prize — 2016
• Notable work: Miffy