Far from slumming it, when Michael Roberts first moved to New York from Europe to work at Vanity Fair, he lived at Anna Wintour’s house. But it was wintertime and the weather was depressing. “It was a nightmare river of slush on the side of the curb and I was just hating it,” says the fashion director of The New Yorker, who also moonlights as a children’s book author.
So he’d go back to the house every evening and paint jungle landscapes in a little book. Once Fran Leibowitz saw the sketches, she suggested he turn them into a children’s book. It took years to become a reality, but during that time, Roberts developed a signature style: three-dimensional paper cutouts that are reproduced as two-dimensional art. “Jungle ABC,” a series of those cutouts, was a success, celebrated with a book party thrown by Wintour and Tina Brown at The Mercer. It spawned a follow-up title about Halloween called “Mumbo Jumbo.”
Last week saw another fabulous book party (thrown by Iman at Bergdorf Goodman) for Roberts’ third children’s book, “Snowman in Paradise.” Told in verse, it’s a story about a snowman fed up with the cold who’s offered some time off in the tropics by a magical bluebird. Once there, he relaxes in hammocks and starts to paint.
“Given a choice, does anyone really like mud and sludge and freezing your ass off?” Roberts asks. (He splits his time between Paris, London and Rio.) He sees “Snowman in Paradise” as a parallel to the story of Gauguin, who found inspiration in Tahiti. Even Roberts’ bohemian colors are a direct crib from Gauguin.
“There’s no blood and guts,” Roberts explains. “The book relies on a little bit of charm — it says that you can discover things if you travel. I don’t do those kind of preachy Madonna-esque books. I find them faintly annoying and aggravating.”
A collection of his 20 years of illustrations, including work done for Vogue, Interview and The New Yorker, will be released next autumn by Karl Lagerfeld’s 7L press. Roberts says most people don’t realize the work that goes into the painstaking cutouts making up each page of the book and the occasional cover of The New Yorker. They think it’s been done by computer, but that doesn’t bother him.
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“When they see the originals, some people are taken aback,” Roberts says of the cutout illustrations. “But it’s like reading a novel: People want to feel the flow of the words, they don’t want to imagine the writer sweating over a typewriter puffing on a cigarette as they read.”
— Marshall Heyman