Worm Burning Bright in the Forest in the Night 277/850

Adapted posthumously from the circa 1969 original oil on illustration board.

Dr. Seuss would often take different artistic genres and portray them in his inimitable style. Consider the Cubism of The Rather Odd Myopic Woman, the Abstraction of The Joyous Leaping of Uncanned Salmon, and the Surrealism of Surly Cat Being Ejected. However, the only “drip painting” Ted ever painted is Worm Burning Bright in the Forest in the Night, which juxtaposes a self-illuminating central character with an abstractly “dripping” forest.

By the time this artwork was painted in 1969, Dr. Seuss certainly would have become familiar with Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings—the genre of abstract art Pollock made famous between 1947 and 1950, rewarding him with a place in art history. An avid artistic and cultural sponge, it’s possible that Ted, while on his annual New York trip to Random House, saw MoMA’s 1967 comprehensive Pollock exhibition. Either way, knowledge of Pollock’s drip paintings was practically unavoidable.