El grotesco en los álbumes ilustrados infantiles

Abstract

The study of the grotesque, as an aesthetic category, is one of the great contributions of modern thought in its approach to the artistic object. The first attempts (Rosenkratz, Flögel), centred on the analysis of ugliness as a response to the hegemony of the beautiful, were followed by the proposals of Bakhtin and Kayser, centred on specific historical periods. Various works by Beltrán Almería take up the concept and situate it in a broader horizon, as the foundational aesthetics of the human creative imagination in its unfolding through history. This work takes up this path again and attempts to explore its expression in children's picture books. The imagination of the child, prone to the grotesque, offers artists aware of its power, backed by the great tradition (Busch, Steig, Sendak, Saéz Castán...), a fertile space for creation, which is explored in the following pages through figures and symbols such as the devilish child, the apocalypse, the monster or the states of alienation and transit.