New Books In Art

In the field of children’s programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, but most famous for his creation of the Muppets. And yet, he’s remained an enigmatic figure in the years since his death. People remember the Muppets and they remember Jim, but they don’t know much about him. Jim Henson: The Biography (Ballantine Books, 2013), by Brian Jay Jones is thus an effort to correct that and to pin down the puppeteer: as a man, a husband, a father, and an innovator. For, with the passage of time, we’ve come to take the Muppets and their maker rather for granted. They’ve been around for over fifty years so it’s easy to forget they had to be invented. It’s equally easy to forget how ground-breaking an invention- along with Henson’s other innovations- they were. As Jerry Juhl, the first official employee of Muppet’s Inc., reminds us in Jim Henson: “This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and