OSCAR DE MEJO'S ABC

From the late expatriate Italian painter, who was acclaimed for the special and unusual vision he brought to children's illustration (The Tiny Visitor, 1982), an alphabet of paintings (with dates from 1973 to 1988) celebrating his adopted country. In his surreal, carefully constructed compositions, de Mejo pays tribute to the vivid colors and stiff, hard-edged style of American folk art; in the same spirit, his subjects are historical icons: Valley Forge, Lewis and Clark, Virginia Dare, the Wild West; even scenes that might have been more contemporary—``Umpire''; ``Zoo''—have a period flavor. The stars and stripes appear frequently, often as the garb of a woman of heroic proportions. De Mejo seems to have accepted the trappings of conventional history uncritically, but his pictorial representation of it is uniquely imaginative. Provocative and intriguing. (Picture book. 5+)