Heinrich Kley
Heinrich Kley (born April 15, 1863 in Karlsruhe , † February 8, 1945 in Munich ) was a German draftsman and painter .
life and work
Heinrich Kley's parents were the silversmith Theodor Kley (1831–1870) and his wife Emma nee. Roos (1841-1908). From 1880 to 1885 he studied - interrupted by a short study visit to Munich - at the Karlsruhe Art School under the history painter Ferdinand von Keller . He gained first notoriety through a fanfold album depicting the historical parade and illustrations for a festival chronicle for the 500th anniversary of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in 1886.
Until the turn of the century Kley tried - not least because of economic necessity - to get public and private contracts in the vicinity of his home in Baden. Two lost wall paintings ( the inauguration of the Merkur altar on the great Staufen and a drive by Kaiser Wilhelm I and Empress Augustas on Lichtenthaler Allee in Baden-Baden ) for the Reich Post Office building in Baden-Baden (1891) and a monumental painting ( Heidelberg Summer Day Train ) for the Heidelberg Stadthalle (1902) prove that he was active in the field of history and genre painting. Despite various efforts (including work as a press illustrator, participation in art exhibitions in Karlsruhe, Munich and Berlin, co-founding of the Karlsruhe Artists' Association, etc.), he only partially succeeded in establishing himself in Karlsruhe's art scene.
An order from the Karlsruhe court art dealer Velten was of great importance for his further career. In 1897/98 he made over 100 watercolors for them with motifs from German cities, which were reproduced as colored postcards and were widely used. Its particular attraction lies in the precise and at the same time atmospheric description, which earned its author the reputation of a specialist in topographical subjects.
In 1901 the Krupp-Gussstahlfabrik in Essen became aware of Kley's postcards and ordered several watercolors from him with depictions from their facilities. These include the scenes from inside the factory, for example tapping a furnace , casting a 50t slab from two ladles or casting crucibles in smelting . In an impressionistically relaxed way of painting, they illustrate work processes from a world otherwise hidden from the public eye and describe their atmospheric mood, which is characterized by enormous machines, human labor and unleashed elementary forces. Kley's watercolors were used by Friedrich Krupp AG as illustrations for representative commemorative writings and company albums, as well as reproduced as postcards, which soon made them well known in industrial circles. The oil painting Die Krupp'schen Teufel was created between 1911 and 1914 and is currently hanging in the Westphalian State Museum for Industrial Culture in the Henrichshütte in Hattingen . In the years to come he became a sought-after industrial painter who received orders from companies such as MAN , Grün & Bilfinger and Voith until the end of his life .
Kley's name became known to the general public through his work on the Munich Simplicissimus . Its editor, the publisher Albert Langen , had become aware of the artist through the popular actor Konrad Dreher and published his humorous, satirical and grotesque pen drawings, originally made for private enjoyment, in his paper from 1908. About 350 examples are contained in the four albums Sketchbook (1909), Sketchbook II (1910), Leut 'und Viecher (1912) and Scrapbook (1923) from Albert Langen Verlag . With technical virtuosity, striking wit and psychological empathy, Kley depicts in them - often in the form of human-animal comparisons - eternally human characteristics and events, so that most of his pictorial inventions have lost none of their relevance to this day.
The success that set in almost overnight motivated the artist to move to Munich in 1909. Here he became an employee of the youth (magazine) , received numerous orders as a book illustrator and entered into an extremely successful business relationship with the gallery owner Franz Josef Brakl .
The First World War marked a decisive turning point for Kley and his work. He let his work on Simplicissimus and the youth rest, increasingly looked after his wife Theophanie (1861–1922), who needed care, and withdrew more and more from friends and acquaintances.
At the beginning of the Weimar Republic , Kley reappeared in public. The resumption of work in various magazines and work as a book illustrator is mainly due to economic necessity, because in the war years the artist lived primarily on income from Brakl, which he increasingly felt he was taking advantage of and with whom he fell out in the mid-1920s.
The death of his wife Theophanie in 1922 and the loss of his savings in hyperinflation plunged Kley into a deep crisis from which he only slowly recovered. It was above all the industrial orders that occupied and nourished him from now on. Mainly he recorded huge machinery, high-low construction sites and bridge constructions, i.e. motifs with a strongly technical character. Not least because of these specifications, he approached a way of seeing and painting in his representations based on the New Objectivity.
Kley finally drew new courage to face life through his second wife Emily (1878–1970), whom he married in 1928. She became a loyal, intelligent and energetic companion who would keep the memory of him long after his death.
With the dawn of National Socialism , it became quiet around the artist. Only a few weeks before the seizure of power, the Simplicissimus had published a caricature of him that was harmless but unmistakably directed against the National Socialists. In order to avoid reprisals and not have to submit to the demands of the increasingly harmonized press, Kley abruptly stopped working on all magazines. The entry into the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, which is necessary for further professional practice as an artist, did not take place until 1938 and therefore relatively late (from 1935 membership in this organization was mandatory for all visual artists in Germany). With this he moved under the observation of the state authorities, who approved his industrial motifs, but which were extremely suspicious of his humorous, satirical and grotesque pen drawings. In 1939 the Reichsschrifttumskammer put the scrapbook published in 1923 on the list of harmful and undesirable literature . She requested the collection of copies that appeared and had the printing matrices from Albert-Langen-Verlag destroyed. In order not to get further into the maelstrom of the investigation and to assert his reputation as a first-class painter of industrial motifs, Kley created several large-format paintings with corresponding subjects in the last years of his life, using all his strength. He himself reported on this in a letter: "I paint in the morning 1/2 5 to 7 in the evening on immortal oil paintings in order to reap the necessary laurels shortly before the gate closes."
Heinrich Kley died shortly before the end of the Second World War in the Nymphenburg Hospital in Munich.
reception
Although Heinrich Kley was never in the USA, his pen and ink drawings, which appeared in Simplicissimus before the First World War and were easily available through the albums of Albert-Langen-Verlag, enjoyed astonishing popularity and reception there.
As early as the mid-1920s, "The Golden Book Magazine" published several dozen works by Kley, albeit without his knowledge. The Coronet followed in 1937 ; In the absence of more detailed information about the artist, this magazine spread the absurd rumor that Kley had died years ago in a psychiatric institution. In 1941 and 1948 the Californian publisher Emanuel Borden published two bibliophile volumes with Kley's pen drawings, which he compiled from the albums of the Albert-Langen-Verlag. The artist George Grosz , who emigrated from Germany to the USA in 1933, contributed a foreword to the second publication in which he expressed his admiration for the works by Kley, which he had known since his student days. In 1961 and 1962, Dover-Verlag in New York published two volumes, which are still available in bookshops today, with all the drawings from the albums of Albert-Langen-Verlag.
Heinrich Kley's most famous admirer was the cartoon producer Walt Disney . His colleagues Joe Grant and Albert Hurter made him aware of Kley's pen drawings in the late 1930s, and he immediately recognized their potential as a source of inspiration for his own film projects. This can be seen particularly clearly in the film Fantasia (1940). Numerous figures and plot motifs in the scenes Pastorale , The Dance of the Hours and A Night on Bald Mountain are inconceivable without Kley's role model. The films Dumbo (1941) and The Jungle Book (1967) also owe a lot to the artist, who had long since been forgotten in his homeland. Disney confessed in a 1964 television interview:
"Without the wonderful drawings of Heinrich Kley I could not conduct my artschool classes for my animators."
exhibition
- 2011: Heinrich Kley - Master of the drawing pen in the context of his time , Villa Stuck , Munich
- 2011: ditto, German Museum for Caricature and the Art of Drawing Wilhelm Busch , Hanover
Books
- Heinrich Kley, people and critters. Album. Albert Langen Verlag, Munich undated
- Sketchbook. A hundred pen drawings . Albert Langen Verlag, Munich undated
- Sketchbook II. One hundred pen drawings . Albert Langen Verlag, Munich undated
- 12 art prints from the youth . Verlag der Jugend, Munich o. J.
- Sagas. 9 stories from the legends of Germanic tribes . Adapted from the sources by Eugen Weimann. With 8 original illustrations by Heinr. Kley. Samuel Lucas, Elberfeld undated (around 1905).
- Hetaeren letters. A selection from Alciphron, Lucian and others translated by Dr. Hans W. Fischer. With pictures by Heinrich Kley. Georg H. Wigand'sche Verlagbuchhandlung, Leipzig undated
- In the Australian bush . Sketches by Stefan von Kotze. With pen drawings by Heinrich Kley (10 illustrations and 1 cover picture). 16th of the Green Ribbon edited by Nicolaus Henningsten. Hermann Schaffstein, Cologne undated (approx. 1905).
- Youth . Special issue for Heinrich Kley, Munich 1910, 5th issue (February)
- Lucian, Lucius or the donkey . Foreword by Georg Cordesmühl. Pictures by Heinrich Kley. Georg H. Wigand'sche Verlagbuchhandlung, Leipzig undated
- Reineke the fox . As told by Wilhelm Fronemann . Pictures by Heinrich Kley. Loewes Verlag, Stuttgart 1930.
- The giant mum . A children's book by Eberhard Buchner. With pictures by Heinrich Kley (19 illustrations and 1 colored cover picture). Albert Langen, Munich 1910.
- Virgil's Aeneid . Travested by Alois Blumauer. Illustrated by Heinrich Kley. Berthold Sutter Verlag, Munich 1910.
- Justinus Kerner , The Shadow of Travel. With original zinc drawings by Heinrich Kley. Hans von Weber Verlag, Munich 1921.
- Paul Georg Ehrhardt : The last power. A utopia from our time. Novel in four volumes with 24 black and white drawings by Heinrich Kley (- Sindbad books series - Fantastic and adventurous novels). Drei Masken Verlag, Munich 1921.
- Pageant. Jubilee of Heidelberg University 1386–1886. Pageant album, designed and drawn by Heinrich Kley in Karlsruhe under the direction of Professor Hoff. Verlag von Bangel & Schmitt (Otto Petters), Univ.-Buchhandlung and Edmund von König, Kunsthandlung in Heidelberg (probably Kley's first publication)
- The Drawings of Heinrich Kley. Dover Publications, New York 1962.
- More Drawings of Heinrich Kley. Sketchbook I and II. With an introduction. Dover Publications, New York 1961.
- The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley, Volume 1: Drawings . With a foreword by Michael Wm. Kaluta. Picture This Press, Silver Spring: Maryland, 2012.
- The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley, Volume 2: Paintings and Sketches . With a foreword by Joseph V. Procopio. Picture This Press, Silver Spring: Maryland 2012.
literature
- Alexander Kunkel: Heinrich Kley. Life and work . Publishing house and database for the humanities, Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-89739-650-0 (also dissertation, University of Munich 2009).
- Brigitte Lohkamp: Kley, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 61 f. ( Digitized version ).
Web links
- The drawings of Heinrich Kley
- Literature by and about Heinrich Kley in the catalog of the German National Library
- Postcards from Heinrich Kley
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Dückershoff: The Krupp devils and the Essen cast steelworks . In: steel and iron . tape 119 , no. 9 , 1999, p. 152-153 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kley, Heinrich |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German draftsman, caricaturist and painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 15, 1863 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Karlsruhe |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 8, 1945 |
| Place of death | Munich |