Maatstaf. Jaargang 26

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Portfolio Heinrich Kley
Door Donald Weeks

Heinrich Kley had ‘died in a mad house a few years back’. These words introduced Kley's drawings to America in three consecutive issues of the then new Coronet Magazine in 1937. Kley had never been in any mental institution and, in 1937, he still had eight years to live until 2 August 1945.

Born at Karlsruhe on 15 April 1863, he studied art under Ferdinand Keller at the Karlsruhe Akademy for five years beginning in 1880. He continued his studies under C. Frithjof Smith after moving in 1908 to Munich, his next and last home. At first he did small illustration work, turning to oil painting of landscapes, city scenes, interiors, portraits and still-life work. Between 1888 and 1894, his paintings were accepted and hung at the Munich Glasspalace and Sezession exhibitions. During the same period, he created two murals for the main hall of the Reichspostgebäude in Baden-Baden: ‘Einweihung des rom. Merkuraltares’ and ‘Spazierfahrt Kaiser Wilhelms i’.

The answer to ‘What is art?’ is a very personal one. Paintings and artists fall into many categories and, as individual laymen, no two are alike. When it comes to the artistically technical form of graphic art - the chiaroscuro in its supreme representation - the artist is at his best as pure draughtsman. He has an inborn precision, knowing exactly where each line will touch the paper and for what purpose. Each line and dot will convey immense areas of figures or scene, and the true artist/draughtsman can thus relate his imaginative skill to the viewer. Add to this the exceedingly rare attribute of satirical humour - and you have one of the greatest draughtsmen of this century: Heinrich Kley. But the satirical Kley did not exist before 1909.

At the turn of this century, he changed his material and approach to subject matter using the scenes of modern industrial life. The very special appeal this held for him can be seen in the oils, watercolours and drawings of this period - blast furnaces, tunnel constructions, ship docks, huge scaffolds and machine-filled factory interiors. Perhaps the best known of the work at this time is his ‘Tiegelstahlguss bei Krupp’. George Grosz exclaimed his delight over Kley's industrial watercolours. His architectural drawings included the exteriors of buildings in Old Munich, Nuremberg, Bruchsal, Dresden, the harbour of Kiel, Paris, Ostende, and the picturesque North Sea island of Helgoland. In 1903, he contributed a painting, ‘Darstellung des Heidelberger “Sommertagzurges,”’ for part of the new decoration of the Karlsruhe Town Hall.

For Kley, book illustration began in 1886, with a single-page illustration (204 inches by 6 inches), folded into a single album, Jubiläum der Universität Heidelberg, reminiscent of Aubrey Beardley's first published work a few years later. Kley's single-drawing book shows a steady historical procession passing through Heidelberg, from ‘Grundung der Universität durch Kurfurst Ruprecht i’ in 1386 to ‘Wiederherstellung der Universität durch Karl Friedrich von Baden’ in 1803. This single illustration shows the beginning of his masterful touch with animals. His illustrations for such books as Die Reisescgatten, Vergilis Aeneis, Hetaerenbrief, Der Herr der Luft and Streiszuge eines Kreuzvergnugten all depict a verve and omnipotent line technique portrayed with the very soul of fact and fancy.

Moving to Munich, the renderer of scenes became a completely different sort of artist. His architectural pen or brush was substituted

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Minimax

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Picknick

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Schmücke dein Heim!

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Maibock

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Der Kehraus

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Exotische Badegäste

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Der Kränschen

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Heinrich Kley (8 februari 1923)

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by satire - a true satire which stings, never missing its mark. Kley the satirist lived amid the pages of Die Jugend and Simplizissimus. The new city erupted within him some revolutionary force to re-face his entire psychological make-up. The blasting Krupp furnaces were replaced by the almost blasphemous display of the industrial world's output of pleasure. The poetry once caught in a factory interior was suddenly metamorphosised into smirking devils and a world peopled with people and animals as real as people. Since Aesop's day, some person or other dressed up animals and made them speak human words. Kley's animals were imbued with the very personification of human souls - tumbling perhaps only toward their individual perdition. He became a ‘Rubens corrupted by Rabelais’. He captured the pre-World War i disilliusionment of life in all its aspects then undercurrent in Germany. He depicted a society from the tomes of Restif de la Brettonne and Crebillon - a world of methaphor and paradox - as wildly bizarre as had been Breughel's centuries before. The weird emergencies of bestiality which fell from his pen symbolized the vices and foibles of his fellow men - for ‘Strange is the man when he seeks after his gods’ - the men, the creatures beholden in Kley's art. His intent was for the fullest exposure. Mediocrity was beneath him, although some of his symbols were as traditional as those with the founding of Christian art. The centaur equaled lust. The faun or devil followed human suffering. His other ‘animal instruments’ expressed puns on paper. Kley's juxtaposition of human and animal created a very special world - not of make-believe, but a world of totality - the totality of creatures living together, sharing the same products of daily life, amusements and emotions. His pen left nothing inanimate. The erotic element in Kley's drawings can be seen, but its obvious desire to shock at all costs is combined with the mastery of his sure satirical line and outlook.

Kley's art had no rivals. He did live in an age of revolution - in the 1910s and the early 1920s. Munich was also the home of Kandinsky, Paul Klee and certain artists of the Blue Riders school. The coincidence of time and place left no mark on him. He remained an original - an enigma. He seemed to have absorbed in a world of revulsion. Too, he was a master technician and, no doubt, refused to condescend to a level of artistic techniques below him. He portrayed what his fervid imagination ‘actually’ saw. He cared nothing for experimentation - for ‘telling a story’ in a way which, perhaps, no one could decipher. He was of the moment - and that one moment was captured in a fashion never to be forgotten. He lived above all classes. He was no Robin Hood. If he would ever had heard the words of his fellow nationalist, B. Traven - ‘God in His infinite mercy had never created a man so poor who could not be robbed’ - he would have approved. If his world seemed merely that of fancies, it was solidified with the words of Orson Welles: ‘Still at least a dream is never an illusion.’ Kley drew only the true world - as it existed in front of his fanciful mind.

The productivity of Kley's pen was most profuse between 1909 and World War i - the pen of a satirist and a satyr. He expressed pain when others laughed and he himself laughed at the pain emanating from others - or even laughed loudest when others were silent. The strange reversal from his architectural, photographic-like art at the turn of the century to the suddenly demonic portrayal of the world's follies took another turn - sharply twisting in a yet new direction. His bitingly humourous drawings were collected in Skizzenbuch (1909), Skizzenbuch ii (1910), Leu' und Viecher (1912) and Sammel-Album (1923). But by this latter date, Kley the satirist had completely disappeared into the maze of the advertising world of Munich. Much later - in March 1939 - Gebrauchsgraphik reported that Kley then was an outstanding commercial artist. He had again begun to reproduce factory and city

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scenes - but in delicate watercolours. In one of his earlier sketches of wit, he captioned a drawing of a girl entering bed ‘Minimax’ (see illustration). The same issue of Gebauchsgraphik published some serious sketches he had made for the Minimax catalogue - a German fire extinguisher company.

The frivolous gaiety of his drawings just preceeding World War i may not have had the same appeal in the improverished aftermath of the Kaiser's folly. A new school had been created and Dadaism was one of its children. George Grosz was the master of the post-war scene, artistically - but cruelly - mocking the tattered threads dangling from the golden costumes of pre-war days. Grosz aimed at the Establishment as a direct target - an Establishment that slapped back - and an Establishment which may have feared the broader strokes of Kley. But, by this date, Kley had ceased to combat the windmills of this world. He was safely secure in ‘the lost civilization’ of advertising.

The famous satirist existed upon this planet for hardly more than a brief decade - from 1909. By 1920, he was no longer the individualist, the preacher who dared to comment on the sins of sinners and preachers alike. But his soul kept marching on. In the English classic murder novel by E.C. Bentley, Trent's Last Case, Philip Trent had once painted ‘what he called a machinery-scape in the manner of Heinrich Kley’. In the post-World War ii United States, paperback books - mostly science fiction - incorporated Kley's drawings in their cover designs. Atlas and Motive were but two magazines which included Kley's work on their pages. The Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco utilized some of Kley's frogs in a poster for one of their programmes. But the sincerest flattery given to Kley was the imitating of his people-like animals dancing in ‘The Dance of the Hour’ sequence in Walt Disney's Fantasia.

Kley lived in Munich during the holocast of two world wars. Whatever questions may be asked about his personal life, let his art - his master draughtsmanship depicting wit, humour, satire, imagination of an all-knowing man - speak for him. His drawings have a clearness that is rare in the art of present-day craftsmanship. They are as rare, as humourous and as beautiful today as when first penned for the pages of Die Jugend or Simplizissimus. Heinrich Kley engendered into his art one rare attribute: Timelessness.

His acclaim today is almost non-existent. And the wit he displayed has a sad footnote. If the post-World War i Establishment were in no position to oppose him, the Fates of a later period were. At the beginning of World War ii, he was an old man. He collected all of his drawings, paintings and tools of trade and boxed them for shipment to a safe home - away from the territory beneath gathering storm clouds. The work and tools of a lifetime were to be shipped to a friend in California. The crates were duly slung aboard a ship at Hamburg - a ship to be torpedoed in the North Sea.