Kley's Winter

The wacky wonderland of a master artist

The Human, The Bestial, the inanimate: in the world of the late German artist Heinrich Kley, these met on equal terms. They fraternized and merged, forming a gay, gemutlich' phantasmagoria where alligators skated with nude women and nude women obligingly became ski-slopes for diminutive sportsmen. Kley's approach to line drawing was looser, less stylized than most of the illustrators of his period. His uninhibited pen, spinning narcotic nightmares for the fine German magazines Die Jugend and Simplizissimus, pointed the way to a new freedom in draftsmanship which was echoed in the floppy, humanized animals of our own Walt Disney. The winter scenes on these pages are typical: like all the rest of his pen work, they are unmistakably the product of the fertile imagination, questionable sanity and abundant talent of the one and only Heinrich Kley.