Leut’ und Viecher [People and Critters] – Album von Heinrich Kley

1st ed. Folio. 40x30cm, 64 pp. illustrated cloth, with gilt caricature and titling.

Heinrich Kley (1863 – 1945) was a German painter, illustrator and editorial cartoonist.

After a variety of commercial and industrial engagements, Kley attained notoriety with darkly satirical pen and ink drawings, published in the satirical magzines Jugend and Simplicissimus.

This is his first album, with several hundred pen and ink sketches depicting the absurdity of the human condition: church, marriage, fashionable ladies and pompous gentlemen, clothes and customs and character traits. Kley repeatedly uses anthropomorphic characters: elephants, apes, horses, in human poses – illustrating the spectacle of humans caught in ridiculous situations and grotesque positions.

In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Kley ceased working for most of his magazine clients and kept a low profile. After the war, he resumed work as an illustrator, but it wasn't the same. Kley's wife passed away in 1922, and the following year, with the collapse of the German economy, Kley lost his life savings. In 1933 the Nazis took over, causing Kley to shrink once again from public life. The Nazis destroyed the printing plates for his earlier drawings, and placed his work on their "List of Harmful and Unwanted Writings." In 1937, Coronet magazine published Kley's imaginative drawings of cavorting beasts and naked nymphs, of dancing alligators, wicked demons and lusty satyrs – Walt Disney began collecting his work and Kley's influence can easily be seen in the cavorting anthropomorphics of Fantasia, later acknowledged by Disney himself, "Without the wonderful drawings of Heinrich Kley, I could not conduct my art school classes for my animators."

CONDITION: Very Good; text block is fine. Covers clean and bright, except for some minor foxing and toning to spine. Kley's name written in pen on the otherwise blank spine; date of 1912 penciled onto title page.