In 1908, there suddenly appeared in the Munich Expressionist literary and art magazine, Die Jungend (The Youth)—unheralded and unexpected—a series of remarkable pen and ink sketches signed “Kley.” Sometimes black and white, sometimes covered with color washes, usually without captions, they were characterized by a highly individual staccato technique and a subject matter that leaped wildly about from satire to near-obscenity to despair. They were the first mature works of one of the great cartoonists of modern times, Heinrich Kley.

(Left) Heinrich Kley, Harvest Time (Erntezeit), pen and ink (c.1908-10)

Little known, even today, the question has to be asked: who was this brilliantly acerbic social commentator, Heinrich Kley? This was a question that was probably also being asked in Munich at the time his work was first published, because the sketches aroused a considerable amount of interest. Actually, Kley was one of the last men who could be expected to create such imaginative work. artes fine arts magazine

Before 1908, he had simply been one of thousands of capable academic artists. Born in 1963, in Karlsruhe in the Rhineland, he received his first training in the ‘practical arts’ curriculum of the Karlsruhe Akademie, one of many technical schools scattered around Germany during the decades book-ending the turn of the century. He continued his studies in Munich under the traditional tutelage of studio artist, C. Frithjof Smith. His earliest work, from 1888 to about 1892, consisted of portraits, still lifes, city scenes and historical paintings—mostly unexceptional work. Some of his work found its way into museum collections and a handful of murals graced public buildings in Baden Baden and elsewhere.

Kley had also created for himself a small reputation, in the 1890s, as a competent depicter of industrial scenes. Working in both oil and watercolor, he gathers his subject matter from the processes of manufacturing, as industrialization became an increasingly common feature of the German landscape. He turned the forces of industry—coal, steam and sweat—into paintings, showing considerable understanding of the processes involved in industry. Critics at the time wrote that, “He captured the poetry of the modern machine world.” Those images, along with his landscapes of the Black Forest garnered considerable attention from the press, but none belied the work in pen and ink that would soon made him famous.

The Heinrich Kley of record was not the Kley who was now producing volumes of sketches and submitting them to Die Jungend and the other Munich satirical periodical, Simplizissimus. An important transformation had occurred for reasons that may never be known. The Heinrich Kley who once “caught the poetry” of factories now revealed the devil lurking behind the smokestacks; the Kley who painted symbolically acceptable and politically inoffensive historical murals in city halls and post offices now skewered the bureaucracy at every possible occasion. Kley had now become a “Rubens corrupted by Rabelais.”

Based on his prolific artistic output for popular, left-leaning periodicals, Kley quickly became well-known. Even beyond the technical virtuosity which his pen sketches showed, he captured the disillusionment that had become a strong undercurrent (despite the war spirit that existed at other levels in society), his visual jibes achieving a strong emotional resonance with his audiences. He was a deft burster of political bubbles; even more shocking in his perceptive send-ups of bourgeois German society. Social life, as illustrated by Kley, took on the quality of Restif de la Brettone or Crebillon, with cruelty, pain and laughter emerging unexpectedly in the jittery, highly-personalized lines that cris-crossed social conventions and cultural trends of the day.

Kley was now immersing himself in the fun-house mirrored world of metaphor, irony and paradox as widely bizarre as the visions of Hieronymus Bosch, the elder Breughel, Goya or the animal scrolls of 13th century Japan—sharing obvious affinities with both. Animals and monsters and weird emergences of bestiality from a human base all served to symbolize the various vices, foibles and follies besetting mankind. Human virtues were of little interest to Kley.

At first glance, we might think that Kley had some deep symbolism in mind, with his elephants, bird-women, satyrs, crocodiles and assorted chimeras. But a closer examination shows that there are some elementary similarities became many of the themes commonly represented in Kley’s work: elephants, babies and children share common traits of awkwardness, shyness and endearing innocence (elephants may have entered his roster of caricatures because of their popularity in advertising of the day—the result of African and Asian colonization). Perhaps this is the reason that the image of the elephants and their wet nurse arouse feelings of horror and dismay in some viewers. Elsewhere, his symbolism is often traditional: the centaur usually equals lust, the faun or devil is usually to be found where human suffering is a predominant theme. Inversions of images are sometimes used, like racing snails, word and visual puns and thought play also find their way into his images. The erotic element is strong, and there is a certain infantile delight in words, utensils and postures suggestive of excretion—an obvious attempt to shock at all costs.

As Kley’s work is considered in an historical context, they now seem to be an integral part of the multi-channeled artistic outflow that was occurring in Europe during the tumultuous 1910s and early `20s. Kley lived in the same pre-war Munich that harbored Kandinsky, Klee and the other members of the Blaue Reiter art movement. Yet, despite coincidence in time and place, there seems to have been no social or artistic relationship between Kley and the modernists. Perhaps it was a difference in age: Kley in that period would have been about 50, paunchy and solemn, according to a self portrait of the time. Perhaps it was because Kley was more absorbed in the world of pain and revulsion than they were. Perhaps Kley, an astonishing draftsman whose animal sketches rank technically among the best, had little understanding, patience or sympathy for the experimental artistic heights that the early moderns were attempting to achieve through their abstract and reductionist work.

So, this was the Heinrich Kley during his last period of high-profile productivity, between 1908 and World War I; a mysterious satirist, whose frequent inclusion of satyric figures may have been self-referential—much like Picasso’s frequently-appearing metamorphosed bull—lending first-person intensity to the body of political and socially-charged drawings. His emotional range was palpable in his work: he felt pain where others laughed, and laughed sardonically, when others remained silent. Little is known about his personally, beyond what can be seen in the unpredicted reversal in the style of his work and the personality that seems to emerge in the sketches that survive to this day. Apart from occasional appearances in German pamphlets and art journals until about 1923, Kley disappears from the artistic stage until 1939, when his work appeared in the March issue of Gebrauchsgraphik (Practical Graphics). There, he is cited as an outstanding commercial artist and a number of his industrial scenes, in pen and ink, with color washes, are reproduced. After this, he drops from sight.

Looking at the trajectory of Freidrich Kley’s career in the context of 20th century German history, it is easy to see why his radical take on the country’s political culture and society would have been feared and disliked by the expanding sphere of influence of the Third Reich. His sketches reflect the growing tensions of the early 20th century and the strong undercurrent of disillusionment that Europe was prey to. His frantic, posturing brainchildren lash mercilessly at bureaucracy, militarism, false “Gemütlichkeit” (coziness), the eccentricities of reformers, the ballast of majesty, and many other facets of a conflict-weary civilization. Many official cultural texts produced during the period, 1920-1940 ignored Kley’s contribution to the field of art and mass-media magazines. He was passed over while many artists of lesser ability were discussed, principally because their work conformed to the right-wing conservative message of the new ruling class, bent on reshaping German history in the interests of European domination.

Kley’s death has been reported many times, so much so that it is not certain when he actually died. Various authoritative sources cite 1940, 1945, and finally, August 2, 1952. Kley, who perpetually evoked the demonic and absurd in man, would have enjoyed this confusion.

Reviewed by Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Excerpted from a November, 1960, Dover Publications, Inc. forward to sketchbooks (Skizzenbuch I and II), presenting Kley’s work. While out of print, copies of The Drawings of Heinrich Kley are available through book sellers on the Internet.