Kay Nielsen East of the Sun and West of the Moon Art
by Terri Windling
The period in art history at present referred to every bit the Golden Age of Book Analogy occurred in London at the cease of the 19th century and in the dawning years of the 20th -- growing out of the reassessment of Book Arts fostered by the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts-&-Crafts movement, and aided past advances in printing techniques that fabricated the publication of sumptuously illustrated volumes suddenly economically viable. As a outcome, a number of the greatest book illustrators the world has ever known were amassed in London during those years: Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Charles and William Heath Robinson, Charles Ricketts, Lawrence Housman, Henry Ford, Jean de Bosschère, and many others -- including a young Dane named Kay (pronounced "Kigh") Nielsen, who turned up in the city in 1911 at the tender age of twenty-v with a serial of black-and-white drawings inspired by Aubrey Beardsley under his arm.
Kay had been born into an illustrious theater family in Copenhagen in 1886, growing upwardly with the trappings of wealth and fame and a stiff interest in the arts. (His father was the director of the Royal Danish Theater, his female parent was a much-revered actress, and visitors to the Nielsen household included Ibsen and Grieg.) At eighteen, Kay left Copenhagen for Paris to study art in Montparnasse. Information technology was there that he, like so many art students, discovered Beardsley'south work, with its fine use of line and ornamentation and its aura of dark romance. Beardsley's drawings fabricated a considerable impression on him, containing every bit it did two of the things he loved best: imagery from myth and sociology, and the strong influence of Japanese fine art. Nether Beardsley'south spell, Nielsen produced a serial of morbidly romantic black-and-white drawings titled The Book of Death, portraying the tragic honey of Pierrot for a immature dying maiden. Moving from Paris to Beardsley's homeland, Kay mounted a major London gallery exhibition of the series in 1911. Mixed in with these darker drawings were designs for watercolors based on archetype fairy tales -- the art for which the immature painter would henceforth be best known.
On the forcefulness of this piece of work, Kay soon received his first English language volume commission: In Powder and Crinoline, a volume of fairy tales retold by Arthur Quiller-Couch. The book appeared in 1913, instantly garnering wide acclamation. A year later, when he was just twenty-viii, Kay published the work that would exist his virtually famous: East of the Sun, Due west of the Moon: Old Tales from the Norse. With these ii volumes, Kay Nielsen came out from under Aubrey Beardsley's long shadow into a style that was all his own -- ane that incorporated the influence of Romantic Art, Art Nouveau, Japanese woodcuts, and Chinese prints, nevertheless gave them a dank Nordic elegance and a modernist expect. The original paintings from these 2 volumes were exhibited in London in 1915 (book artists depended on the sales from such shows, for they earned very niggling from the published works), and then formed the core of a Nielsen exhibition in New York two years afterward.
In 1917, Kay traveled from New York back to Copenhagen and became, during the mail-war years, deeply involved with the theater over again. Collaborating with his close friend Johannes Poulson (now known equally a pioneer of Danish movie theatre, but then a immature stage actor and producer), he designed elaborate sets and costumes for Adam Oehlenschlaeger's Aladdin at the Danish State Theater, also as for a lavish product of Scaramouche, with music by Sibelius. It was during these years, between 1918 and 1922, that the creative person as well created his sensual illustrations for The Arabian Nights, incorporating a melange of influences from Eastern art to the Italian Renaissance. Publication plans for the series savage through, but the paintings were shown in a London exhibition in 1924, along with new illustrations for a volume of Hans Christian Andersen tales.
Kay married his beloved, charismatic married woman Ulla Pless-Schmidt in 1926, and the ii of them lived in chiliad style for the next decade in Copenhagen -- where Kay, due to his popular books and innovative theater work, was now a celebrity just as his female parent and father had been. In 1936, the theater work led to a prominent chore in Hollywood, creating designs for Max Reinhardt'south Everyman at the Hollywood Basin -- and so Kay stayed on at the request of Walt Disney to pattern the "Baldheaded Mount" sequence of the animated motion picture Fantasia. When state of war broke out in Europe again, Ulla joined Kay in Hollywood, along with their ii Scotty dogs, and the couple settled in to a new life in America. At beginning, it was a life equally luxurious as the one they'd left backside -- but gradually, Kay's working relationship with Disney Studios deteriorated...and when he turned to his own art again he found, to his astonishment and despair, it had fallen quite out of fashion.
And so began a long stretch of years where jobs were few and far betwixt, and Kay's once highly sought after paintings became incommunicable to sell. His disadvantage, notes Hildegarde Flanner, a friend and neighbor in southern California,
"lay in the narrowness of his range in a twenty-four hours that was suspicious of fantasy -- unless neurotic or Joycean -- that 'the Gold Historic period of Illustration' in which his name had been notable along with those of Morris, Beardsley, Boecklin, Pyle, Rackham, Dulac, and their brotherhood had closed, and however vital his skill in ornament, he had no ease in self–promotion. In other times his talent and reputation might take carried him without anxiety for the residuum of his life, nevertheless already in the forties of the century and his own middle-fifties his successes, both European and American, were all in the past and plainly behind him, and he was living obscurely in a mortgaged cottage in the foothill suburbs, with no prospects ahead. Apprehension about money became chronic, and too in that location was the crucial matter of ill wellness. In spite of his tall advent of well-being, Kay was not strong and Ulla, since no one dares be sick without plenty of cash, did not mention the fact that she was threatened with diabetes."
Ulla and Kay tightened their belts, moved into the modest cottage near Flanner, and gear up about living with as much gentle grace and mode as they could muster on a small-scale and dwindling income. It was then that Flanner first met the couple -- astonished to find that her neighbor was the very artist whose books she had almost treasured in her childhood.
"Every bit I came to know him," Flanner writes, "he appeared to be the model of his tall heroes, and like them seemed puritanic, equally much monk as painter, never quite coming out of the hieratic woods....Asked today what they recall nigh virtually him people invariably reply, 'He never said an unkind word near anyone.' "
Despite their fiscal worries, the Nielsen house was a warm and lively place, filled with friends, art, conversation, and the distinctively Danish customs with which they kept their homeland shut. It was too filled with babe chicks, for the couple attempted to breed and enhance Cornish game hens to supplement their income -- but after a while this business organisation failed besides. And nevertheless Kay's art didn't sell.
In 1941, good fortune came in the grade of Jasmine Britton, supervising librarian for the Los Angeles school system. Distressed to find an creative person of Nielsen's caliber living in genteel poverty, she pulled some strings and located funds with which to hire him to create a full-scale mural for the library of the Los Angeles Primal Junior Loftier School. Information technology was a vast undertaking, a painting on which the artist spent three long years of hard work. When the mural was finally completed, information technology was ceremoniously unveiled to enormous acclaim; Arthur Miller chosen it "one of the most beautiful wall paintings in America" in the L.A. Times. One twelvemonth later, the schoolhouse edifice was taken over by the Los Angeles Lath of Education for a new authoritative headquarters, and the mural was stripped from the wall as the room was converted to offices.
Enraged, Jasmine Britton threatened the School Board with a well-publicized public scandal. They agreed to transfer the mural, and a new habitation was found for it at Sutter Junior High School in the San Fernando Valley -- but the enormous painting had been desperately damaged in the course of its careless removal and storage. A farther ii years of work was required to restore the art in its new setting -- a blow from which Kay'due south health, fragile at that time, never fully recovered. When the restorations were complete, he went on to a new commission -- a splendid altar painting for the Wong Chapel in the Commencement Congregational Church of Los Angeles. Afterward this, yet, it was six long years before he received another commission.
In the late 1940s, lacking all prospect of work, the Nielsens returned to Denmark, though life there was to be quite different from what they had known before. Where Kay had one time been a celebrity, followed everywhere by the media, now he was aging, his piece of work was obscure, and their country business firm, though charming, was also rustic and bitterly cold. Kay spent dark wintertime days wrapped in blankets, attempting to pigment, equally his health grew worse.
By the 1950s, the Nielsens were back in the cottage in California one time more -- where good fortune appeared in one case again in the grade of another Britton sister, Helen Britton Holland, who arranged for Kay to receive a mural commission from Whitman College. It was the final major painting he would ever complete -- for over the side by side several years his cough worsened, his frame grew thinner and thinner, and in 1957 he died quietly at abode at the age of sixty-nine. Ulla made no pretense of wanting to keep with life now that her Kay was gone, and she died just thirteen months later on of complications from diabetes. Neither knew that a revival of Kay'south life work was soon about to begin.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Kay'due south fairy tale paintings were rediscovered as part of a general cultural reappraisal of Victorian fairy fine art, Pre-Raphaelite fine art, and Aureate Age book illustration. In the latter group, Nielsen'south work was ranked once again alongside Rackham'southward and Dulac'due south every bit the finest of the age. In America and England, Kay's pictures appeared on notecards, posters, and calendars, and facsimile editions of his various fairy tale volumes presently followed later on. In the 1970s, Peacock Press, nether the visionary direction of Ian and Betty Ballantine (who were instrumental in popularizing Tolkien'south books in America) presented a serial of trade paperback volumes honoring the works of Golden Age illustrators. Kay Nielsen, edited by David Larkin, was published in 1975, followed upwardly by The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (featuring the creative person'due south Arabian Nights paintings) in 1977.
Since and so, Kay's piece of work has become beloved past fans of fairy tale fiction and illustration all around the world, and a new generation of mythic artists are now as inspired by the art of Kay Nielsen equally he was one time inspired past Beardsley.
"Though naturally conversant with the celebrated advances of painting in the twentieth century," writes Hildegarde Flanner, "he remained aristocratic from the times in his piece of work. Excelling in the lyrical and poetical was the ideal that absorbed him and he made no endeavor to modernize the subject-matter that had governed his style."
Today, we can only be grateful for the artist's devotion to "the lyrical and poetical." He maintained his own unique vision to the terminate, leaving his wondrous pictures every bit gifts to the future. I hope somewhere that his spirit, and Ulla'south, knows but how much nosotros treasure them now.
Credits & copyrights:
The paintings above are from Due east of the Sun, West of the Moon, illustrated by Kay Nielsen (1886-1957).
The text higher up start appeared in The Journal of Mythic Arts and Realms of Fantasy mag, copyright c 2003 by Terri Windling. It may not be reproduced without the author's permission. For information on obtaining permission (text only), please go hither.
Source: https://www.terriwindling.com/mythic-arts/kay-nielsen.html
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