What do you do when you're ambushed by a body of work that is equal parts confusion, despair, fascination, and revulsion?
You pay attention.
In 1908, a series of ribald and masterfully executed drawings began taking the Munich art publications Jugend and Simplicissimus by storm. Seemingly out of nowhere, an artist with both immaculate penwork and a perfectly depraved mind had materialized and begun laying out work right and left . Who was this interloper who mixed sensationalism and skill with such easy indifference?
No doubt laughing at the consternation he had aroused (a typical pattern for the rest of his life), Heinrich Kley needed no introduction and no explanation. Already near the age of forty, Kley had spent his career thus far painting traditional landscapes, portraits, and still life. Until then, his only recognition had come from his swarthy, empathetic depictions of industrial work scenes. He had subsisted mostly on loosely "commercial" art - murals, commissions, public spaces.
Something happened. To this day, nobody knows what compelled Heinrich Kley to throw himself into a weird, writhing world of surreal ink drawing. Wielding a mighty command of human and animal figures alike, he began pouring out supremely grotesque and irresistible drawings. Frantic hatching, wriggly, dense shading, effortless gestures and perfect open lines coalesced into scenes of destruction or bizarre propriety. Half-humans, half-animals, divine beings - good, evil and neutral - perform unnatural, unexpected acts in the most graceful form. Ponderous street vendors peddle miniature elephants to big-eyed prepubescent girls; naked women cavort with crocodiles while floods of tangled humans are shit out by great deformed centaurs. Crucified in the living room of a clergy member, Christ bleeds above the sofa while the pastor sleeps after a huge meal. Fauns play a violent tug of war with their tails tied together. A suited man attacks a gowned bride on the steps of the Marriage License Bureau. The scenarios are as endless as they are strange.
Kley reveled in the corpulent and bloated human form, as well as the grim and sinewy devils which he often portrayed as giants, sabotaging factories, defecating on churches, floating in nasty airborne dance with nymphs and nyads. Animals figure prominently - sometimes anthropomorphic, always displaying the same despairing but ravenous movement as their human counterparts.
Eros and shit; innocence and filth; awkwardness and bestiality seem to prevail together without any element reaching a final triumph. Even in drawings that seem to be demure and harmless, the perverse atmosphere remains heavy. Satirical symbolism is shaken together with so many red herrings that it is hard to tell which elements of a drawing carry meaning, and which are merely meant to confuse. The real and the fantastical mingle together in the most unlikely events, as if it was their normal way of life.
As one might expect, Kley loved to perpetuate speculation regarding his life - So much so that little is known of him other than his work. What was the reason for his dramatic reversal from conservative obscurity to such wild experimentation? He declined to explain, and, of course, rumors abounded. His actual date of death was never documented, reportedly as early as 1945 or as late as 1952. It seems that Kley enjoyed wreaking havoc with every aspect of his life, and he went out with as much jovial and ghastly mischief as when he arrived.
Heinrich Kley was a man working backwards in medium and forwards in concept. As he retreated from oil painting and color illustration to his dark pen-and-ink style, he continued to climb heights of disgust and wonder. He found himself separated from the Modernists with his figurative, classic style and his absorption with pain and morbidity. At the same time, he shared with them his love of satire, his iconoclasm and eccentricity. While he celebrated all things base and animal in man, his love of beauty was always present in the poise and liveliness of his figures.
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