[Thanks to Karen Nipps, Head of the Rare Books Team, for contributing this post.] European graphic artists of the early 20th century clamored to distance themselves from the decorative excesses of Art Nouveau. In Germany, the poster style “plakastil” was particularly popular, with its emphasis on stark combinations of flat colors enhanced with simple, bold shapes and letterforms. Julius Klinger was a leading practitioner of this art, creating thousands of commercial and industrial pieces of graphic art over his forty-year career. Born in Vienna in 1876, as a youth he moved to Germany, which at the time had a flourishing art scene. By the 1920’s, Berlin’s walls and shelves were plastered with his art in the form of posters, commercial printed ephemera, book illustrations, and type designs. (Tragically, the Nazis deported him to Minsk in 1942, where he was presumably killed).
Early in his career, Klinger joined two colleagues, the actors Rudolf Bernauer and Carl Meinhard, in articulating their low opinions of the current state of children’s book illustrations in Die Kunst im Leben des Kindes (Art in the life of the child), a parody of Heinrich Hoffman’s classic Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter) books. (Houghton owns numerous editions of Hoffmann’s perennial favorite.) In it, they skewer old practices, but also provide new models. Klinger’s humorous illustrations are particularly arresting. Boldly caricatured are the Russians and Japanese fighting over Manchuria; a lovely tightlaced Cléo de Merode, followed by her ardent fan, Leopold of Belgium; the (bad) painter Max Liebermann; the author Hermann Sudermann (holding a briefcase emblazoned “Japan”); a tearful pacifist Bertha von Suttner, and a scantily-clad, barefoot Isadora Duncan (the author wishes he could be her socks). While the Harvard Theatre Collection owns many images of Isadora, we can say with certainty that none quite resembles this one.
