Monster in the Imagination

When Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 at the age of 70, he was famous at home in Denmark. Some of the fairy tales on which his enduring name rests had already found their way into translation. But few people knew that the vain, morbid, brilliantly imaginative Dane was also a visual artist of real talent, or that his work, when viewed down the corridor of a century, would come to look quite "modern."

Like every educated traveler in those pre-Kodak years, Andersen drew assiduously while journeying through Portugal, Spain and Italy. But these diary drawings are trite; in their grasp of the conventions of realistic landscape, they are far below the sketched views and water-colors made by his nearest English equivalent, Edward Lear. But in his fantasy doodles, collages and paper cutouts, Andersen's vision flowered in a lyrical and fearsome way. In such work, he emerges as an accident of history--a previously unrecognized link between the 19th century Romantics and the 20th century Surrealists, sharing their common delight in dreams, irrational encounters and the imagination of children.

Many of these fragile jeux d'esprit were done when, while staying at friends' homes, he amused their offspring with stories and images. As with Lewis Carroll, so with Andersen: children released him. He saw what the social assumptions of Victorian culture veiled from most of his fellow adults: that children, far from being the apple-cheeked, docile innocents their parents thought them, were monsters of imagination, able to look at other monsters with candid relish. (The tales collected by the brothers Grimm--not to mention some of Andersen's own--are packed with sadism and nightmare.)

This undoubtedly liberated Andersen's fantasy. His own head was stuffed with elves, hobgoblins, demons and freaks; he half-jokingly (but only half) presented himself as a monster with "a nose as big as a cannon and eyes as small as green peas"; one of his favorite images, which probably grew out of his regular disappointments in love and his otherwise suppressed resentment of women who had hurt him, was the "heart thief," depicted hanging from a gallows tree and clutching a human heart. The motif so obsessed him that he even worked it into a Christmas ornament of a masked dancer meant to be hung from a tree.

Medusa as Trap. Like most 19th century Romantics, he was fascinated by the image of Medusa, the mythical woman whose hair is snakes and whose face turns people to stone. When he saw a painting of Medusa in Florence he called it "the head of a Madonna created by purgatory." He made a paper-cutout version of the Medusa's head, and pasted it onto a page in conjunction with a printed view of the Castel Sant' Angelo in Rome.

Two dancers perform in the head's ugly proscenium of a mouth, a hint that Andersen felt that femininity itself was a trap. In one collage that he made for Agnete Lind, the child of Louise Lind, one of his early unrequited loves, a snake shares the page with one of Andersen's own book covers, a sketch of an audience and a blue cutout doily. It is the serpent in Eden. "This," Andersen scribbled under it, "is the snake of knowledge, representing both good and evil." The dilemma of coming to grips with any work of art became the subject of another image, "Art and the Critic"--a fop peers through a lorgnette at a mocking head faceted with many small variants of the same face that peer from within--all invented, it seems, by the writer at work in his cell in the creature's neck. The critic can see the face, not what lies behind it.

In technique, these images suggest such modern masters of collage as Kurt Schwitters or Max Ernst. But their "modernity" has as much to do with their obsessiveness as their means. Collage was not unknown in the mid-19th century--it was often used for greeting cards, decorative screens and the like--and Andersen was clearly one of the first men to use it as a possible language of art.

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