DOI Heft:
No. 248 (November 1913)
DOI Artikel:Dixon, Marion Hepworth: The drawings of Kay Nielsen
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21208#0142
Kay Nielsen s Drawings
The angels they call it the joys of Heaven,
The devils they call it Hell's torment even,
And mortals they call it loving !
The scene depicts a pair of lovers em-
bracing with all ardent protests of con-
stancy, while a leering devil squirms and
an angel prays in a very fervour of pious
ecstasy. No angel, alas ! attends the
lovers of another famous poem by
Heine :
There was an aged monarch,
His heart was sad, his head was grey.
This sad and aged monarch
A young wife wed one day.
There was a handsome page, too,
Fair was his hair, and light his mien.
The silken train he carried
Was the train of the self-same queen.
Dost know the ancient ballad ?
It sounds so sweet, it sounds so sad.
They both of them must perish,
For too much love they had.
KAY-
“ SOLITUDE :
BY KAY NIELSEN
of the principal features' of the exhibition. They
were certainly not the least arresting and poignant
of the drawings. The theme, no doubt, as well as
the sincerity of the artist’s mood, largely accounted
for their popularity. Pierrot loves a young and
lovely maiden, as every Pierrot should, but a sharp
foreboding—some imminent presage of disaster—
is ever present to the lovers. The first drawing,
entitled Omen, the third, Inevitable, the fourth, Left,
and the fifth, called The Chasm, perhaps sufficiently
explain the story. For our light o’ love is separated
from his nmamorata by death, and in his despair
seeks destruction in the deep dark tomb of the
beloved. The Chasm, in fact, shows the desperate
lover flinging roses into the sepulchre as he prepares
to take the fatal plunge into the darkness below.
Intermezzo follows, and in The Vision and Yearning
we see Pierrot struggling to regain the
beloved one—not now in her mere
bodily beauty and effulgent youth, but
in the finer essence of the spirit. Of
Solitude we have already spoken. The
End, the last of the series, is inevitable.
No less an interpreter of the incom
parable genius of Heinrich Heine, Mr.
Kay Nielsen has at moments the same
light-hearted cynical smile, the same
sense of the inevitable, the same fan-
tastic environment. For if he has the
master poet’s sense of tears he has also
something of his irony.
Take the drawing illustrating the
verse :
Needless to say, Mr. Kay Nielsen’s version of the
“ancient ballad ” is vivid and picturesque. Yet in
his interpretation the young Dane and the stricken
poet—the poet of the mattress grave—are altogether
at one. A third drawing, seen at the Dowdeswell
Galleries in 1912, has something of the same theme
for a subject. It is spoilt by having rather too
obvious a moral tacked on to it. In a wholly
decorative setting the two lovers meet in the
flowering fields, but even as we perceive their
rapturous transports, we are made to shudder at the
grim and grinning skull which lies partly concealed
at their feet among the herbage. Has Kay Nielsen
an affinity with Rops, the Belgian etcher and
draughtsman, as is alleged by no less an authority
than Sir Claude Phillips? Probably in some of
his moods. Not that the young Dane is entirely
120
The angels they call it the joys of Heaven,
The devils they call it Hell's torment even,
And mortals they call it loving !
The scene depicts a pair of lovers em-
bracing with all ardent protests of con-
stancy, while a leering devil squirms and
an angel prays in a very fervour of pious
ecstasy. No angel, alas ! attends the
lovers of another famous poem by
Heine :
There was an aged monarch,
His heart was sad, his head was grey.
This sad and aged monarch
A young wife wed one day.
There was a handsome page, too,
Fair was his hair, and light his mien.
The silken train he carried
Was the train of the self-same queen.
Dost know the ancient ballad ?
It sounds so sweet, it sounds so sad.
They both of them must perish,
For too much love they had.
KAY-
“ SOLITUDE :
BY KAY NIELSEN
of the principal features' of the exhibition. They
were certainly not the least arresting and poignant
of the drawings. The theme, no doubt, as well as
the sincerity of the artist’s mood, largely accounted
for their popularity. Pierrot loves a young and
lovely maiden, as every Pierrot should, but a sharp
foreboding—some imminent presage of disaster—
is ever present to the lovers. The first drawing,
entitled Omen, the third, Inevitable, the fourth, Left,
and the fifth, called The Chasm, perhaps sufficiently
explain the story. For our light o’ love is separated
from his nmamorata by death, and in his despair
seeks destruction in the deep dark tomb of the
beloved. The Chasm, in fact, shows the desperate
lover flinging roses into the sepulchre as he prepares
to take the fatal plunge into the darkness below.
Intermezzo follows, and in The Vision and Yearning
we see Pierrot struggling to regain the
beloved one—not now in her mere
bodily beauty and effulgent youth, but
in the finer essence of the spirit. Of
Solitude we have already spoken. The
End, the last of the series, is inevitable.
No less an interpreter of the incom
parable genius of Heinrich Heine, Mr.
Kay Nielsen has at moments the same
light-hearted cynical smile, the same
sense of the inevitable, the same fan-
tastic environment. For if he has the
master poet’s sense of tears he has also
something of his irony.
Take the drawing illustrating the
verse :
Needless to say, Mr. Kay Nielsen’s version of the
“ancient ballad ” is vivid and picturesque. Yet in
his interpretation the young Dane and the stricken
poet—the poet of the mattress grave—are altogether
at one. A third drawing, seen at the Dowdeswell
Galleries in 1912, has something of the same theme
for a subject. It is spoilt by having rather too
obvious a moral tacked on to it. In a wholly
decorative setting the two lovers meet in the
flowering fields, but even as we perceive their
rapturous transports, we are made to shudder at the
grim and grinning skull which lies partly concealed
at their feet among the herbage. Has Kay Nielsen
an affinity with Rops, the Belgian etcher and
draughtsman, as is alleged by no less an authority
than Sir Claude Phillips? Probably in some of
his moods. Not that the young Dane is entirely
120