The Skinny -- Rie Cramer

Rie Cramer

Marie Cramer, better known as Rie, was an illustrator of her times.  Her images perfectly capture the essence of the 1920s and 30s, from her color choices to her linework and detail to her subject matter and point of view.  Her work features flowing Art Nouveau figures, with bright, saturated color, and lots of personality.  We Blackbird girls love illustrators, and her work makes us so, so happy.

The youngest in a family of four girls, Rie Cramer was born and raised in the Dutch East Indies, more specifically in Java, Indonesia, in 1887.  Her father, Henry Cramer, was often absent, as he was with the "packet service", traveling on ships with cargo.  Her mother, Elisabeth Frederika Schenck, took Rie and her sisters back to The Netherlands when she was 9 years old, and she attended an art academy in The Hague, the third largest city in the country, from 1905 to 1907.

At 17, she left a folder of her work -- drawings and rhymes -- with a publisher, W. de Haan, in Utrecht.  They loved it, and she got a contract in 1906 to do the book, Of Girls and Boys.  She did a sequel a year later.  

"In contrast to the then usual moralistic and educational children's books were these playful books about domestic life and the world of the child. The illustrations were not only informative, but appealed to the imagination and made the book much more accessible to children than the usual children's literature."*

Rie went on to illustrate books for other Dutch authors, like Nienke Hichtum and Anna Sutorius, as well as the classics, like Grimm's Fairy Tales and Alice in Wonderland.  She was heavily influenced by the art of other illustrators from around the world, like Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac.  She worked with a dark black outline, and then filled in with watercolors.

 

  
Rie was married two times, both ending in divorce, and she had a passionate, life-changing affair with married art critic Albert Plasschaert that ended in 1919.  She had no children.  But she lived for her art, going on to make dolls, ceramics, and even write plays and novels under a pseudonym.  She also wrote for a children's magazine, Sunshine, in the 1920s and 30s.

World War II was especially difficult for Rie.  In 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands.  Two of Rie's pre-war novels, She,We, and You and The Land of Promise were banned for their anti-Nazi message.  She worked against the Nazis, hiding refugees and writing poetry, called Verses of Resistance.  Through it all, though, she continued to illustrate children's books.  After the war, her fame spread to Britain and beyond, and she wrote a series of children's radio shows, of which 42 episodes aired in 1954 and 1955.

The Little Mermaid

Rie's later years were spent in Mallorca, living with friends.  According to her, it was the best time of her life. She wrote several books about Mallorca, and her love for cats.  She was crazy about her cats, and even posed with one of her cats for her passport photo.  In 1971, she moved back to the Netherlands.  Rie died at the age of 89 in 1977.  

Critics have said that Rie neglected part of society with her art, focusing too much on the whimsy and beauty, and not enough on the realness of the world during the time she worked.  However, her lighthearted, beautiful art speaks more to me because the fantasy she put into every illustration.  Rie captured the most important element of childhood in her work -- imagination and fun.

*http://www.fairyworx.net/Rie_Cramer.html

The Skinny: Ghastly Gorey

As Halloween approaches, we like to brush the dust off of some of our darker influences. This week, the focus is on Edward Gorey, an iconic twentieth century writer and illustrator of some wickedly dark tales.

Gorey cover art for A Clutch of Vampires

Although most people assumed that Gorey was English, and of the 19th century (due to his reputation for black and white Victorian-inspired art), he was actually born in Chicago in 1925. He studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago, spent a little time in the army in the 1940s, and then majored in French at Harvard. He moved to New York to work in the art department at Doubleday Anchor, and began writing and illustrating his own stories. His first book, The Unstrung Harp, came out in 1953.

This was the start of a prolific career that yielded over 100 titles before his death of a heart attack in 2000. Gorey also worked on theatre productions, most notably a 1977 Dracula set, and illustrated dozens of books for other authors. He was best known for his "ghoulish" side, but he also illustrated an edition of T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (the basis for a certain Broadway show about cats), as well as putting his spin on Brer Rabbit.



He often used pseudonyms, which were usually various combinations of the letters of his name. My favorite is Ogden Weary, of The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work. It manages to be both risque and vague at the same time:

Oh, Alice!

In the early 1980s, Gorey's aesthetic was made famous by Derek Lamb in the opening credits of Mystery!, making him a sort of Gothic-art superhero. The animation team spent weeks sorting through fifty or so of Gorey's works, trying to pour the essence of his work into a mere forty seconds. I think it worked:

Derek Lamb later said "His work seemed inspired by the worst of human nature and of the highest forms of art. This was the contradiction I believe Gorey presented in his work, and he did it over and over. As readers we become enticed with the sheer brilliance of his art....then to find he's delivering us a reminder of the darkest sides of ourselves; or in the words of Edmund Wilson, "It is poetry and poison." We are fascinated and repelled. " The Mystery!-induced fame catapulted Gorey into the pop culture world of the 1980s and 1990s. A Nine Inch Nails music video was based directly on his work, and Tim Burton has long proclaimed Edward Gorey as one of his major influences. In California, there are regular Edward Gorey-themed costume balls. His artwork is also wildly popular in the tattoo world.

Edward Gorey, "The Insect God"

 Gorey admitted to having an aversion to disturbing or graphic violence, so the majority of his illustrations capture the moment just before, or just after, a climactic event, leaving the in-between details to the imagination of the reader. In fact, several of his stories are nothing more than a series of captioned illustrations that, when viewed in the correct sequence, provide a bare-bones framework to a story that still manages to be wickedly witty. Perfect example? The Blue Aspic, a story about love, opera, and murder-suicide. Sound horrible? Just think about poor Jasper....

"Jasper wandered the streets, his warping records clutched to his chest."

Gorey also had a Seuss-like affinity for rhymes, alliteration, and the alphabet, which produced (among several variations on the ABCs), The Gashlycrumb Tinies. It is, oddly enough, my favorite Gorey title (other than The Curious Sofa), and it is basically a rhyming alphabet of dead children. I know--it's terrible. But it's funny, in a bizarre, macabre sort of way....

 *Information obtained from http://edwardgoreyhouse.org/on-view-e-info.html; http://www.awn.com/mag/issue5.04/5.04pages/lambgorey2.php3