Ord og billede: I H. C. Andersens kunst

The present monograph is a study of the relationship between Hans Christian Andersen’s visual art and his literary art. While Andersen’s literary art is well known, the same can scarcely be said of his visual art. Nor has it commanded any great interest among scholars, even though his activity as a visual artist is considerable and runs parallel with his entire life as a writer from 1822-74. The lack of scholastic interest in Andersen’s visual art seems surprising, precisely because practically everything that he dealt with in artistic fashion has paper as its material: he wrote on it, drew on it, cut it and joined it together.

A basic assertion that underlies this study is that his visual and written art share common features and that these connections can contribute to an increased understanding of and deeper insight into Andersen’s entire artistic nature. For that reason, this study examines how the visual relates to the written – in short, how the two different art forms – literary art and visual art – relate to each other.
The main research issue is thus: What points of convergence exist between Andersen’s literary and visual art?

Methodological and theoretical approach
In order to answer this question it has been necessary to gain an overview of the total empirical visual-art material. Such a survey has not previously been carried out and I have therefore listed all Hans Christian Andersen’s visual art existing in public ownership in the appendices to the monograph (App. 1, 3, 4 and 6). Thereby a better grasp can be gained of the qualitative and quantitative distribution of the visual-art material. The total empirical visual material has then been categorised into three typical groups: papercuts, drawings and collages. The various characteristics, their chronological occurrence and the stylistic sequence of development within each genre have subsequently been investigated. Finally, the three visual-art genres have been related to Andersen’s literary art.

Visual art and literary art are art forms that are difficult to compare with each other. For that reason, I have related my comparative work to Irina Rajewsky’s theory of intermediality, where she divides the concept into three modes of perception: medial transposition, media combination and intermedial reference.
By medial transposition Rajewsky understands a transposition of the substance of a medium to another medium. Medial transposition is an important feature of Andersen’s papercuts. The papercuts are closely connected to language since they are visualised words or figure of speech. The understanding of Andersen’s papercuts is the result of a transposition of image to word. This form of intermedial quality also occurs in a number of the drawings that Andersen made in the early 1830s to entertain a young boy (Otto Zinck).

Andersen’s travel drawings belong to the category intermedial reference. The travel drawings are a form of literary sketch and express what Andersen found difficult to immediately find words for and describe in a literary form. The intermedial reference occurs in the travel drawings via the ekphrasis they are subsequently subjected to. Andersen’s drawings for the boy Otto Zinck and a number of the collages in the picture books also contain various intermedial references, where Andersen refers to other media via graphical elements or superscriptions.

We also finally find media combination in Andersen’s collages – most clearly in the picture books he made for small children in families he was closely attached to. Here image and word are combined by fragmentary elements which when juxtaposed constitute a new medial product.

An understanding of Andersen’s visual art depends to a great extent on its intermedial qualities. Thereby one can note general structures and patterns in the visual art that also characterise his literary art. I relate the intermedial quality of Andersen’s art to early German Romanticism, by which I believe that Andersen was strongly influenced in his overall artistic idiom. The insistence on intermediality and synaesthesia had its great breakthrough in terms of culture and the history of ideas at the end of the 18th century, with its epicentre in Jena and the circle around the Schlegel brothers. As a literary movement it marked a reaction against the epistemology of Kant and Fichte and an attempt to unite various branches of literature with philosophy, science and art into a universal poetry.

In this study I deal with Andersen’s visual art in the three central main sections: Andersen’s papercutting; Andersen’s drawing and Andersen’s artistic collages.

The papercuts occur chronologically throughout Andersen’s entire life as a writer and are fairly uniform in design through the whole period. The prevalent trait of the papercuts is a mirroring of motifs that is predominantly across one symmetry axis. Where the motif combination expresses a relation of meaning between the motifs, this mirroring gives rise to a mysterious ambiguity and ambivalence. This ambiguous nature is also a governing principle in Andersen’s literary art. The mirroring principle and ambiguity are extensive, ranging right from the semantic level to the material-aesthetical. Andersen, for example, allowed ambiguity in his fairytales to apply to and intrigue people of all ages – something which shortly before his death he referred to as the humour that was ‘the salt’ in them. Within the group of papercuts one can additionally see a developmental tendency from the simple papercut to complex, large arabesques, which were done in the last decade of Andersen’s life. The outer frame of the large arabesques was formed out of theatrical masks or a theatre stage, beneath which the many cohesive motifs order themselves into an ‘entire fairytale’. The arabesques and the playful riddles of the papercuts imply that Andersen’s papercuts relate to the binding-letter tradition that Andersen was familiar with from his childhood.

Stylistically and chronologically, Andersen’s drawings fall into three groups: the imaginative drawings done for the young Otto Zinck, travel drawings, and a small group of experimental drawings. The drawings for Otto Zinck are amusing flights of fantasy that bear witness to Andersen’s inner imaginative world. These drawings are the earliest and can be dated to c. 1831.
Andersen’s travel drawings are mainly done within a restricted period – during his Educative Journey (1833-34) and his Oriental Journey (1840-41). They express an attempt to train his eye and to capture an outer sense impression, and many of them therefore also appear via ekphrasis in the novel The Improvisatore and the travel book A Poet’s Bazaar, which were the literary output of the two journeys. This group of drawings is the largest, and most of them were executed in 1834. The youngest and smallest group of drawings are formal experiments, such as a series of ink-blot drawings from 1871. In the group of drawings, one can trace a line of development – starting from the inner world of ideas, then turning the gaze outwards towards the exterior world and finally ending up in pure abstraction and more material-aesthetical work with pen and paper. The most notable of Andersen’s drawings are the travel drawings from 1834, which constitute the largest group by far. What is so remarkable is that these many drawings came into being at a time of personal crisis that made it impossible for him to carry out any literary work.

Andersen’s collages seriously get underway from 1850 onwards and continue until 1874. They can be divided into three groups: the independent collages (Christmas tree dolls, decorated bookmarks and rulers), picture books and finally Andersen’s large folding screen. His collages are more complex and harder to understand than his papercuts and drawings, for in the collage these genres of art are combined and the bound motifs of the papercuts are also liberated, so that they can be combined with greater freedom or placed on top of each other. This enabled Andersen to define more precisely the message the collages contain – as in emblematics. The most comprehensive collages are to be found in the picture books, of which there are 16, made for children in the Collin and Ørsted families as well as for the Melchior/Henriques family’s child circle – i.e. the families closest to Andersen personally. In the monograph I focus on the picture books Andersen has done himself and not in collaboration with others. The picture books provide insight into the material-aesthetics that typifies Andersen’s art: his organisation of the picture books, the composition of the individual collages and their interrelation as well as the compilation technique from which the collage work derives. Precisely the compilation technique, of which the collage work is a visual expression, is also a literary characteristic of Andersen’s art. Andersen’s notebooks, which are to be found at The Royal Library, date from the same period (1850-74) and they contain a host of stray thoughts, formulations and ideas which Andersen made use of in various ways in his literary works. The use of the notes and the picture books clearly show what a flair Andersen for putting together ideas and fragments of images to form an artistic whole. The final piece of collage work we have from Andersen’s hand is his large folding screen. This large découpage work also marked the conclusion of Andersen’s life as a writer. By this time, Andersen was so weakened by his illness that he was unable to find enough strength to do any literary work. It is interesting that Andersen in this enfeebled state – as in 1834 – was able to work artistically in images and structures but not in words. This could possibly indicate that the image precedes or underlies Andersen’s work as a writer.

The concluding section of the monograph sums up the observations of the three main sections dealing with Andersen’s visual art and suggest a possible way of viewing Andersen’s literary art as a system, i.e. a structure of elements that relate to each other like a string of pearls. As a writer, Andersen liked to construct his works – his fairytales, for example – out of a number of small images. This veneration for small images, relations and structures can be traced all the way back to Andersen’s very first attempts at poetry in 1816.