Above: Full view of pen & ink drawing

Above: The artist’s signature

Above: Title in German “Electrodämonen” Electric Demons

A technically dazzling pen & ink drawing by Heinrich Kley titled “Electrodämonen,” translated to “Electric Demons.” A brooding and troubling satire on the machine age and ongoing industrialization. This captures Kley’s technical brilliance and foreshadows the later science fiction pulp drawings of Virgil Finlay.

Heinrich Kley is best remembered today for satirical, despairing, and often obscene images which evinced a maniacal distrust of the industrial revolution and its automatized society. In 1907, a series of remarkable pen & ink drawings appeared in the Munich German Expressionist literary art magazine Die Jugend that captured the growing disillusionment of fin-de-siecle German counter-culture. Kley’s scathing and deftly rendered creations resonated with audiences and Kley became a leading interpreter of the follies and vices that beset mankind. Kley’s art appeared in the United States in 1937 and caught the eye of Walt Disney & Sketch Artists at the Disney studio, including Albert Hurter, Joe Grant, and James Bodrero. Hurter introduced Kley’s work to the Disney Studio and Walt Disney accumulated a collection of the artist’s work. The images in Kley’s art inspired a number of animated sequences and characters, including Night on Bald Mountain and the dancing animals of Dance of the Hours in Fantasia.

In 1947 the “Drawings of Heinrich Kley” was published with a forward by George Grosz. Of Kley, Grosz wrote: “Kley used the pen like the lariat of a temperamental cowboy [and] is a great draftsman of animals. Like Walt Disney he humanizes the beasts […] I am sure that the drawings of Heinrich Kley will be remembered and enjoyed as long as human beings retain the ability to laugh at themselves.”

Here is this work as it appears in this edition.

Above: The work in the 1947 Book The Drawings of Heinrich Kley

Above: Verso notations

Above: Framed view in beautiful quality gallery frame

Above: Detail