The Arabian Nights of Kay Nielsen

The Arabian Nights: "Scheherazade and the Sultan"
by Kay Nielsen, 1918-1922

Danish painter Kay Rasmus Nielsen (1886–1957) is best known for his illustrations of tales from the European fairy tale cannon (particularly East of the Sun, West of the Moon) -- yet his fascination with the Orient began in early childhood with the prints and books his grandfather brought home from travels in the far East. The influence of Japanese, Chinese, and Persian art is clearly evident in Nielsen's spare watercolor style -- an influence that became even more pronounced in the artist's later work.

     The Arabian Nights paintings on this page were executed during the years 1918–1922, when Nielsen was living in Copenhagen and was involved with set and costume designs for a stage production of Aladdin. Somewhat different in tone from his fairy tale illustrations, these gouache paintings are thoroughly adult and even more highly stylized, reflecting the influence of Persian miniatures in their imagery and their small size. (Each one is just thirteen inches square.)

     Nielsen created twenty Arabian Nights paintings altogether, intended to illustrate an edition of the text translated from the Arabic by Arthur Christensen -- but publication was canceled due to the high costs of printing in Denmark after the first World War, while plans for French, English, and American editions fell through due to translation problems. Sadly, the pictures remained unpublished until twenty years after the artist's death. Although one of the paintings had been lost, the other nineteen were finally collected in an American "Peacock Press" edition titled The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen, edited by David Larkin, in 1977. This paperback volume is now out of print, but we recommend seeking out a copy through secondhand bookshops or book search services. In addition to the fine reproductions of these jewel-like, little known pictures by Nielsen, the book contains a beautifully written reminiscence of the artist and his wife by their close friend Hildegarde Flanner Monhoff, which is worth the price of the volume alone. It was through the hard work and devotion of Hildegarde and Frederick Monhoff that nineteen Arabian Nights paintings were preserved intact and published at all, for which all fans of Kay Nielsen and fine illustration should be eternally grateful.

     As of this date, there is no biographical volume devoted to Kay Nielsen and his work in publication in America or England, such as exists for his fellow Golden Age illustrators Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. We can only hope time will correct this error. In the meantime, you can find reproductions of his work in A Treasury of Great Children's Book Illustrations by Susan E. Meyers and Myth, Magic, and Mystery: One Hundred Years of American Children's Books by Michael Patrick Hearn.

Kay Nielsen: A Brief Biography

by Terri Windling

The Arabian Nights: "The Tale of the Third Dervish" (detail)
by Kay Nielsen, 1918-1922
Click image to enlarge

The period in art history now referred to as the Golden Age of Book Illustration occurred in London at the end of the nineteenth century and in the dawning years of the twentieth century -- growing out of the reassessment of Book Arts fostered by the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts-&-Crafts movement, and aided by advances in printing techniques that made the publication of sumptuously illustrated volumes suddenly economically feasible. As a result, a number of the greatest book illustrators the world has ever known were clustered in London during those years: Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Charles and William Heath Robinson, Charles Ricketts, Lawrence Housman, Henry Ford, Jean de Bosschère, and many others -- including a young Dane named Kay (pronounced "Kigh") Nielsen, who turned up in the city in 1911 at the tender age of twenty-five with a series of black-and-white drawings inspired by Beardsley under his arm.

Kay had been born into an illustrious theater family in Copenhagen in 1886, growing up with the trappings of wealth and fame and a strong interest in the arts. (His father was the director of the Royal Danish Theater, his mother was a much-revered actress, and visitors to the Nielsen household included Ibsen and Grieg.) At eighteen, Kay left Copenhagen for Paris to study art in Montparnasse. It was there that he, like so many art students, discovered Aubrey Beardsley's work, with its fine use of line and ornamentation and its aura of dark romance. Beardsley's drawings made a considerable impression on him, containing as it did two of the things he loved

The Arabian Nights: "The The Tale of the First Dervish #1" by Kay Nielsen, 1918-1922

The Arabian Nights: "The Tale of the First Dervish #1"
by Kay Nielsen, 1918-1922
Click image to enlarge

best: imagery from myth and folklore, and the strong influence of Japanese art. Under Beardsley's spell, Nielsen produced a series of morbidly romantic black-and-white drawings titled The Book of Death, portraying the tragic love of Pierrot for a languid young dying maiden. Moving from Paris to Beardsley's homeland, Kay mounted a major London gallery exhibition of the series in 1911. Mixed in with these darker drawings were designs for watercolors based on classic fairy tales -- the art for which the young painter would henceforth be best known.

On the strength of this work, Kay soon received his first English book commission: In Powder and Crinoline, a volume of fairy tales retold by Arthur Quiller-Couch. The book appeared in 1913, instantly garnering wide acclaim. A year later, when he was just twenty-eight, Kay published the work that would be his most famous: East of the Sun, West of the Moon: Old Tales from the Norse. With these two volumes, Kay Nielsen came out from under Aubrey Beardsley's long shadow into a style that was all his own -- one that incorporated the influence of Romantic Art, Art Nouveau, Japanese woodcuts, and Chinese prints, yet gave them a chilly Nordic elegance and a modernist look. The original paintings from these two volumes were exhibited in London in 1915 (book artists depended on the sales from such shows, for they earned very little from the published works), and then formed the core of a Nielsen exhibition in New York two years later.

The Arabian Nights: "The Tale of the Enchanted King
of the Black Islands"
by Kay Nielsen, 1918-1922
Click image to enlarge

In 1917, Kay traveled from New York back to Copenhagen and became, during the post-war years, deeply involved with the theater again. Collaborating with his close friend Johannes Poulson (now known as a pioneer of Danish cinema, but then a young stage actor and producer), he designed elaborate sets and costumes for Adam Oehlenschlaeger's Aladdin at the Danish State Theater, as well as for a lavish production of Scaramouche, with music by Sibelius. It was during these years, between1918 and 1922, that the artist also created his sensual illustrations for The Arabian Nights, incorporating a melange of influences from Eastern art to the Italian Renaissance. Publication plans for the series fell through, but the paintings were shown in a London exhibition in 1924, along with new illustrations for a volume of Hans Christian Andersen tales.

Kay married his beloved, charismatic wife Ulla Pless-Schmidt in 1926, and the two of them lived in grand style for the next decade in Copenhagen -- where Kay, due to his popular books and innovative theater work, was now a celebrity just as his mother and father had been. In 1936, the theater work led to a prominent job in Hollywood, creating designs for Max Reinhardt's Everyman at the Hollywood Bowl. When this job was done, Kay stayed on in California at the request of Walt Disney to design the "Bald Mountain" sequence of the animated film Fantasia. When war broke out in Europe again, Ulla joined Kay in Hollywood and the couple settled in, with their two Scotty dogs, to a new life in America. At first, it was a life as luxurious as the one they'd left behind -- but gradually, Kay's working relationship with Disney Studios deteriorated. And when he turned to his own art again, he found, to his astonishment and despair, it had fallen quite out of fashion.

The Arabian Nights: "The Tale of the Second Dervish"
by Kay Nielsen, 1918-1922
Click image to enlarge

Then began a long stretch of years where jobs were few and far between, and Kay's once highly sought after paintings became impossible to sell. "His disadvantage," writes Hildegarde Flanner, a friend and neighbor in southern California, "lay in the narrowness of his range in a day that was suspicious of fantasy -- unless neurotic or Joycean -- that 'the Golden Age of Illustration' in which his name had been notable along with those of Morris, Beardsley, Boecklin, Pyle, Rackham, Dulac, and their brotherhood had closed, and however vital his skill in decoration, he had no ease in self-promotion. In other times his talent and reputation might have carried him without anxiety for the rest of his life, yet already in the forties of the century and his own middle-fifties his successes, both European and American, were all in the past and apparently behind him, and he was living obscurely in a mortgaged cottage in the foothill suburbs, with no prospects ahead. Apprehension about money became chronic, and also there was the crucial matter of ill health. In spite of his tall appearance of well-being, Kay was not strong and Ulla, since no one dares be sick without plenty of cash, did not mention the fact that she was threatened with diabetes."

Ulla and Kay tightened their belts, moved into the modest cottage near Flanner, and set about living with as much gentle grace and style as they could muster on a small and dwindling income. It was then that Flanner first met the couple -- astonished to find that her neighbor was the very artist whose books she had most treasured in her childhood. "As I came to know him," she writes, "he appeared to be the model of his

The Arabian Nights: "The Physician's Tale of a Young Man
Loved By Two Sisters"
by Kay Nielsen, 1918-1922
Click image to enlarge

tall heroes, and like them seemed puritanic, as much monk as painter, never quite coming out of the hieratic forest…. Asked today what they recall most about him people invariably answer, 'He never said an unkind word about anyone.'" Despite their financial worries, the Nielsen house was a warm and lively place, filled with friends, art, conversation, and the charmingly exotic Danish customs with which they kept their homeland close. It was also filled with baby chicks, for the couple attempted to breed and raise Cornish game hens to supplement their income -- but after a while this business failed too. And still Kay's art didn't sell.

In 1941, good fortune came in the form of Jasmine Britton, supervising librarian for the Los Angeles school system. Distressed to find an artist of Nielsen's caliber living in genteel poverty, she pulled some strings and located funds with which to hire him to create a full-scale mural for the library of the Los Angeles Central Junior High School. It was a vast undertaking, a painting on which the artist spent three long years of hard work. When the mural was finally completed, it was ceremoniously unveiled to enormous acclaim; Arthur Miller called it "one of the most beautiful wall paintings in America" in the L.A. Times. One year later, the school building was taken over by the Los Angeles Board of Education for a new administrative headquarters, and the mural was stripped from the wall as the room was converted to offices. Enraged, Jasmine Britton threatened the School Board with a well-publicized public scandal. They agreed to transfer the mural, and a new home was found for it at Sutter Junior High School in the San

The Arabian Nights: "The Tale of the First Dervish #2"
by Kay Nielsen, 1918-1922
Click image to enlarge

Fernando Valley -- but the enormous painting had been badly damaged in the course of its careless removal and storage. A further two years of work was required to restore the art in its new setting -- a blow from which Kay's health, fragile at that time, never fully recovered. When the restorations were complete, he went on to a new commission -- a splendid altar painting for the Wong Chapel in the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. After this, however, it was six long years before he received another commission.

In the late 1940s, lacking all prospect of work, the Nielsens returned to Denmark, though life there was to be quite different from what they had known before. Where Kay had once been a celebrity, followed everywhere by the media, now he was aging, his work was obscure, and their country house, though charming, was also rustic and bitterly cold. Kay spent dark winter days wrapped in blankets, attempting to paint, as his health grew worse. By the 1950s, the Nielsens were back in the cottage in California once more -- where good fortune appeared once again in the form of another Britton sister, Helen Britton Holland, who arranged for Kay to receive a mural commission from Whitman College. It was the last major painting he would ever complete -- for over the next several years his cough worsened, his frame grew thinner and thinner, and in 1957 he died quietly at home at the age of sixty-nine. Ulla made no pretense of wanting to go on with life now that her Kay was gone, and she died just thirteen months later of complications from diabetes. Neither knew that a revival of Kay's life work was soon about to begin.

The Arabian Nights: "The Merchant's Tale of the Young Thief"
by Kay Nielsen, 1918-1922
Click image to enlarge

     In the 1960s and 1970s, Kay's fairy tale paintings were rediscovered as part of a general cultural reappraisal of Victorian fairy art, Pre-Raphaelite art, and Golden Age book illustration. In the latter group, Nielsen's art was ranked once again alongside Rackham's and Dulac's as the finest of the age. In America and England, Kay's pictures appeared on notecards, posters, and calendars, and facsimile editions of his various fairy tale volumes soon followed after. In the 1970s, Peacock Press, under the visionary direction of Ian and Betty Ballantine (who were instrumental in popularizing Tolkien's books in America) presented a series of trade paperback volumes honoring the works of Golden Age illustrators. Kay Nielsen, edited by David Larkin, was published in 1975, followed up by The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (featuring the Arabian Nights paintings) in 1977. Since then, Kay's work has become beloved by fans of fairy tale fiction and illustration all around the world, and a new generation of mythic artists are now as inspired by the art of Kay Nielsen as he was once inspired by Beardsley.

     "Though naturally conversant with the historic advances of painting in the twentieth century," writes Hildegarde Flanner, "he remained aloof from the times in his work. Excelling in the lyrical and poetical was the ideal that absorbed him and he made no effort to modernize the subject-matter that had governed his style." Today, we can only be grateful for the artist's devotion to "the lyrical and poetical." He maintained his own unique vision to the end, leaving his wondrous pictures as gifts to the future. I hope somewhere that his spirit, and Ulla's, knows just how much we treasure them now.

     To see Kay Nielsen's enchanting fairy tale art, please visit the SurLaLune Fairy Tale Illustrators site edited by Heidi Anne Heiner.

Copyright © 2001 by Terri Windling.

Copyright © by The Endicott Studio.
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