Word: andersen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...close friend, Rikard Nordraak (Frank Poretta), "I was beginning to lose any hope, Nordraak, of ever being important." The plot follows Grieg's agonized crawl to fame, illustrated principally by a lot of fancy name-dropping. "I've written 15 songs for the poems of Hans Christian Andersen," he shyly admits. Cries Nordraak, eagerly: "Has Hans heard these?" Later, Grieg's wife Nina (Florence Henderson) sighs: "How do you suppose the others managed?" Replies a piano salesman played by Edward G. Robinson: "You mean Schubert and Liszt, for example?" When Grieg enters the Scandinavian Club in Rome...
Many of these fragile jeux d'esprit were done when, while staying at friends' homes, he amused their offspring with stories and images. As with Lewis Carroll, so with Andersen: children released him. He saw what the social assumptions of Victorian culture veiled from most of his fellow adults: that children, far from being the apple-cheeked, docile innocents their parents thought them, were monsters of imagination, able to look at other monsters with candid relish. (The tales collected by the brothers Grimm-not to mention some of Andersen's own-are packed with sadism and nightmare...
This undoubtedly liberated Andersen's fantasy. His own head was stuffed with elves, hobgoblins, demons and freaks; he half-jokingly (but only half) presented himself as a monster with "a nose as big as a cannon and eyes as small as green peas"; one of his favorite images, which probably grew out of his regular disappointments in love and his otherwise suppressed resentment of women who had hurt him, was the "heart thief," depicted hanging from a gallows tree and clutching a human heart. The motif so obsessed him that he even worked it into a Christmas ornament...
...dancers perform in the head's ugly proscenium of a mouth, a hint that Andersen felt that femininity itself was a trap. In one collage that he made for Agnete Lind, the child of Louise Lind, one of his early unrequited loves, a snake shares the page with one of Andersen's own book covers, a sketch of an audience and a blue cutout doily. It is the serpent in Eden. "This," Andersen scribbled under it, "is the snake of knowledge, representing both good and evil." The dilemma of coming to grips with any work of art became...
...images suggest such modern masters of collage as Kurt Schwitters or Max Ernst. But their "modernity" has as much to do with their obsessiveness as their means. Collage was not unknown in the mid-19th century-it was often used for greeting cards, decorative screens and the like-and Andersen was clearly one of the first men to use it as a possible language...