You and I, Giotto

Kaja Meyer at Copenhagen Comics 2015.

Remember this budding artist in her own right,  Kaja Meyer looking at the posters created by contemporary cartoonists highlighting, what made their predecessors great?

It is high time for this blog to show the poster to the left of her, seeing even more posters are underway; all of them about to be turned into a book, which will make any coffee table worth its name sigh and collapse of joy.

Helle Scheffmann: Adolf Hallman, 2015.

 

Helle Scheffmann, detail from Adolf Hallman, 2015.

Helle Scheffmann creates landscapes worthy of the High Renaissance in which men and architecture alike emerge and are dissolved among one another. Her line is angled and edged, exposing, what has not been seen and cutting open, what refuses to see itself exposed.

She is a worthy heir of Adolf Hallman (1893-1968), who distillated cartooning to the simplest line. He would bare the paper beyond that sharp curve and it would contain the world.

To this end he turned to Early Renaissance artists such as Giotto for inspiration for the simplicity in his way of rendering figures and color planes.

Helle Scheffmann, detail from Adolf Hallman, 2015.

Giotto and Hallmann are equals on the picture plane and Helle is pointing to the important fact so often forgotten, when defining cartoon art that Giotto too had a boss breathing down his neck.

Enrico degli Scrovegni was paying his artist to create a chapel glorifying him for eternity in his name, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (ca. 1305). Hallman's editor at the daily Politiken is flanked by his renowned corner office, which overlooks - and is seen from - the Copenhagen Town Hall Square.

This way and for once, the editor got his portrait too, which is rather apt on this blog, since it was he, who engaged Valdemar Andersen in 1908: Henrik Cavling.

Helle Scheffmann, detail from Adolf Hallman, 2015.

The cartoon poster shown is courtesy of Helle Scheffmann and must not be reproduced without her permission.