The Daily Valdemar No. 24: April 5

Valdemar Andersen, cartoon for a poster for a concert of newly written songs, 1907.

Shown with permission from Designmuseum Danmark.

I apologize for the poor quality of the photo. It was taken by me for study purposes.

Today's moment of calm visualizes the vibrato of the singing using two vibrant, complementary colors.

In 1907 the predecessor of what is today named The Danish Union of Journalists organized an evening of newly written songs by a number of poets and the audience were to guess who wrote what. The grand prize was the piano on the stage accompanying them all. Two factors dampened the enthusiasm on the evening, however. For one it was all too easy to recognize the creator behind each piece and to this was added that the winner was not drawn till days later when so much else had happened in life and the draw was largely forgotten.

The poster stood the test of time, when the evening did not. Before us is a cartoon in its original sense of being the final sketch from which the poster advertising the evening was made. It is composed from a blue/orange-complementary setting off the scene of which her dress is seen from below as the audience would have seen her onstage. Her curls and ruffling of the fabric form the vibrato of her voice and obscures the pianist, leaving only the hands on the keyboard to be seen.

This is the piano that was at stake. Valdemar was a cartoonist of the impossible kind, we usually never see. His editors would ask him to include this, this, this, and oh, this too into one work. The kind of insistence that is the reason why editors and the rest of us for that matter makes horribly hoarded drawings with no clear intention to them. Most cartoonists chuck out the brief altogether to do their own thing; imagery the rest of us would never have thought of. Valdemar on the other hand often played with all of the elements to create a unity of them. He likely used this cartoon from a few years before as his base. When we look at the present one, we have the piano, the singer and her sheet of music carries the name of the organizer.

In fact we have the totality of the evening condensed onto one picture plane with no need for the actual one.