Tag: grimm’s fairy tales

Calendar: December 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of December

No Stretch of tlhe Imagination

On December 20, 1812, “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is published.

Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, both poets and novelists, were good friends of the Grimm brothers and wanted to publish folk tales. So they asked the brothers to collect oral tales for publication. The Grimm’s collected many old books and asked friends and acquaintances in Kassel to tell tales and to gather stories from others. Jacob and Wilhelm sought to collect these stories in order to write a history of old German Poesie and to preserve history.

The first volume of the first edition was published in 1812, containing 86 stories; the second volume of 70 stories followed in 1815. For the second edition, two volumes were issued in 1819 and a third in 1822, totaling 170 tales. The third edition appeared in 1837; fourth edition, 1840; fifth edition, 1843; sixth edition, 1850; seventh edition, 1857. Stories were added, and also subtracted, from one edition to the next, until the seventh held 211 tales. All editions were extensively illustrated, first by Philipp Grot Johann and, after his death in 1892, by German illustrator Robert Leinweber.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of folktales contains some of the best-known children’s characters in literary history, from Snow White and Rapunzel to Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. Yet the brothers originally filled their book, which became known as “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” with gruesome scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in an R-rated movie. The Grimm brothers never even set out to entertain kids. The first edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” was scholarly in tone, with many footnotes and no illustrations. Only later, as children became their main audience, did they take out some of the more adult content.

Natalie Frank

Natalie Frank, Illustrations for Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Natalie Frank is an American artist currently living and working in New York City.  Her work deals with themes of power, sexuality, gender, feminism, and identity. Although Frank is best known as a painter, she has also explored other mediums including sculpture and drawing. Her most famous works are a series of drawings of the original, unsanitized “Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales”.

Frank’s work is marked by disturbing, explicit, and grotesque subject matter that revolves around themes including women, sexuality, gender, violence, and humanity. She often blurs the line between reality and fantasy, and the artist notes that she wants her work to be located on the edge of ‘Magical Realism’ and the real world. With oil on canvas and mixed media making up the bulk of her work, Frank is praised for her classical techniques that illicit references to the artist Francis Bacon.

In 2011, artist Paulo Rego suggested that Frank read the original, unsanitized versions of the “Brother Grimm Fairy Tales”, noting that the series embodied many of the themes present in Frank’s work. Frank was intrigued, and spent the next three years creating 75 gouache and chalk pastel drawings of 36 of the original stories, including well known tales including ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Cinderella’, as well as lesser known ones lie ‘The Lettuce Donkey’. The series marks the first time Frank drew inspiration from literature and is one of the only complex, systematic examination of the original tales by a contemporary artist.

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