In 1923 it had been just over a century since the first illustrated edition of Grimm's tales
was published, and in that year Danish illustrator Gustav Tenggren created a series of traditionally
styled images using pen and tonal watercolour washes.
Despite Tenggren's reliance on the mood and characterisation of Rackham's 1909 edition
it was a great popular success, and it was far from coincidental that he was later chosen
to make a significant contribution with his concept, character design and background art
for Disney's 1937 feature length animation of Snow White.
But it was fellow Dane Kay Nielsen's more radically modernist 1925 edition which was
easily the most distinctive in this period.
Nielsen had been busy creating similar illustrations for around 20 years, and had already been
influential on others such as Jennie Harbour, who drew part one to a close.
But his enormously atmospheric angular pen, ink and watercolour interpretation would rightly
be recognised as one of the most iconic and enduring.
Nielsen's elongated figures inhabited impossibly beautiful but unsettling landscapes which
dominated every formally composed image.
And it was only the series of monochromes he also produced which were more dominated
by the characters, drawn using a distinctive blend of folk art and art deco elements.
But it was by no means over for the more traditionally inclined.
Dutch illustrator Rie Cramer published an attractive edition in 1927, which continued
to explore the same general stylistic approach which had been established some 30 years earlier.
And in 1932 Monro Orr created a series of particularly attractive and amusing tonal
watercolour renders which although considerably more upbeat and brightly coloured nevertheless
owed a stylistic debt to Rackham.
The considerable popular success of these and other editions indicated the public were
not as enthusiastic about modernist styling as the more progressive publishers hoped.
But some such as Joyce Mercer were able to attract and please a large number of readers,
even though her approach to image construction was far from conventional.
Her 1934 edition was an angular and brightly coloured visualisation which featured calligraphic
line and colour applied generally flat, and although they were possessed of great visual
charm there was also an underlying sinister quality to the images which had been influenced
by what Nielsen had created a decade earlier.
Czech-born Wanda Gag published an American edition in 1936 which harnessed European folk
art principles with a series of charmingly naive monochromes using a less slavish approach
to anatomy than others.
Nevertheless she was able to create some highly atmospheric scenes and character studies.
In 1941 the world was at war for the second time so there were only a couple of new editions
published.
But in that year the staunchly traditionalist Dutch illustrator Anton Pieck totally ignored
the prevailing trend towards modernism and created his vision of the tales with some
highly rendered evocative watercolours. and he also produced a series of equally backward-looking
but still absorbing pen and ink monochromes.
And in 1944 Josef Scharl created a particularly personal interpretation which nevertheless
clearly referred back to the styling and grotesquerie of medieval woodcuts.
Following the end of the war British author and illustrator Mervyn Peake published one
of the more distinctive and personal interpretations in 1946 using a nervously hatched pen and
ink style with occasional overlays of transparent colour.
Like many of his contemporaries Peake regarded his work as an illustrator to be much more
than a visual translator of text.
His highly distinctive visualisations went beyond pure narrative and introduced pictorial
elements only suggested - and in some cases not even that - by the written word.
Although Nothing like as obtuse as Peake's visualisation Fritz Kredel's edition in the
same year featured attractive and imaginative vignetted pen and watercolour pages.
But it was arguably his expressively controlled calligraphic line spot illustrations which
were sed throughout the text which were more visually engaging and distinctive.
in 1954 Leonard Weisgard published a book featuring a radically styled linear series
which was very much against the grain of what more conventional commercial American contemporaries
were churning out with greater popular success at the time.
Czechoslovakian Janusz Grabianski took an equally expressive and unconventional approach
in1962, making great creative use of deceptively chaotic application of vibrant colour to create
particularly energetic images.
In 1973 Maurice Sendak created what is rightly considered to be one of the truly enduring
modern visualisations of the tales, although they don't look modern at all.
His illustrations were created and printed as monochrome, and they made significant use
of the carefully applied crosshatching associated with the victorian tradition.
In 1980 Italian illustrator Manuela Adreani created a series of stylised visually engrossing
watercolours which were an accomplished blend of tradition and modernity.
Many were created as double page spreads which incorporated the text with great sensitivity.
Her figure work for human and animal characters was far from representational, but this was
entirely to the benefit of the distinctive quality of the images.
Pauline Ellison's edition of 1981 demonstrated a remarkably eye for drtail and her precisely
painted images invited the viewer to look at them for the longest time and be rewarded
with scenes within the overall composition similar to the works of Breugel and other
medieval northern European painters.
In 1985 Lidia Postma produced an equally striking interpretation with a collection of mesmerising
richly textured illustrations.
The delicacy of her colour application and dream-like quality of her images contributed
greatly to what appears to have been the last significant 20th century edition of the tales.
And following this the general absence of other worthwhile examples led me to wonder
if this would be where the trail would run out, possibly due to a general lack of interest
from a generation far more invested in computer games and effects-driven films.
But in 2005 Agnes Indre created a series of humorous and visually engrossing watercolour
illustrations which happily seems to have been one of the earliest 21st century examples
of of quite a few remarkably attractive and stylistically diverse visual interpretations.
It would be hard to imagine a more radically different interpretation than these wordless
digital comic strips from Frank Flöthman, published in 2013.
And while may not be as richly decorated as others this defiantly digital edition is nevertheless
a witty modernist alternative eminently suited to what has been referred to by some as the
post-literate generation.
And in the following year Yann Legendre's edition was published, also created using
digital vector graphics, although with a considerably more representational approach than Flothmann's.
Nevertheless this series of aesthetically balanced absorbing narrative illustrations
dispensed with any hint of painterly quality or tonal application.
These pictures may have been some considerable distance from those of the Golden Age but
as far as I'm concerned they were every bit as visually compelling.
But others seem to nave been intent on carrying on with traditional techniques and styling.
Don Daily's edition, also from 2014 couldn't have been more unlike Legendre's flat graphic
technique.
His interpretation capitalised on his breathtaking accomplishment with his chosen medium, and
although romantic these images still resonated memorably with the darker elements of the
tales.
In the same year Vladimir Stankovic produced a far less representational but equally evocative
series which nevertheless relied on immaculately painted tonal qualities, and as a bonus for
the young reader this edition was published featuring several artfully constructed pop
up pages.
Only a year later a Lina Dudaite used traditional media to create her edition, and her distinctive
textured double page illustrations managed to be both beautiful and disturbing at the
same time.
Like Stankovic she offset her painted approach with stylised anatomy in her characters.
Gris Grimly's visualisation took the darker elements of the various stories and made considerable
creative use of them with a restricted colour palette even more sombre than Rackham's from
a century before.
But he also added considerable humour with his finely drawn sophisticated contemporary
cartoon style.
I'm concluding this pair of videos with Anns Lang's 2018 edition, which contained a series
of particularly atmospheric and absorbing textured paintings, and I don't know, nor
do I feel the need to know, whether they were painted digitally or traditionally.
And I must say it's rather nice to be able to end a video such as this with images by
contemporary illustrators which convince me that optimism for the future of narrative
illustration, however it's been created, isn't misplaced.