Monika Beisner Explained

Monika Beisner
Birth Place:Hamburg, Germany
Birth Date:1942
Nationality:German
Known For:Artist, book illustrator

Monika Beisner (born 1942 in Hamburg) is a German artist and book illustrator.

Life

Monika Beisner studied painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (HBK) and - with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service - at the Slade School of Fine Art, London and at the Berlin University of the Arts. A Fulbright scholarship enabled her to study in New York. Since 1970 she has lived as a freelance artist in London, Ratzeburg and on Gozo (Malta).

Work

Children's literature

Early in her career, Beisner was best known for her children's books, such as The Heavenly Zoo (1979)[1] and Fabulous Beasts (1981),[2] created in collaboration with the American writer Alison Lurie. Beisner's book Fantastic Toys (German: Wunderlicher Spielzeug-Katalog, 1973), first published in English in 1975, was selected by New York Review Books at the beginning of 2019 and reprinted in The New York Review Children’s Collection.[3]

In September 2014, in an interview with Harvard professor Stephen or Stephanie Burt, an Anglist and Transgender activist, published in The Paris Review, the American poet and writer Matthea Harvey, born in Germany in 1973 but raised in England, named Beisner's Fantastic Toys as the earliest inspiration for her own artistic development. Asked which book to read to understand Harvey's lyrical work, she answered: "Fantastic Toys, by Monika Beisner. A book I read over and over again as a child. It features such wonders as a heated sheep toboggan and winged jumping boots. Four years ago, I discovered the reason we had that magical book - my mother had gone to elementary school with Monika. For me, it was as if she’d gone to school with Marilyn Monroe and never mentioned it."[4]

Adult works

More recently, Beisner has concentrated on illustrating classic texts such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Ovid's Metamorphoses.[5] The three-volume edition of Dante's Divine Comedy also includes an essay on Beisner by the historian and mythographer Marina Warner. She wrote: "The hundred miniatures took her seven years to complete and the achievement is dazzling. The present volume reproduces her work full-size, … with no strokes or drawing visible, but a pure glow of dense color, applied with brushes so small they consist of a half-dozen sable hairs. … Monika Beisner has been scrupulously loyal to Dante’s text, rendering gesture and position as described in the poem as well as its unsurpassed precision of spatial, geographical and temporal coordinates.“[6] Already Botticelli, William Blake, Gustave Doré and Salvador Dalí illustrated the Divine Comedy, but Beisner is the first woman to illustrate this important work of world literature. She has translated Dante's 100 songs into pictures as detailed and literal as possible, painted with egg tempera colours. All 100 of her original paintings for the Divine Comedy are in the collection of the Italian Dante collector Livio Ambrogio.[7]

Beisner's illustrations for Ovid's Metamorphoses were published by Pratt Contemporary, as a portfolio of 36 digital prints.[8]

She is currently working on a new collection of works related to Gilgamesh.

Dante's "Divine Comedy"

Ovid's "Metamorphoses"

Children's books

Literature/Articles

External links

Notes and References

  1. Book: The Heavenly Zoo: Legends and Tales of the Stars . Alison . Lurie . Illustrated by Monika Beisner . London . Eel Pie . 1979 . 9780906008119.
  2. Book: Fabulous Beasts. Alison . Lurie . Illustrated by Monika Beisner . London . Cape . 1981 . 9780224019712.
  3. Web site: Fantastic Toys. New York Review Books . 12 March 2019 .
  4. Web site: Stephen . Burt . Mermaid Convention: An Interview with Matthea Harvey . The Paris Review . 2 September 2014 .
  5. Book: The Divine Comedy . Dante . Alighieri . Illustrations by Monika Beisner . Verona . Edizioni Valdonega . 2007 . 9788885033610 . https://web.archive.org/web/20161031212319/http://www.prattcontemporaryart.co.uk/the-divine-comedy/ . 31 October 2016.
  6. Book: The Divine Comedy . Marina . Warner . Monika Beisner: Illuminating Stories . 228–235 . Verona . Edizioni Valdonega . 2007 . 9788885033610.
  7. Web site: Dante panellists: Monika Beisner. Academy of Ancient Music .
  8. Web site: Monika Beisner. Metamorphoses portfolio . Pratt Contemporary . 2010 . https://web.archive.org/web/20170630235708/http://www.prattcontemporaryart.co.uk/beisner/ . 30 June 2017.