{"id":546,"date":"2018-01-14T15:19:21","date_gmt":"2018-01-14T15:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/friendsoffreddy.apps-1and1.com\/?page_id=546"},"modified":"2023-02-19T18:59:15","modified_gmt":"2023-02-19T23:59:15","slug":"kurt-wiese-illustrator","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/freddythepig.com\/?page_id=546","title":{"rendered":"Kurt Wiese, Illustrator"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Man Who Gave Freddy a Face<\/strong><\/h2>\n

By Michael Cart<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The legions of Freddy the Pig fans will know that in the very first Freddy book (To and Again), our friend Freddy wasn\u2019t the hero; he was just one of the thirteen Bean Farm animals who took a vacation trip to Florida. Similarly in the second volume in the then nascent series (More To and Again in which the gang journeyed to the North Pole) Freddy was, at best, a co-star. Yet by volume three (Freddy the Detective), the plucky pig was front and center, the indisputable star. How did this evolution come to pass? Well, when Walter R. Brooks, Freddy\u2019s creator, was asked why a pig instead of a dog or a cat should have become his \u201cpermanent hero,\u201d he mused in reply, \u201cPerhaps it is because Kurt Wiese draws such very sympathetic pigs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The simpatico Wiese (pronounced we-see) (unless you\u2019re German, in which case you\u2019d pronounce it vee-zuh) was, of course, the man who \u2013 with dash and verve — illustrated all twenty-six Freddy books; the man who gave Freddy a face (and a full figure!). With more than four hundred books to his credit, Wiese was one of the most prolific \u2013 and gifted — children\u2019s book illustrators of the twentieth century. The critic Barbara Bader has written that Wiese had \u201can outstanding visual memory. He could work in a variety of mediums and styles, draw animals and people with equal sympathy, convey ideas and information effectively, and he became, almost immediately, the most versatile and productive artist in the field of children\u2019s books.\u201d How\u2019s that for high praise?<\/p>\n

Like many other celebrated illustrators who began working in the U.S. in the 1920s and \u201830s, Wiese (1887-1974) was an immigrant, having been born in Minden, Germany, where, as he put it, he grew up \u201cunder a remarkable collection of paintings of the Dusseldorf School.\u201d Nevertheless he was not encouraged to study art; instead being sent to Hamburg to learn the ins and outs of the import-export trade. \u201cAfter being able to count the threads of a ten shilling shirting just by feeling it with my hand,\u201d he once recalled, \u201cI was sent out\u00a0to China.\u201d Arriving in 1909 when he was just twenty-two, he spent the next five years traveling, trading, and becoming conversant in Chinese. With the outbreak of World War I, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1914 and turned over to the\u00a0British. The next five years were spent as a prisoner of war, one year in Hong Kong and four in Australia. It was there that he discovered his gift for illustration. \u201cDeeply impressed by the landscape and the animal world of Australia, I began to take up drawing and writing.\u201d Returning to Germany in 1919 with a bulging sketchbook, he worked for four years designing children\u2019s books and sets for a film company. Then, longing, he said, \u201cto live under a warm sun again,\u201d he set sail for Brazil in 1923 and spent a year \u201ctraveling through jungles, surviving a revolution, and meeting Indians.\u201d Following these adventures he settled down and spent the next three years illustrating textbooks and children\u2019s books for a Brazilian publisher. He also did work for a newspaper, drawing cartoons and producing a weekly children\u2019s page.<\/p>\n

Then came 1927 and \u201cWanderlust again,\u201d Wiese recalled. \u201cThis time, the call of the North. I landed,\u201d he continued, \u201con a gray winter morning at a snow-covered pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, was taken to Ellis Island for a glass of milk and a sandwich and then came long weeks of traveling through the canyons of Manhattan with a collection of sample drawings under my arm.\u201d
\nHistory suggests that not too many of those weeks were actually spent trudging through Manhattan canyons, since a job with Collier\u2019s Weekly magazine soon materialized followed by his first two book commissions. By 1929 his career was in full flower as he demonstrated by illustrating the first American edition of Felix Salten\u2019s immortal Bambi. Though he may be best remembered for his remarkably fluid and dynamic line drawings (as in the Freddy books), he was also a master of the technique he used in Bambi: the lithograph. His work in color lithography is especially notable as in the case of Phil Stong\u2019s beautiful Newbery Honor book Honk the Moose (Wiese had nearly as fruitful a collaboration with Stong as with Brooks, the two men working together on fourteen books).<\/p>\n

\"\"It was Wiese\u2019s life in China that seems to have left the most indelible mark on both his visual memory and its manifestation in his work. \u201cHe put the stamp of his style on China for a generation,\u201d Bader observes. Indeed, two of the nineteen books he both wrote and illustrated \u2013 You Can Write Chinese and Fish in the Air \u2013 were each Caldecott Honor Books. More fondly remembered, perhaps, are the illustrations hedid for Marjorie Flack\u2019s classic The Story about Ping, the tale of a little Chinese duck who is the last to reach the houseboat in the evening and to receive a \u201cSpank!\u201d for his troubles. Ping is historically important for having been one of the first American picture books to have been written by one talent and illustrated by another. Previously picture books had been both written and illustrated by the same person.<\/p>\n

If China lived in Wiese\u2019s memory, the man himself lived, more prosaically, in New Jersey. Recalling his early days in America he once said, \u201cI married and bought a little farmhouse at the edge of the woods which cover the rocky banks of the Delaware River about twenty-five miles above Trenton, New Jersey. It\u2019s a good life. I can sit at my window and the animals come to me. They make me understand how they live.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is it too much to hope that one of those animals was a talking pig named Freddy?<\/p>\n

Links to More Pages about Kurt Wiese<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here<\/a> for an illustrated bibliography of children’s books illustrated by Kurt Wiese.<\/p>\n

Kurt Wiese’s obituary<\/a> from The New York Times.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our pages on Kurt Wiese’s illustrations<\/a> in the Freddy books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Man Who Gave Freddy a Face By Michael Cart The legions of Freddy the Pig fans will know that in the very first Freddy book (To and Again), our friend Freddy wasn\u2019t the hero; he was just one of the thirteen Bean Farm animals who took a vacation trip to Florida. Similarly in the second volume in the then nascent series (More To and Again in which the gang journeyed to the North Pole) Freddy was, at best, a co-star. Yet by volume three (Freddy the Detective), the plucky pig was front and center, the indisputable star. How did this evolution come to pass? Well, when Walter R. Brooks, Freddy\u2019s creator, was asked why a pig instead of a dog or a cat should have become his \u201cpermanent hero,\u201d he mused in reply, \u201cPerhaps it is because Kurt Wiese draws such very sympathetic pigs.\u201d The simpatico Wiese (pronounced we-see) (unless you\u2019re German, in which case you\u2019d pronounce it vee-zuh) was, of course, the man who \u2013 with dash and verve — illustrated all twenty-six Freddy books; the man who gave Freddy a face (and a full figure!). With more than four hundred books to his credit, Wiese was one<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-546","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nKurt Wiese, Illustrator - Friends of Freddy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/freddythepig.com\/?page_id=546\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kurt Wiese, Illustrator - Friends of Freddy\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Man Who Gave Freddy a Face By Michael Cart The legions of Freddy the Pig fans will know that in the very first Freddy book (To and Again), our friend Freddy wasn\u2019t the hero; he was just one of the thirteen Bean Farm animals who took a vacation trip to Florida. 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