Graphis Sept./Oct. 1958 [antikvár]

Adolf Max Vogt: HANS FISCHER N"either fish nor bird', says the German when confronted with the _ ill-defined, the nondescript. Hans Fischer's art, to the sifter of his hundreds of graphic compositions and thousands of drawings, appears as an untiring definition of the dividing line between fish and bird. These two realms—the water and the air—occupied his thoughts so much in the years of his ripest achievement that the third realm—where man is domiciled—figures in his work only as a zone of transit. The productions of his later years represented here show clearly enough what passion guided Fischer's pencil, needle or brush: the passion for transformation. To depict as poor a thing as man entirely on his own must have struck the artist more and more forcibly as an excessively isolated undertaking. The fish-man and the bird-man, with all their imaginable variants and sub-species, are the two demon-beings that he created and that must have held his thoughts and senses in thrall even up to his very last daj-s. Fis, as he signed himself, was a graphic artist, a stage designer, a painter of pictures and murals, on occasion too a wonderfully witty and inventive cabaret artist who—small of stature, with unruly hair, bright, lively eyes and unusually expressive features—stepped to the blackboard with the chalk in his hand, blew the white dust from the arm of his dinner jacket, began to sketch lightly and easily and captured his audience completely at every word and stroke. In his special act, his oral and visual picture-riddles, he had the naivete and the slightly grotesque charm of a shepherd who has doffed his smock and climbed into evening clothes. He was the 'little man' who marvelled at the wonders of the world, yet at the same time he had already seen so sharply through them with his bright, boyish glance that the smile on the face of his onlookers occasionally faded like a snuffed candle. That was back in the 'thirties. For the next twenty years he went steadfastly on his way. He designed children's books and collections of fairy-stories that earned him the most precious of all rewards: the love of the children. The success of these books was so genuine that they made their way beyond the shores of Europe, finding publishers in America and in Japan. The secret was that Fischer did not have to bend