Heinrich Kley
Biography
Heinrich Kley (April 15, 1863, Karlsruhe – February 8, 1945, Munich) was a German illustrator, painter, and caricaturist — NOT a 1960s poster maker. Trained at the Karlsruhe Academy, he worked for two decades as a painter and industrial artist before turning, around 1908, almost entirely to satirical pen-and-ink line drawing — devils, machines, and anthropomorphic animals — for the Munich journals Simplicissimus and Jugend. His sketchbooks (1909–10) were later collected by Walt Disney. He appears in this archive because his half-century-old drawings were posthumously adapted onto Fillmore posters.
Why They Matter
Kley is a historical source artist, not a rock-poster designer — he died in 1945. His importance is twofold: as a wellspring for American animation (Disney collected his work and credited it as a teaching source, its influence visible in Fantasia), and, directly relevant here, as a found-art source mined by San Francisco poster artists — Wes Wilson adapted his "jamming turtles" for BG-15/16 in 1966. A reminder that psychedelic poster art freely appropriated older illustration.
Notable Works
- Skizzenbuch (1909) and Skizzenbuch II (1910)
- pen-and-ink work for Simplicissimus and Jugend
- his "jamming turtles" drawing, adapted by Wes Wilson for the Turtles / Oxford Circle Fillmore Auditorium run, July 1966 (credited "Wes Wilson & Heinrich Kley" on BG-15 and BG-16)