The exhibition can be seen as being linear in two senses. It describes a time line from 1943 and Arne Ungermann to the innovative work of contemporary Danish illustrators such as Cato Thau-Jensen, Otto Dickmeiss, Helle Vibeke Jensen,

Rasmus Bregnhøi, Lars Vegas Nielsen and Els Cools. At the same time it shows up the relationship between, for example, the classic draughtsmanship of an Ib Spang Olsen and the new, cheeky newcomer in the class, Jakob Martin Strid, who has already been published outside Denmark and who also draws inspiration from comics, as indeed another of the illustrators in the exhibition, Anders Morgenthaler, clearly also does.

Ib Spang Olsen is represented by two works in the exhibition, and in both cases he has both written and illustrated the story. Det lille lokomotiv (‘The Little Steam Engine’) from 1954 and Drengen i månen (‘The Boy in the Moon’) from 1962 can be read for children as young as three and are related to an older genre, namely the story woven round objects, especially familiar phenomena that particularly attract the attention of small children – here in Ib Spang Olsen the moon and a train – which are given life and behave as people in exactly the same way as the nutcracker, the porcelain figures, the darning needle or toys do in the stories of E.T.A Hoffmann or Hans Christian Andersen. As it happens, a couple of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories are also included in the exhibition with new illustrations by Otto Dickmeiss. This is an illustrator whose pictures have their very own style and are very characteristic, their figures looking out with huge, innocent eyes and their strong, at times uncompromising and at times beautiful symbolic language in the midst of an almost surrealistic universe that reflects all eras.

Another line that can be followed is that of the individual child’s development as a reader. The books for the smallest children comply with convention, strangely enough, by being the smallest in their format, just the right size to take along in your bag when you go out of the house and to provide the security of the thoroughly familiar. The Kaj books and the Poul books are examples, their very simple stories taking place in a recognisable everyday environment.

Later on it is an advantage for books to be a little more challenging, the format grows and the illustrations become richer and more crowded. They may also say a little more than the text itself – as, for example, in Snabels herbarium (‘Snabel’s Herbarium’), Sebastians monster (‘Sebastian’s Monster’) and Da Bernard skød hul i himlen (‘When Bernard shot a hole in the sky’) – or the illustrations become fully fledged artworks in which you can go exploring, as in Helle Vibeke Jensen’s illustrations for Hør her stær (‘Listen here, Starling’) or Bente Olesen Nystrøm’s Hr. Alting (‘Mr. Everything’), which is a story completely without words.

One of the richest Danish picture books is Cykelmyggen Egon (‘The Tale of Two Mozzies’) by Flemming Quist Møller about a cycling mosquito, Egon, who meets a dancing mosquito. The ‘cyclesquito’ arrived on the scene in 1967 and in 2005 a successor came along in the same explosive style. Both works are in the exhibition.

After a more advanced form of picture book comes a time when children begin to read for themselves. Here Jeg er Frede (men det er ikke altid det de andre kalder mig) (‘I am Frede (but that’s not always what the others call me)’) is an obvious beginner’s book, in which minimalism on the textual page makes it easy to read but also creates considerable room for interpretation, which illustrator Cato Thau-Jensen exploits to the full.

 
The illustrators narrate in a universal language, the language of pictures. This can be swarming with life and multi-coloured as in Flemming Quist Møller; it can be kept in a very limited range of colours as, for example, in Hanne Bartholin’s illustrations for Den lille gule pige (‘The Little Yellow Girl’), which consist of watercolours in yellow and red; or it can be such simple graphic expressions that the figures almost end up looking like pictograms as in the Cirkeline books. Cirkeline with her polka dotted ladybird dress and her bare feet lives on the artist’s desk and helps keep things tidy, and she is so small that she can sleep in a matchbox. She came into the world in book form in 1969, and now forty years later yet another book about the little elf has just appeared.

 
‘Cirkeline’ and the cycling mosquito have, then, been with us most of the way. The first books continue to be in demand and, with the most recent additions in 2005 and 200 they have been kept up to date. ‘The Tale of Two Mozzies’ about the two mosquitoes is really a classic tale, a miniature Bildungsroman. It takes place way out in the forest among speaking insects, who wear clothes as though they were humans. Egon himself shoots off on his racing bike in an orange T-shirt. In this fairytale world Egon, it goes without saying, comes face to face with the caterpillar from ‘Alice in Wonderland’, for this story makes great play with the human capacity to imagine and fantasize – as fine and universal narratives do.

Translated by John Mason