All hell broke loose in the Frankfurt Museum for Communication.

Four hundred of an estimated ten thousand envelopes lovingly decorated by the book illustrator Axel Scheffler, the graphic father of the Gruffalo, with detailed inked image worlds show his fantastic head births.

Scheffler's only condition for these documented friendships to continue until the end of his life is the written answer of the thoughtful ones.

"Of monsters, mice and people" is the name of the show for this special mail art, for which there will definitely be a counterpart in Leipzig and maybe even one in London, the illustrator's adopted home.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

Many of Scheffler's letters are therefore addressed to the British author Julia Donaldson, with whom he made the Gruffalo a worldwide success and created the book "The Ugly Five" around 2018.

The animals, which on closer inspection are not all that ugly, appear again in a transformed form next to the remaining and always unusual animal figures on many of Aesop's covers.

Scheffler is apparently just as fascinated by myths and metamorphoses as this post-antique world of animal fables.

Leda and the swan at eye level, satyrs, Neptune and Amphitrite, but also Greek athletes as well as Apollo and Daphne catch the eye, where the nymph turns into a split tree in front of the Muse god.

Freedom from breadwork through wild metamorphoses

The metamorphoses are very often based on the motif of the always carefully chosen stamps, which for Aby Warburg, as the inventor of modern cultural studies, were the most influential image carriers of the modern age.

The Queen's unusually open and cheerful-looking face on a landscape-format stamp is given a body and hat, and Her Majesty is already floating over green meadows, holding hands with the Gruffalo.

In one of the most whimsical letters, the small postage stamp portrait of Prince William is given a lanky green body that fits and mismatches in an almost uncanny way, yet at the same time morphs in the mind's eye into that of his father Charles.

One can therefore regard these metamorphoses as an individual "cadavre exquis", the favorite game of the surrealists of the 1920s: a part of something larger, often the picture on the postage stamp or hobby horses of the recipient, is supplemented or mirrored by an idea that is as outlandish as possible, which in turn is completed by surreal settings.

But how to bring exhibiting order into the stylistically and thematically diverse fantasy realm?

The curators have opted for a tripartite division.

On the main wall on the right, hundreds of motifs are arranged chronologically in a kind of timeline.

Beginning in 1983 with two photo collages by Helmut Kohl and the "Genschman" cheerfully presenting his distinctive ears, the political-caricature initially disappeared almost completely,

In the middle of the hall, on the other hand, there is a glass case in the form of a lightning bolt, which shows the life of the picture letters from the origin - one of the envelopes painted in advance actually looks like a fully valid miniature of the finest fine painting around 1820 without any mark, stamp or address - via the different states of delivery - a hippopotamus carries a bar code in its body, and some heads and snub noses were mercilessly overstamped - to receipt and rare pictorial returns of the addressed shows.

Except for an issued envelope, from which the Gruffalo greets him in a visibly battered and crumpled manner, the letter artworks are in surprisingly good overall condition.

Involuntarily, thoughts of the Deutsche Post and their often brute process of fitting oversized envelopes into letterbox slots that are far too small pop up in their heads.

Scheffler accepts this stoically, coincidence and time also shape things.

A Belgian artist friend, on the other hand, complains deliciously on one of the envelopes about the postal abuse in an old master painting enriched with speech bubbles.

The left flank of the room is formed by further, particularly elaborate examples of letters.

If proof of the power of the analog despite the triumph of the digital was needed, this show will provide it: Scheffler never betrayed the power of imagination to the electronic media, and once excluded his short-lived penchant for fax art.

But that's another exhibition.

Of monsters, mice and humans.

Axel Scheffler's fantastic letter pictures.

In the MfK, Frankfurt;

until July 24th.

The beautiful book "Verbriefte Hoffnung" from Péridot Verlag costs 16.99 euros.