Reparation for Felix Hess, the comic scribbler of ‘The world of Jantje’

You can sink into oblivion, but you can also be fished out of it. In the case of cartoonist Felix Hess, the saving net is in the hands of Sytze van der Veen, who has written a beautiful biography under the title The world of Jantje – Felix Hess, painter and draftsman, 1817-1943.

As a political cartoonist, Hess was in the magazine for twenty years The green with his satirical contribution From Jantje’s notebook, which enjoyed national fame between the two world wars. Hess used the drawing style of a 6-year-old for this.

From that innocent-looking form he criticized politics and society. Cornelis Veith, a well-known critic at the time and a cartoonist himself, called Hess a seasoned artist with ‘a remarkable comic gift’ who knows how to group his ‘childish puppets in a quasi-naive way and throw them over his page’.

From Jantje’s notebook was the first newspaper strip in the Netherlands. Hess drew inspiration from the story for the remarkable drawings Un genius incompris (‘A misunderstood genius’) by the French comic strip pioneer Cham from 1841. In this, a painter who has been rejected by the art academy decides to start making childlike caricatures.

The paradox of Hess is that he combined a childish but daring form with an old-fashioned content, because in many ways he was conservative. He opposed the advance of the automobile and called drivers ‘gasoline slubbers’. He thought democracy was a novelty and spelled it ‘demokrasjie’.

He vehemently opposed the planned construction of a brick theater on the Museumplein in the capital, because he did not like modernist architecture. All this conservatism was beautifully symbolized by his point beak, which was emphatically 19th-century.

Before Hess became acquainted with the world of Jantje, he was a painter and worked in the age-old style of the Larense School. At the time, because of their palette, such painters were mockingly referred to as the ‘browns’, as opposed to the ‘blues’ who worked in the experimental, modern style.

The Jewish Hess lived with his wife and children’s book author Eliza Binger in the Amsterdam district of De Pijp, where many Jewish artists lived at the time. His neighbors were the well-known expressionists Mommie Schwarz and Else Berg, so the ‘browns’ and the ‘blues’ met regularly.

In 1933 Hitler came to power and Hess drew a Jantje-style cartoon in which Goebbels is fired by the Nazis because he does not look Aryan enough. Three years later, it was over for Hess himself: The green took a leftward course and could no longer use Hess’s notebooks.

Ironically, during the war, Hess came to work for the Michaplast company, which ran a workshop for Jews in hiding. They had to paint commercial and sugary landscapes, which you can see in retrospect, a parody of Hess’ own canvases in the style of the Larense School.

A few years earlier, Hess had drawn a parody of the fascist Moessolino, in which cartoonists, the ‘picture scribblers’, are banished to the island of Urkio in the Zuiderzee. In 1943– exile became bitter reality for Hess himself: together with his wife he was sent to Westerbork and from there to Sobibor, where they were killed three days after their arrival.