While we've written a number of biographies on this website, this is the first we've really been obsessed with, and as a result, is the first to incorporate pictures throughout. Click on the small images of books to see larger images that include more of Kredel's art!
Though Fritz Kredel's birthplace was in Germany, he became a giant in American illustration in the 30 years between 1940 and his death in 1973, inking more than 400 titles, both in German and English, and receiving numerous awards and honors. The American Artist magazine in March 1956 called him "one of the world's greatest living woodcutters." Kredel's efforts are important to anyone who loves book illustration, remembers special images from their favorite children's stories, or cares about quality in artwork and in printing. Unfortunately, most online sources about his life are extremely limited, but his daughter Judith and granddaughter Mathilde compiled a trio of shows in 2000 and with them, published a survey of his life and bibliography of his works including a lot more material than we can fully incorporate here!
Fritz Kredel was born on February 8, 1900 in Michelstadt-im-Odenwald, then in the Grand Duchy of Hesse of the German Empire, only son of August Kredel, a major in the Royal Prussian Army, and of his wife Mathilde. Fritz began sketching at a young age, graduated from the Realgymnasium in Darmstadt and, in 1920, after serving briefly in WWI (1918 in a Hessian regiment) and a couple of other false career starts (pharmacist, working on a relative's farm), he entered the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts & Crafts) in Offenbach to study under Professor Rudolf Koch (1876-1934), a famous German type designer and graphic artist.
EARLY CAREER IN GERMANY

In 1921, Koch began a new "werkstatt" (art studio), and he invited Kredel and five or six other students who had "exceptional talent and interest in crafts" to join him. One of those other students was textile artist Annie Epstein, who would eventually become Kredel's wife, and the studio also hosted several visitors who would become long-term colleagues, including Victor Karl Hammer (printing artist), Joseph Blumenthal (book designer from New York City), George Macy (of the Limited Editions Club), and Warren Chappell (type designer and illustrator).

Sometime in 1922, Kredel left to spend a year in Florence, Italy, studying under Professor Hammer, but he returned to Offenbach, where he began to teach, but also collaborated with Koch on a number of books—the most famous of which are A Book of Signs (1923); The Book of Flowers (Das Blumenbuch, 1930, various printings followed until 1942, from large to small), and a collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales (1931) published by the Limited Editions Club. He also published The Little Book of Birds and Nests in 1934. These represent the sort of work much of his future would hold: a combination of elegant woodcuts, pen & ink drawings, and lovely watercolor in genres such as scientific drawings of plant and animal life and the illustration of fairy tales.

Probably partially owing to his father's military career and his own experience in WWI, Kredel was keenly aware and passionate about military history, tradition and pageantry. Koch shared this passion and both men collected military uniforms and artifacts. In 1933-34, Kredel published two collections of 18th & 19th century German songs, both titled Wer will unter die Soldaten? (Who Wants to Join the Soldiers?), accompanied with illustrations of German men in uniform. The first of these, in a larger format, focused more on the art and won a gold medal for illustration at the Paris Exhibition in 1937 (though, due to the political climate at the time, Kredel never actually received his medal).

Another project Kredel and the others in the studio collaborated on was the Deutschland Karte, a large scale map of Germany. The members were extremely patriotic in the 20s and started the project 1929 as a celebration of Germany, published for German schools and children; the first version even included the German eagle. The map used internationally recognized borders of Germany, and each region's historic coat of arms was brightly displayed.

But as Hitler came to power, the map underwent a series of revisions and became more politically charged: the fourth edition, published in 1934, did away with the traditional eagle, and so expanded Germany's borders into its neighbors' recognized boundaries that it incited a mob to riot when it was displayed in France at the German embassy. The studio did not endorse these changes, however; as Hitler ascended, it had steered away from political and national projects. Fritz Kredel later reflected that he was glad Koch died early enough that he did not have to face the transformations in Germany.

Kredel had married Annie (a converted Jew) in 1926 and their two children, Stephen and Judith, were born in June 1927 and October 1930. After Koch passed away in April, 1934, Kredel took over the studio, but moved his family to Frankfurt. Over the next couple of years, they moved to Grundlsee and then to Vienna in Austria, all to avoid Nazism. In 1937, Melbert Cary, who ran the Press of the Wooly Whale based in New York, visited the Kredels and then organized and sponsored the difficult-to-acquire and expensive affidavits for them to leave Europe. They arrived in New York City by ship on September 22, 1938, just as WWII was beginning.

This sponsorship by Melbert Carey was truly generous, and Kredel was very grateful. They continued to work together afterwards: Cary's Press of the Wooly Whale was the publisher for one of Kredel's first books as a US resident. Schnitzelbank (which refers to a traditional German song in which the rhymed lyrics are ad-libbed) was published that Christmas, and in it, Kredel and Cary refer to funny artifacts and memories from their own friendship.
IN AMERICA

Kredel's life in Germany seems more exciting than his career here in the U.S., but it is for his work here that many of us know and admire him. After emigrating to the United States, Kredel taught at Cooper Union in New York for two years and continued to work as an artist. From his earlier collaborations, he was already well-known and in demand in the United States. Here is a brief summary of his work:
Among his most public projects: he illustrated Eleanor Roosevelt's Christmas book in 1940, and was commissioned by the U.S. government to create a woodcut of the Presidential Seal for the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Kredel completed eight books for the Peter Pauper Press (including Voltaire's Candide and A Christmas Carol by Dickens) and 21 volumes for George Macy's Limited Edition Club (Heritage Press), the most of any of their illustrators. Titles include: The Decameron, Fairy Tales of both Andersen and the Grimm brothers, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Robinson Crusoe, Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V, and many others.


He worked with (then living) authors like Jean Fritz, Earl Shenck Miers, Opal Wheeler, Leonard Wibberley, Robert Penn Warren, and Carolyn Dale Snedeker, but also illustrated classic books by Homer, Plato, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, and William Thackeray. He was chosen by Random House to color the John Tenniel illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass for their 1946 editions. These little books were widely distributed and remain popular in the vintage book market today.

While many of the above titles and editions may be foreign to my home school readers, most of the following likely will NOT. For Illustrated Junior Library, he illustrated: Grimms' Fairy Tales, Pinocchio, and Aesop's Fables. For the Junior Deluxe Editions, he inked Swiss Family Robinson, Tales from Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe. He was the artist selected for four All About Series books (Birds, Moths and Butterflies, The Desert, The Sea); two Landmarks (The Panama Canal, From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa, with his son Stephen), and one Signature Book biography (The Story of Beethoven).

Mr. Kredel's creativity extended far beyond his professional work. He loved creating and repairing toys and other mechanical objects, such as trains, working models, and soldiers; he would carve wooden soldiers or other toys for friends, purely for diversion and joy of creation. He would purchase antiquarian books to repair, rebind, or illustrate for fun. He also designed, carved, painted, and strung, for which his wife Anne designed clothes. The couple were known for the puppet shows they performed for neighbors and the family.

Some of his later personal work echoed his earlier career; one such undertaking was another map, this one of his hometown of Michelstadt, Germany. He spent years researching and corresponding with citizens, family, and friends in the town to understand how it would have looked in the 1400s and 1600s. He completed sketches and then cut in wood an aerial map of the walled town as it would have appeared in 1650. This he completed in 1952.

Another theme to which Kredel returned was military uniforms, and in his Soldiers of the American Army 1775-1941 (later expanded and retitled 1775-1954) he depicted the pageantry of his adopted home.

Yet another project echoed the early Das Blumenbuch (Book of Flowers) he had published with Koch in the 1920s. Just as Koch had gathered items on his lunchtime walks, Kredel began in the early 1950s to collect items while on walks himself, first on a visit to his daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then in his New York City neighborhood (near the Cloisters). He started working on a set of detailed Japanese-inspired woodcuts he called Am Wegesrand, which means "along the walk". He published a few of these images without text in 1959 and his friend the calligrapher George Salter saw them and encouraged him to complete more woodcuts. Eventually, the two selected poetry, which Salter lettered. The final United States publication in 1961 of only one hundred and fifty signed copies has poetry in the fine calligraphy of Salter, paired with Fritz Kredel's graceful, hand-colored woodcuts of natural images.

Fritz Kredel died on April 12, 1973, just after the Grolier Club held their first retrospective of his work. Their summary spotlights the amazing variety of artwork Kredel completed: pen and ink, watercolors, and woodcuts that were used in books, posters, maps, and fine art prints, a testimony of what a multi-talented and diverse artist he was.
Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, in 1940 a professor of art history at Columbia University, described his work thus:
"Fritz Kredel approaches the delicate task of illustrating a book with thoroughness and is well aware of his responsibilities to author and text. He studies intensely and no trouble is too much when it helps to answer a puzzling question of accuracy or detail. Yet, when he sits down to draw, or to cut in wood, all this recedes into the background. Only the artist is left at work."
Mathilde Kredel Brown Swanson said of her grandfather:
"My memories . . . are from the perspective of a child of ten years old. He was a grandfather—strict and kind, instructive and funny, all at the same time. My grandfather was a favorite of mine as a child. He liked to wear cowboy-style boots and a cowboy hat. He smoked cigars and had a friendly twinkle in his blue eyes, which were very light and clear blue under bushy eyebrows. When we visited New York City as children, he took my brother and me to his studio in the morning and would quickly sketch coloring books to keep us occupied while he tried to work. I was fascinated by the rooms of filtered light, wooden work tables, and by the multicolored bathroom sink and tub, no longer white from brush rinses of watercolors and ink. Hanging from his studio walls were many of the natural objects that inspired my favorite of his books, Am Wegesrand.
"Two central themes of my grandfather's work and my grandparents' lives were good humor and undying optimism. He was known by his friends as a storyteller. Fritz Kredel was exceptional in his willingness to use his talent to "serve" the text and the reader. He had complete mastery of a variety of media and styles available to him and applied the one that made sense to him to illustrate for the reader the meaning, the content, and the feeling of the story. At the same time, he was very light and optimistic. He is often mentioned along with other illustrators and artists of his time, but his work stands out because in showing human foibles and the humor in a situation, it reminds us to be positive, that the story can and will have a happy ending. His work is technically proficient and inspiring to the spirit at the same time. It is an honor to have known him, loved him, and to be his granddaughter."
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