A Fully Cut Fairy Tale
Hans Christian Andersen Danish
Not on view
One of the world's most remarkable storytellers, Hans Christian Andersen was also an enthusiastic amateur paper cutter, often traveling with a pair of scissors at hand, ready to entertain friends and their children with whimsical designs. Andersen folded this large sheet three times to create a delicate and fantastical scene of masks, pierrots, ballet dancers within leafy arbors, angels, swans, and palm trees. This imagery reflects his own more or less private mythology, some of it dating to his early days as a puppeteer and his love of the theater. Andersen would often cut these sheets as he told stories at friends' homes, but they never directly correlated with his published tales; rather the cutouts were meant as stories in and of themselves: "a whole cut fairy tale."
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