Drawings and Paintings
Petersen left about 60,000 drawings and 100 paintings of varied quality. His drawings are very often illustrated jokes, or series of a theme besides artist sketches. Among his favourite themes are the vagabonds — who are portrayed as grotesquely dressed-up petty philosophers — and the circus milieu that he regarded with much warmth.
He is perhaps best known for his Storm P machines, comic drawings of machines that perform very simple tasks through an unnecessarily complex and usually humorous series of actions. Other cartoonists who are known for similar machine drawings are Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson. Besides that, he illustrated many books, often written by congenial authors — Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome and G. K. Chesterton, among others.
As a painter he is clearly influenced by names like Edvard Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec, but often with an independent naivist touch. Later on, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky seem to have been an inspiration in spite of his often outspoken ridiculing of modern art. Among his many themes are extérieurs from Paris, from prostitution milieus and nature scenes. La Morgue (1906) and Kultur (1908, "Culture") are two of his most well known paintings.
Read more about this topic: Robert Storm Petersen
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