Ted van Lieshout’s Daring Approach to Fairytale Illustrations and Texts

The Dutch author and illustrator Ted van Lieshout is famous and perhaps even infamous for his taboo-breaking children’s books. Van Lieshout has also found an original angle for fairy-tale illustrations, which he develops in particular in his short-story collections Driedelig paard (Tripartite Horse) from 2011 and Onder mijn matras de erwt (Under my mattress the pea) from 2017. While in the former, he illustrates the stories with sonnets compiled of images (“beeldsonnetten”), in the latter he uses dressed up wooden puppets to give new meaning to the texts. Both intriguing and mundane, uncanny and humorous, these images lend themselves to various interpretations. Moreover, Van Lieshout re-frames the fairy tales by placing them in a broader context: the short stories in Driedelig paard explore the tension between realism and fantasy, while in Onder mijn matras de erwt, Van Lieshout uses the tales for an exploration of divorce, loneliness and death. All these efforts combined give Grimm’s fairy tales new meaning and relevance for a contemporary, double-addressed audience.