Biography

I have been drawing since very childhood. If I had a pencil or a piece of chalk I began drawing at once. And sometimes I was "drawing" even having nothing.

(Herluf Bidstrup)

Herluf Bidstrup is a famous Danish caricaturist and a public figure, the author of more than 5 thousand pictures.

His father Hermond Bidstrup was a Dane, he worked as a painter and an art designer. In free time he kept on painting. He traveled a lot and in Berlin met Augusta Emma Berta Shmidt. They married. And on the 10th of September, 1912 a future artist was born. When Herluf was 5 his family came back to Denmark.

Herluf began to draw being a child. His first teacher and critic was his father who told him a lot of his travelings. The first caricature appeared in 1922 when the boy was 11. He told about himself: "I was thinking about the power of caricature at school. I used to draw my classmates and teachers on the blackboard. I tried to show peculiarities of the person, his favourite pose, facial expressions. And it didn't only made the others laugh but touched a drawn person. Caricature was my weapon. But a real political satirist I became during the Civil war with Spain. Fascists did there terrible things. I tried to hold them up to shame and to show the plot of events."

After graduating from school in 1931 Herluf entered the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen. In the evenings he drew routine life of people with a piece of coal. Finising the Academy he worked as a painter in advertisings.

In 1936 he was taken to the newspaper «Social-Democraten» to fill an artist. There he created caricatures with anti-fascist meaning. His characters were Benito Mussolini, Herman Hering and Joseph Goebbels. His caricatures were a great success. They were published every Sunday. So he was offered a regular work in the newspaper.

In 1943 the artist joined Communist party in Denmark which was forbidden and began to draw for not legal newspaper «Land og Folg». His caricatures were also sold as postcards. And money was sent to the party. The style of the artist was known well, so up to the end of the war Bidstrup had to live in a small country house near Copenhagen. At the same time he sent his pictures to the newspaper «Social-Democraten».

In 1945 the newspaper «Land og Folk» became legal and Bidstrup published his pictures every day there.

In 1952 the artist visited the Soviet Union for the first time. A lot of books with his caricatures were published in the USSR. He was a true communist and considered to be a progressive artist as he showed capitalist West in his pictures. His pictures were presented in Pushkin's museum of fine arts in Moscow and in the Hermitage in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). And in 1964 he got an international Lenin's award.

He died in December, 26 in 1988 in the town of Allered (Denmark), but his creation lives nowadays. A lot of books with his caricatures appear in many bookstores. Нis caricatures are actual  now though a lot of them appeared long ago.