Meeting in the square by YVON Bilderbeek

About "Meeting in the square"

by YVON Bilderbeek

About the artwork

Meeting in the square in front of Arnhem train station.
A Juxta photo: contrast young-old, the girl and boy with the scooter(now contemporary) versus the image of the two vikings (old).
(Juxtaposition photography involves combining two or more elements in the same photograph, emphasizing the interesting contrast between them).

The subjects in question are Eric the Norseman and Svein Langtand. Eric is a tough Viking king. Conceived by Hans G. Kresse (1921-1992), a well-known Dutch cartoonist, who spent the last years of his life in Doorwerth.
Together with Kapitein Rob and Tom Poes, Eric de Noorman belongs to the "big three" in Dutch comic strip history. Eric the Norseman was published as a newspaper strip from 1946 to 1964. The stories revolve around the Viking king and his adventures overseas. The comics were especially popular in the early 1950s. At the height of his fame, more than 300,000 Eric the Norseman comic books were sold annually.

On September 27, 2006, an impressive tribute to Hans G. Kresse was launched in Arnhem. The cartoonist would have turned 85 on December 3, 2006. And it was 60 years ago that Kresse began his comic strip epic about Eric the Norseman. The Kresse-Strips-Arnhem Foundation, which was set up especially for that purpose, undertook a number of projects, one of which was "Eric the Norseman on the walls of Arnhem.
The Viking at the train station is still a nice reminder of that.