Woodcuts are an attractive art form to me and have featured in our blog before – see Twentieth century German woodcuts – so I was delighted to come across a book featuring woodcuts by Frans Masereel (1889-1972) while writing the recent post on Till Eulenspiegel, and to discover that the UL has a good selection of other works by him which will be explored in this post. Masereel’s name is not a familiar one now but in the 1920s he was very prolific and well-known, employing a distinctive Expressionist style in illustrations for books by other authors as well as in his own novels without words which were influential forerunners of the graphic novels of today.
Masereel was Belgian and spent much of his childhood in the city of Ghent. For most of his adult life though he lived in France, with time also spent in Switzerland and Germany. On moving to Paris as a young man he met the socialist intellectual Henri Guilbeaux and during World War One became part of his pacifist circle in Geneva alongside Romain Rolland. The works of Rolland were among the many illustrated by Masereel. Here is his work featured on the covers of some books by an earlier French writer, Charles-Louis Philippe, published by the German Kurt Wolff Verlag, and on one by Arthur Holitscher:
Holitscher collaborated with Stefan Zweig on a 1923 monograph about Masereel, proof of how popular he was in his time. In this book Zweig showed how impressed he was, asserting that:
Ginge alles zugrunde, alle Bücher, Denkmäler, Photographien und Berichte, und blieben nur die Holzschnitte erhalten, die er in zehn Jahren geschaffen hat, so könnte man aus ihnen allein unsere ganze gegenwärtige Welt rekonstruieren.
[If everything were to perish, all books, monuments, photographs and reports, and only the woodcuts remained that he has created in ten years, then our entire present-day world could be reconstructed from them alone]
This was probably a response to the work of the previous few years when Masereel had used his seemingly never-ending creative energy on a number of woodcut graphic novels with no words. Starting in 1918 with The passion of a man (our copy is a 1927 German publication, S404:8.c.9.17), in the space of seven years he produced six works which together contained almost 400 woodcuts, an amazing feat when you consider the amount of work in each one. With woodcuts full of detail and introductions contributed by famous authors such as Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, you can see why these books became popular and have continued to be published.
My favourite of these early graphic novels is perhaps his retelling of the Icarus story, showing the protagonist in lots of adventures while trying to reach the sun. Here are the first two of its 63 woodcuts from our 1926 German edition (9400.e.128):
Masereel’s pacifism was often reflected in his work. In Bilder gegen den Krieg, a weighty tome produced in the 1980s, many works from across his career are brought together. His response to the terrible events of World War Two was Remember! (Liberation.a.336), a large format book published in 1946, containing 26 lithographs, many incredibly shocking and unflinchingly vivid.
In the late 1940s he taught for a little while at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken, Germany. This city is now home to the Frans-Masereel-Stiftung whose website is a fantastic place to view more of Masereel’s outstanding works. An alternative resource is the recent comprehensive (663 pages with French and German text) Frans Masereel, l’empreinte du monde = Frans Masereel, der Abdruck der Welt (C202.b.6876), packed full of excellent reproductions. The cover is made up of a detail of a self-portrait done in 1923.
While best known for his woodcuts Masereel also worked in other media. The catalogue accompanying a 1998 Mannheim exhibition, Frans Masereel: Bilder der Grossstadt, Arbeiten der 20er Jahre includes examples of his paintings, watercolours and ink drawings and features a 1924 watercolour on the cover. An earlier French exhibition also showcased the full range of his output – see the catalogue, Frans Masereel: peintures, aquarelles, dessins, gravures (9400.c.3161)
Katharine Dicks
Further reading
- Frans Masereel, 1889-1972: the radical imagination by Josef Herman (Uc.6.3506)
- Frans Masereel: Einführung und Auswahl by Gerhart Ziller (S404:8.b.9.32)
- Gesang des Lebens: das Werk Frans Masereels by Rudolf Hagelstange (S404:8.c.9.27)
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