(en) Britain, AF Organise #83 - Frans Masereel

We featured an article on the woodcut artist Alexandre Mairet in Organise! 82. In this 
issue of Organise! we take a look at the artist who had a major influence on Mairet, the 
great artist Frans Masereel. ---- Frans Masereel was born in Blankenberg in Belgium on the 
30th of July 1889. Blankenberg is a seaside resort and Frans was born into a middle-class 
family. The middle class in the area spoke French among themselves and Flemish to their 
servants or the local peasants. He received an education at Ghent and later went to the 
?cole des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts) there. ---- He had only been there less than a 
year when his teacher advised him to travel and ?see the masterpieces of the world? and 
that he should work on his own as the Academy could add nothing more to his education. 
Round about the same time Masereel met the master engraver Jules de Bruycker and he was 
seriously influenced by him, above all in his taste for graphics and pen and ink drawings.

In 1910 Masereel travelled to
Tunis. The following year he
moved to Paris and falling in love
with the City of Life, decided to
settle there. He was above all
attracted to where crowds
gathered and loving drawing
scenes of the street, the caf?, and
along the Seine, even though he
himself was a withdrawn and shy
character. He became influenced
by illustrated magazines which
were very popular at the time,
and also by medieval woodcuts
which he discovered during visits
to libraries. When the World War
came he was not conscripted. He
volunteered to work for the
International Red cross, and as a
result moved to Geneva in
Switzerland, where he worked as
a translator of Flemish.

It was in Geneva that Masereel
discovered draft-dodgers,
deserters, anti-militarists and
revolutionaries, artists and
writers appalled and disgusted by
the mass slaughter.

In these circles he met the French
writer and novelist Romain
Rolland who was one of the
founders of the anti-militarist
paper La Feuille. Attracted to
these advanced ideas, Masereel
devoted three hours of every
evening to producing a political
cartoon. Masereel, together with
Rolland and Pierre Jouve, writer,
critic and anarchist, and Marcel
Martinet, one of the pioneers of
the ideas of proletarian art and
culture, published a pamphlet
Salut a La Revolution Russe, in
May 1917. Masereel then
illustrated a Rolland satire, Liluli,
and woodcuts for a film that was
never to be produced, Revolt of
the Machines.

Masereel remained in Switzerland
until 1922. Whilst most of those
in the Geneva circles in which he
had participated had returned to
their homelands by 1920, Belgium
considered Masereel as a draft-
dodger because of his anti-war
activities. In the end he moved to
Montmartre in Paris. Here he met
the German artist George Grosz
who produced savage and angry
works against war and capitalism.
Like Masereel, Grosz was
fascinated and at the same time
repelled by the big city. As
Masereel wrote to Rolland: "He
too thinks that art should as far as
possible be a gesture (action) and
that the artist must not be
indifferent to the social question.?

His friend Stefan Zweig wrote: ?I
know nothing on earth that this
impassioned friend of humanity
hates more than institutions that
tend to reduce the richness and
abundance of life to coldness,
uniformity, immobility, to enclose
and stifle living matter within
fixed bounds. He is the enemy of
the State when it favours coercion
and injustice; he is the enemy of
despotic, conservative ?society?,
and while he does not adhere to
any party (he rejects them all as a
fetter to inner freedom) he is on
the side of the weak, the
oppressed, the victims.? In some
accounts of Masereel he is
portrayed as an anarchist. Whilst
remaining essentially libertarian
he was for too long, like his friend
Rolland, a fellow traveller of the
Soviet state between the two
world wars and his ambiguous
attitude to the State should be
seen in this light.

Nevertheless it is his powerful
books of woodcuts, precursors of
the modern graphic novel, that
have remained popular with
many, including anarchists. The
anarchist and proponent of
proletarian culture Henri Poulaille
used Masereel?s works in the
1930s and just after the war in his
magazines and he has deeply
influenced artists of an anarchist
persuasion like Clifford Harper.
The first of these was The Passion
of Man, published in 1918,
followed by Passionate Journey
and The Sun (both 1919) and
Story Without Words and The
Idea published in 1920. The Idea
is perhaps one of his greatest
works where a writer gives birth
to The Idea illustrated as a tiny
naked sprite. The authorities try
to suppress her nakedness, the
writer defends her and is put in
front of a firing squad for his
pains. Too late, The Idea
reproduces herself on a mass
basis through the printing press.
On one level The Idea represents
the power of political ideas and
how they continue to exist
despite repression, whilst on
another level it can be
interpreted as the way in which
women pose a threat when they
wish to express themselves
freely and are subsequently
derided and their image manipulated
by the media. Other wood-cut novels
followed including the astounding
The City in 1925. Here the mass basis
of the city and the loneliness
that coexists alongside it are
powerfully portrayed, as are
political unrest, poverty, opulent
riches and degradation and illness. These
works were so successful powerfully that
some of the editions had imprints
of over 100,000.
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Should everything perish, all the books,
the photographs and the documents, and
we were left only with the woodcuts
Masereel has created, through them alone
we could reconstruct our contemporary
world, one would know how one lived in
1920, how we were dressed, one would
understand the whole dreadful war on the
front and behind it, with all its devilish
machines and grotesque silhouettes,
understand the stock exchanges and
factories, railway stations and ships, men
of all kinds and, what is more, the spirit,
the moral temper of our times.

Stefan Zweig
-------------------------------------
During the Second World War
Masereel took refuge in the Free
Zone of France, then settled in
Nice in 1949 until his death in
January 1972 in Avignon. As
mentioned earlier, Masereel was
popular in the inter war years but since
World War Two was almost forgotten
until recently, perhaps partially
because of his openly hostile
stances to war and capitalism. His
influence on American artists
like Lynd Ward, who then started work
in a similar style, Art Spiegelman,
creator of the graphic novel
Maus, the great cartoonist Will Eisner
and a host of others, as well as
his great importance in development of
the graphic novel should mean
that he should be re-evaluated.