The Expressionist artist Frans Masereel was a twentieth-century master of woodcuts. He has been called the new Daumier but his was more a visionary outlook.
The horrors of the First World War deeply troubled Masereel. In 1916 he allied himself with the journalists and artists who followed the pacifist credo of Romain Rolland. In Geneva, the Belgian-born Masereel illustrated two anti-war magazines, Les Tablettes and La Feuille. Although he illustrated books by Zola, Wilde and Tolstoy, his most admired works are his romans in beelden or novels in pictures, which he published himself.
"Everything can perish," Stefan Zweig wrote, "books, monuments, pictures and documents, but if Masereel's woodcuts survive, we could reconstruct the modern world. They alone would help us apprehend the dangerous spirit, the genius and psychological currents of our age."
In the introduction to Mein Stundenbuch, Thomas Mann writes that the woodblocks "are a silent film in black and white without titles. [Masereel's art] is part of a distinguished tradition of Northern European woodcarving whose heritage can be traced through Lucas van Leyden and Albrecht Durer well into the Middle Ages."
Masereel quotes the words of Walt Whitman, "When I give, I give myself" to support his artistic beliefs. For Thomas Mann, tis admirably captures the theme. Mein Stundenbuch, he explained, depicts a human life "rich in things seen and experienced, happiness and torment in which we are all caught up. [The protagonist] is the artist, unrestricted by class, untouched by social prejudice, who lives after his own heart."
The Library thanks Mr. Michael Kowal for his translation of the Mann quotations.
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