Frans Masereel

Biography

In the summer of 1911 Masereel did not yet know that he would become a woodcutter. That was when he settled in Paris with Pauline Imhoff, his future wife, and drew without stopping: in ink, watercolour, pencil. He came to woodcut almost by accident, while reading about the anonymous masters of the fifteenth century and about Dürer.

He was born in Blankenberge, on the coast of West Flanders, on 30 July 1889 (some sources give 31 July). In 1894 the family moved to Ghent, and soon afterwards his father died. His mother married a Ghent physician, Louis Lava, a freethinker and liberal. Masereel attended evening classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent under Jean Delvin; in 1906–1907 he learned printing and typography, and he was influenced by the Ghent artist Jules De Bruycker, from whom he took up etching. Russian books made an impression on him, Kropotkin among them, in the translation of his aunt Fanny. In 1912 and 1913 he showed drawings at the Salon des Indépendants, the Paris exhibition open to artists outside the official juries.

The war caught him in Brittany. He went to Ghent, then returned to Paris, drew about twenty sheets for the collection “The Great War” and made illustrations for “Invaded Belgium” by Roland de Marès. In 1915 a friend, the journalist Henri Guilbeaux, helped him to get to Switzerland. In Geneva Masereel worked as an unpaid translator at the Prisoners of War Agency of the Red Cross, lived poorly and took any extra job going, down to waiting at tables. There he grew close to Romain Rolland and Stefan Zweig. Drawings for the journals Demain, Les Tablettes and La Feuille became his bread and butter: in La Feuille about a thousand ink drawings appeared almost daily for three years running. Two anti-war series of 1917, “Arise Ye Dead” and “The Dead Speak”, grew out of the work for Les Tablettes. He refused to serve in the Belgian army, and from November 1917 the Swiss police regarded him as a Belgian draft evader. Until 1929 he was barred from entering Belgium.

In 1918 came “25 Images of a Man’s Passion”: the story of a poor boy who becomes a labour agitator and is executed. The book made his name, and its sheets were printed for decades in publications of the workers’ movement. “Passionate Journey” (literally “My Book of Hours”, 1919), “The Sun” (1919), “The Idea” (1920) and “Story Without Words” (1920) followed. With the writer René Arcos he founded the publishing house Le Sablier in Geneva, where many of these books appeared; it closed in September 1921. The Munich edition of “Passionate Journey”, published by Kurt Wolff, sold about 15,000 copies in three years.

In 1921–1922 he returned to France and settled in Montmartre. The big city became one of his chief subjects: “The City” (1925), “Pictures of the Big City” (1926), “Capital” (1935). In Berlin he made friends with George Grosz, in Paris with Kurt Tucholsky. The fee for his illustrations to De Coster’s “Ulenspiegel” allowed him in 1925 to buy a fisherman’s cottage at Équihen near Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he painted harbours, the shore and portraits of sailors and fishermen. For Rolland’s “Jean-Christophe” he made 666 woodcuts (1925–1927). Exhibitions followed in Paris, Berlin, New York, Moscow, Brussels and other cities.

After the Nazis came to power in January 1933 his books were banned in Germany, some of his works were removed from museums, and his Berlin publisher, Malik Verlag, was broken up. Masereel joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, made drawings for a committee aiding the victims of Nazism, and in 1935 organised an international exhibition on fascism at the Galerie Vorms. In April 1935 and June 1936 he travelled to the Soviet Union; by some accounts he met Stalin briefly on the second trip. In February 1937 he visited Republican Spain. For the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris he made, on commission from an anti-war committee, a large panel, “The Burial of War”, for the Pavilion of Peace, and on the advice of Henry van de Velde another for the Belgian pavilion.

In June 1940 Masereel fled Paris for the south and settled in Avignon, and from September 1943 he lived in a village in the department of Lot-et-Garonne. His drawings of what he had seen on the roads of the exodus formed the basis of the books “June ’40” and “Dance of Death”. From 1947 to 1951 he taught at the art school in Saarbrücken, and in 1949 he settled in Nice. At the Venice Biennale of 1950 he received the grand prize for graphic art. The series of 1949–1968 are no longer built as narratives but as variations on a single theme. In 1951 he was elected to the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium. In October 1958 he travelled to China, where his work was shown in Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan. In 1969, after Pauline’s death, he married the artist Laure Malclès. Among his last works were illustrations for “The Internationale”.

Masereel died in Avignon on 3 January 1972. He was buried in Ghent, in the Campo Santo cemetery.