My (humble) ART Collection (Selected)
Frans Masereel (1889-1972)
The ‘Silent Novels’ of Frans Masereel: Godfather of the American Graphic Novel
By Joris van Parys
Up until twenty years ago, the Flemish woodcut artist Frans Masereel, most famous on the European continent for his “wordless novels”, remained virtually unknown in the US and the UK. However, over the past few decades, interest in his work has increased substantially in London as well as in New York. Masereel biographer Joris van Parys knows how that came about.
“Charging the static, blocky medium of the woodcut with the newly emergent force of cinema, Masereel created wildly kinetic visions…” This is how, back in 2015, Charles Siebert described in The New York Times Magazine the woodcuts of The City, Masereel’s impressive wordless book about life in a bustling 1920s metropolis. In 2017, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London displayed fifty of the one hundred woodcuts from the first limited editions published in 1925 in Munich (Die Stadt) and Paris (La ville). Curator Matt Williams acknowledged that London was quite late to realise the exceptional significance of The City – some thirty years after The Guardian’s laconic comment “only 65 years late” on the publication of the first British reprint (Redstone Press, London 1988).
1972-The-City-Amerikaanse-reprint-paperback-Dover-Books-New-York Frans Masereel, American reprint of The City (paperback), Dover Books, New York, 1972
For decades the entire Anglo-Saxon art world ignored the timeless qualities of the woodcuts that earned Masereel’s graphic stories a place of honour in the European book art of the interwar period. Among the rare admirers in post-war New York was the Anglo-Irish critic James Stern of The New York Times who in 1948 reviewed Passionate Journey, the first post-war American edition of Masereel’s most acclaimed woodcut novel Mon livre d’heures (Geneva 1919). In the closing paragraph of his review Stern noted: “Unlike many other books, both of words and pictures, first published in the Twenties, Passionate Journey does not date. The problems it presents are more crucial, its philosophy more needed than ever.”