Novels without words
John Henshall
THE SUN by Frans Masereel
Redstone Press, 7(a) Lawrence Terrace, London W10 5SU, boxed, £10.95, pp. 68
Athe Academy of Fine Art at Ghent in Belgium in 1909, a first-year student, Frans Masereel, was advised by his tutor, Jaan Delvin, to leave, see the world's treasures, and work on his own. 'The Academy,' said Delvin, 'has nothing more to add to your education.' This was meant as a compliment, and Masereel acted on it. Almost immediately, the young artist born at Blankenberghe, Flanders, in 1889, met the satirical engraver, Jules de Bruycker; he turned his interest in painting into interest in graphics, pen and ink. Masereel moved to Paris; shy and with' drawn, observing and drawing all he saw in the streets, bars and cafds, he nonetheless met his future wife, Pauline Imhoff. He was enjoying learning his craft, adored being young and in love, and took Pauline off to Tunis for a time. However, things suddenly changed, for the Great War was upon them. Frans Masereel was a pacifist, propagan.. dist, and above all, a humanitarian, who worked for the International Red Cross in Geneva during the war. He continued to practise his art, in pen and ink and increasingly — in woodcuts. Then he met a man who was to be a seminal influence, the French anti-war writer, Romain Rolland. Through him, he began drawing pacifist cartoons for La Feuille, then making wood- cuts for Les Tablettes. These were power: fully evocative works and, back in Pans after the war, the diffident unknown had become the name artist. His cartoons were compared with Daumier's; he illustrated works by Tolstoy, Zola, Rolland, Zweig and Wilde. Among his greatest admirers were Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.. Masereel was a man of tireless energies. with a war on, and with endless newspaper work, he continued to develop his start- lingly dramatic, expressionist woodcut style. These refinements were initially forced by the poor quality paper available to La Feuille: thin lines didn't come out properly, so swathes of black and white were needed. Before the war ended, he had begun to produce the extraordinary works for which he will be remembered: the 'novels without words' — stories told in up to 200 woodcuts, with no text at all. Their hypnotic, quasi-cinematographic cycles are the story.
He produced about a dozen of these innovatory books. Four have been pub- lished here by the Redstone Press. The latest, The Sun (1919), has just appeared in the usual Redstone boxed format. It is a visionary work by a man who remained the eternal outsider, perhaps the quintessential journalist — a retiring seer who said he didn't like to talk about himself: his works did that.
Masareel flirted with Soviet commun- ism, and had Moscow exhibitions in 1926 and 1930, but this enthusiasm cooled as Stalin's excesses became known. He was in Spain during the Civil War, drawing Re- publican propaganda, but returned sick- ened by the atrocities, and disillusioned by the in-fighting of the Republican cadres. Then darker clouds loomed over Europe, and Masereel spent the second world war at Avignon, drawing for the French resist- ance. The Allies dropped thousands of his leaflets over German lines. In 1951, an eminence grise, he was made a member of the Belgian Academy; in 1969 he was feted with a huge show at Antwerp. He died at Avignon in 1972. His book, The Sun, explores man's relationship with destiny, and his frenzied attempts to reach the source of light, liberty and life itself, as promised by the rays of the sun. In a book of overwhelming emotional intensity, his artist hero's `dream-self steps from his body, as he slumbers at his desk, and undergoes all manner of trials and adventures (all the time with the unthinking masses trying to restrain him) until he is himself consumed in a fireball by the very sun he seeks leaving the bewildered artist pondering his fate as if woken from a dream.
Paris is the basis for The City (1925/1989, £10.95, pp. 110), a symbolic synthesis of cities everywhere, and a didactic lesson for those who create and inhabit them. For Masereel, cities were simultaneously places of interest, tedium, love, hatred, joy, sorrow and horror. He regarded them — as had Rilke — as unreal, dehumanising places. He shows us anonymous office blocks, their floors crammed with cowering clerks, crowds mesmerised by hollow de- magogues, other crowds who come together only to gawp at the latest accident victim, touching trysts, brutal murders, even a furtive cat, slinking downstairs at dead of night.
In Passionate Journey (1919/1987, £10.95, pp. 170; Penguin £4.99), Masereel succeeds in providing a sublime interpreta- tion of the lives of all men through the A sequence from Masereel's The Sun experiences of one. This anonymous figure travels continental Europe and beyond, and is described in an introduction by Thomas Mann as 'the outsider, the un- involved, the pure guest.' He is sent by Masereel, rootless, classless, yet ever cu- rious, to demonstrate the myriad follies, trials and joys of any one lifetime.
Redstone have also published The Ideal Story Without Words (1920/1924/1987, pp. 148 — temporarily out of print). The first of these is the story of a 'spirit-woman' and her adventures in the real world, the second a moving love story. The woodcut 'text' of the latter is available as the illust- ration to the Redstone 1990 Diary (£6.95).
Frans Masereel was surely one of the most gifted, original graphic artists of the century, and it is worth remembering Thomas Mann's opinion. A journalist once asked Mann which was the most stirring film he had ever seen. Mann's reply must have astonished him: `Masereel's Passion- ate Journey.'
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