Frans Masereel

Frans Masereel – Silent appeals for peace

Frans Masereel was born on 30 July in the Belgian coastal town of Blankenberge and grew up in Ghent. His interest in art revealed itself at an early age and led him at the age of 18 to the École des Beaux-Arts. He soon travelled through Europe and visited England and Germany in 1909 – a fruitful trip which initiated his first woodcuts and etchings. In 1911, Masereel moved for four years to Paris where he gathered further impulses and subsequently worked in Switzerland for various newspapers. The outbreak of the First World War deeply troubled Masereel and drove him back to Ghent, the place of his youth where he felt safe. Whilst the soldiers dug trenches on the battlefields of Europe, Frans Masareel dug a silent protest against the senseless bloodshed into his wood. From then on, the fight against the inhumanity determined the life and work of the artist. 

Humanity in art

His paintings in protest against the war, inspired by Expressionism, made Frans Masereel famous overnight and brought him respectable commissions. In the course of his return to Paris, he created oppressive depictions of light and shade in the overrun streets of the French capital city. He saw everything, showed everything, did not leave anything out. In the same style, he illustrated books by Emile Zola and Thomas Mann, the latter praising Masereel for his gift of illustrating the sheer vitality of the world in all its power. Masereel had a friendly relationship with many literary greats of his time and met Bertolt Brecht, Romain Rolland and Stefan Zweig, and read Marx and Kropotkin. However, his depictions of a society out of joint was only one side of his creativity: When Frans Masereel carved his lines into the hard wood, he always carved a better world. He showed the bad in order to strengthen the longing for the good. Nowhere was this brokenness more at home than in Berlin of the wild 1920s. 

From great to small

With the National Socialist takeover, the artistic frenzy that Masereel had experienced in Berlin ended. Pacifist art did not fit with the war-hungry course of the new rulers, and, like many of his guild comrades, the Belgian artist had to flee abroad. While his exile during the First World War had ignited him as a creative spark for restless resistance against the war, he achieved barely anything artistic during this second flight. It was only after the war that he returned to his art, which increasingly dealt with personal subjects and focused less on major social issues. Frans Masereel received prizes and honours for his work including the Venice Biennale Prize in 1950 and the Culture Prize of the German Federation of Trade Unions in 1964. 

Frans Masereel died in Avignon on 3 January 1972.