Masereel Frans (1889-1972)

Together with Jan-Frans Cantré, Jozef Cantré, Henri Van Straten en Joris Minne, Masereeel is counted to “the big Five”, that renewed the Flemish Graphical art after the first world war. The image novel that he liked himself the most was L'Idée. In 83 woodcuts, we see the Idea - just as nude as the truth- tracked by Police and Justice-, but she lives, survives and lives and proliferates. This book was very popular in German anti-Nazi circles.

Masereel said that the woodcut was the medium par excellence to evoke distribute his pacifism and criticism on society to thousands of people. He tried to denounce the oppression and exploitation of the common man.

In 1911 Masereel settled in Paris for four years and then immigrated to Switzerland, where he worked as a graphic artist for journals and magazines. 

Masereel could not return to Belgium at the end of World War I because, being a pacifist, he had refused to serve in the Belgian army. Nonetheless, when a circle of friends in Antwerp interested in art and literature decided to found the magazine Lumière, Masereel was one of the artists invited to illustrate the text and the column headings. The magazine was first published in Antwerp in August 1919. It was an artistic and literary journal published in French. The magazine's title Lumière was a reference to the French magazine Clarté, which was published in Paris by Henri Barbusse. The principal artists who illustrated the text and the column headings in addition to Masereel himself were Jan Frans Cantré, Jozef Cantré, Henri van Straten, and Joris Minne. Together, they became known as 'De Vijf' or 'Les Cinq' ('The Five'). Lumière was a key force in generating renewed interest in wood engraving in Belgium.

He was a close friend of the German artist Georges Grosz whom he met in 1919. Oddly enough, the work of Frans Masereel is better appreciated in Germany than in Belgium. Perhaps the style of his work is closer to the aesthetics of the German Expressionist movement where harsh contrasts are more in taste.