About Frans Masereel
Ghent resident in an international network
Frans Masereel grew up in the French-speaking bourgeoisie of Ghent, but he led his artistic life on the international stage. He and his wife, Pauline Imhoff, traveled extensively and with great enthusiasm. The couple lived in Paris, Geneva, and Nice, among other places, and through their travels, Masereel formed close friendships with writers and artists such as Henri Guilbeaux, Léon Bazalgette, Romain Rolland, Henry Van de Velde, and Stefan Zweig.
Social commitment
Masereel's oeuvre is imbued with the bourgeois values he instilled at home, such as social justice and individual freedom. With his woodcuts, he emerged early in his career as the leading illustrator of various pacifist publications, such as Les Tablettes, La Feuille, and Clarté. Around the same time, he pioneered the medium of the graphic novel in wordless books like Mon livre d'heures and La Ville, for which he continues to enjoy international renown. In addition, over the next fifty years or so, he developed an impressive oeuvre of independent woodcuts with a unique and still highly beloved visual language.
Under the Nazi regime, his publications were banned in Germany. He produced anti-Nazi pamphlets and fled to the south of France in June 1940. He died in Avignon in 1973 at the age of 82. And after a life of travel, his final wish was to be buried in Ghent.
Double exhibition
Amsab-ISG: The Friendship – Masereel, Bazalgette and Zweig
April 2 - August 28, 2022,
Amsab-ISG will focus on the friendship between Masereel, Austrian author Stefan Zweig, and French translator Léon Bazalgette. Various documents and publications will highlight the bond between these men. The commemoration is therefore an ideal opportunity to showcase their exceptionally valuable collection of masterpieces: in 2003, Amsab-ISG received a unique collection of some 300 woodblocks, nearly 400 galvanos, and 33 books from Masereel.
MSK: Masereel in words and images
April 2 - June 19, 2022.
In its collection presentation, the MSK presents a broad selection from its collection of over 700 works by the artist. Not only is the complete series of pen and brush drawings for the book "Mon livre d'heures" (My Life of Hours) from around 1918 on display for the first time, but this comprehensive tribute focuses on the entirety of Masereel's oeuvre, from the early 1920s in iconic woodcuts like "The Kiss," through rarely shown sketchbooks from 1937-1940, to his late graphic work, imbued with a remarkable sense of fantasy.
Lecture series
May 29, 2022 - MSK - Kees van Kooten about Frans Masereel, one of his Passions
In 1991, Kees van Kooten, who was turning 50 at the time, received a remarkable painting as a gift from his wife Barbara. A steamship seen from a jetty on the Belgian coast, signed FM 1939. Indeed: a work by Frans Masereel. And it didn't stop there. Van Kooten, also world-famous in Flanders through television programs like "De Klisjeemannetjes" (The Little Men), "Het Simpliesties Verbond" (The Simple Association), and "Keek op de Week" (Looking at the Week), became obsessed with Masereel.
Twenty years ago, he wrote a beautiful text about "Hardstochtjes" (Little Hearts) Barely thirty years old, Frans Masereel poured out six books containing a total of seven hundred and forty-six lyrical, often exceptionally witty woodcuts, each taking him six hours to create. They are astonishing examples of visual poetry, in which he virtuously and with panache turns the laws of logic, common decency, and gravity on their heads. "
On May 29th, Kees van Kooten will read the story "Plucking a Woman , which is entirely dedicated to Frans Masereel and from which the above quotation was taken. The reading will be followed by a free discussion about his love for the artist.
June 5, 2022 - MSK - Els Snick: A friendship in words and images / Frans Masereel in posthumous texts by Stefan Zweig
Belgian artist Frans Masereel was admired and praised by Austrian star writer Stefan Zweig. They met during the First World War in Switzerland, united by pacifism and the hope that art could improve the world. Their friendship is documented in numerous letters and in Zweig's extensive essay on Masereel—in which he calls his friend a natural talent—but especially in his posthumously published autobiography, " The World of Yesterday." Els Snick recounts the lives and work of both artists and situates their friendship within the context of the turbulent European history of the twentieth century.
Els Snick is a translator of German literature and teaches German at the Department of Translation, Interpreting, and Communication at Ghent University. She earned her doctorate on the literary networks of the Austrian author Joseph Roth in the Low Countries, co-founded the Joseph Roth Society with Geert Mak, and translated a large portion of Roth's work (primarily journalistic, which she collected). As the translator of " Every Friendship with Me Is Destructive," the correspondence between Roth and Stefan Zweig, she also became better acquainted with this author. She recently translated Zweig's "The Land Between Languages," reports on Belgian cities, and the Antwerp novella "The Wonders of Life."
June 23, 2022 - Amsab-ISG - Book presentation Els Snick: The Wonders of Life (in collaboration with Uitgeverij Vrijdag)
Els Snick, a German lecturer at Ghent University, will be hosting a book launch at Amsab-ISG to mark the publication of Stefan Zweig's , "The Wonders of Life," published by Vrijdag ). Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer of Jewish descent. He achieved international fame with stories and novels such as "Chess Short Story" and "The World of Yesterday ." His novel, "The Wonders of Life ," was translated into Dutch by the Ghent University translators' collective, led by Els Snick.
This 1904 novella is set in sixteenth-century Antwerp. A wealthy and pious merchant wishes to donate a painting to the cathedral in gratitude for his mother's miraculous healing. He commissions the work from an elderly painter who, in his search for a model for the Virgin Mary, encounters a Jewish girl who has fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe. The friendship between the elderly painter and the girl blossoms against the backdrop of the impending Beeldenstorm, which marks the story's climax. This early work already explores many of Stefan Zweig's later themes: an unlikely encounter that leads to a life-changing event, religious conflict, and historical events.
With the support of Literature Flanders .
In the press
- VRT NWS - (Re)discover artist Frans Masereel in Ghent, the father of the graphic novel
- The Time - The timeless woodcuts of Frans Masereel
- Het Nieuwsblad - “He didn't need any speech bubbles”: 50 years after his death, woodcarving artist Frans Masereel remains surprisingly relevant
- Klara - Ampersand
