Engaged in the social struggles of his time and close to the communist ideals which denounced the stranglehold of capital in all sectors of life, the Belgian artist Frans Masereel (1889-1972) made two trips to the Soviet Union in 1935 and 1936, in order to see if there was anything new in the East.
This work retraces, using rare documents and sources drawn from Russian archives, the tribulations of a friend of the people.
Born in Blankenberghe in 1889, Frans Masereel quickly skipped classes at the Ghent School of Fine Arts to better explore the mysteries of the city in the company of the etcher Jules De Bruycker. In 1911, he moved to Paris, published his drawings in the press (Les Hommes du jour, Le Rire) through the journalist Henri Guilbeaux, and learned wood engraving from a fine art supplies dealer. Having moved to Switzerland in 1915 to do useful work for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Masereel met pacifist writers (René Arcos, Pierre Jean Jouve, Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig). If war alone cannot justify the existence of the military by eliminating them, Masereel proposes to engrave its disasters in the pacifist press (Demain, Les Tablettes, La Feuille) and in his first two engraved suites Debout les morts and Les Morts parle, published in 1917. The following year, he published 25 Images de la passion d'un homme, a wordless story in images composed of woodcuts on the theme of class struggle. Encouraged by the writers of Mitteleuropa to plough this furrow, he undertook during the interwar period – alongside his work as an illustrator and editor for Le Sablier – a series of woodcut novels that we can "read" today as an uncompromising observation of a sick society, drunk on progress and profits. Frans Masereel gives up the ghost and
his gouges in Nice in 1972.