The Revelator

“Should every­thing per­ish, all the books, the pho­tographs and the doc­u­ments, and we were left only with the wood­cuts Masereel has cre­at­ed, through them alone we could recon­struct our con­tem­po­rary world.” — Ste­fan Zweig When asked about the Bel­gium artist Frans Masereel, the two thoughts that imme­di­ate­ly come to mind are wood­cuts and war.  I do not know an artist who was so wed­ded to the wood­cut in express­ing his loathing of war. Although this theme pre­vailed in many of his books, an exam­i­na­tion of his wood­cuts in Debout Les morts (Arise Ye Dead, 1917) as reprint­ed in this issue of THE REVELATOR, pro­vides a vital con­nec­tion to his sub­se­quent anti-war books; and there were many, as we will dis­cov­er. Masereel was born in 1889 in an upper-mid­­dle class fam­i­ly from Blanken­berghe, Bel­gium.  He showed inter­est in draw­ing and remem­bered a dis­like of war from an ear­ly age: I can still remem­ber the Boer War, which made a great … Con­tin­ue read­ing →