Woodcut on paper by Frans Masereel – Titled: The satisfied, 1954

Original limited edition fine art print by Frans Masereel – Titled: Les satisfaits dated 1954 (The satisfied)

Woodcut on paper signed and dated in pencil by de artist on lower right and numbered and titled on lower left also monogramed and dated in plate on lower left. One of an edition of 25 signed, dated, titled and numbered woodcuts.

Artwork is not framed and in perfect condition.

Dimension: 31 x 23 cm

Price: $ CAD (Canadian dollars) – For more information on artwork, artist, price, shipping  or other details contact the gallery.

Xylography or Woodcut

Frans Masereel is often considered a master and renovator of woodcutting. If the artist is known for his engraved work, Masereel also developed an important painted work.

It is from 1914 that Masereel becomes familiar with this creative process and it is when he is in Switzerland that he will seize it in order to transmit his ideas. These powerful graphics, which he often puts at the service of realism is both fairy and social and allows him to express his disgust for injustice in all its forms and his wish for an egalitarian society. He invented the “novel without words”. The first being the 25 Images of the Passion of a Man in 1918, a graphic narrative intended for an adult readership composed of a series of symbolic engravings The Sun, Idea or realistic such as La Ville, Debout les Morts where the absence of text makes it possible to tell the story by the only narrative force of the image and thereby make it accessible to a large majority. These stories met with some success; Thomas Mann, for example, was fond of it. Berthold Bartosch was inspired by one of his books and worked with Masereel to make the animated film, The Idea, in 1931. His expressionism had a great influence on European and American printmakers.

A quote from Stefan Zweig taken from the preface to his monograph on Masereel in 1923 says: « Everything could perish: all books, monuments, photographs and documents, if the woodcuts that Frans Masereel created during these ten years remained, by them alone could be reconstructed our contemporary world, and moreover nothing that these sheets would give us to grasp the dangerous spirit, the genius and the psychic turmoil of our time.»