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Title: The Idea
Author: Frans Masereel
Date: 1920
Language: en
Topics: art
Source: The Frans Masereel Group, AKA: Masereel Group, http://www.masereelgroup.com/?id=17

Frans Masereel

The Idea

2020 Preface

The Masereel Group is devoted to spreading the public domain works of

this great artist. The text was first acquired and then scanned. Then it

was cropped, rotated, balanced, contrasted, saturated, despeckled,

noise-reductioned, and some manually touched up. This was followed by

OCR scanning, manual proofreading, and translating into English.

This book is in the public domain in the United States (because it was

published before 1925), but it is not public domain in Europe (because

its author died in 1972). But the Masereel Group is based in the United

States, so everything within here is released under the Public Domain,

and all content that is not allowed to be licensed under the Public

Domain is released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 3.0

License.

UprisingEngineer, Masereel Group,

August 30, 2020

The Idea

83 Woodcuts

From

Frans Masereel

Introduction by Hermann Hesse

Kurt Wolff Verlag / Munich

5. -- 9. Thousand

Printed in 1928 by Offizin Haag-Drugulin, A.-G. in Leipzig / Cover

Munich / Printed in Germany

INTRODUCTION

"La passion d'un homme", "The Path of Sorrows", was the title of the

first series of woodcuts by Frans Masereel, which I saw years ago in

brotherhood counts, although I have never met him personally, and

although he is actually not close to me in terms of type and origin, but

rather is my antipode.

“Man's Path of Sorrows” could be the title of the whole work of this

wonderful, fanatical, childlike, refined artist, and this already means

that Masereel has been at the center of all art from the very beginning.

Because man's path of suffering, the passion of the Incarnation, the

painful being on this difficult path, the thousand upsurges, a thousand

bitter relapses - this passion story is the only and eternal content of

all art.

This very modern artist Masereel, this real big city dweller, this

curious, slightly enthusiastic, always hungry, always receptive child

person, who so often has to do with factories and cars, with flywheels

and pipes, skyscrapers and urban street traffic, who has the distorted

face of the usurer Having portrayed the raw of the policeman, the stupid

of the whore, the evil of the exploiter a hundred and a thousand times

as timely, he is basically always occupied with something thoroughly

timeless and eternal: with the eternally identical, eternally

compassionate, eternally inspiring human history. How this two-legged,

talented, evil, dangerous, cowardly cattle can become that other person

whom the religions and great cultures mean, the person of the idea, the

person in the service of God, the person of love, self-conquest and

goodness - these ancient, serious, happy, holy story, about which the

Bibles of all peoples and ages deal, this Bethlehem, Jerusalem and

Golgotha of the developing, the aspiring human is the content of

Masereel's art, over and over again. He does not speak of Moses and the

kings, not of the prophets and not of the Savior, he speaks of himself

and of us, his brothers, he speaks of the people of our time, as he is

in the midst of his cities, his machines, his armies and Barracks, his

factories and penitentiaries are looking for their way, the longing for

God in their hearts, sometimes attracted and bound by the world with all

the loveliest charms of love, sometimes deeply offended and

disappointed, involved in a hundred battles, hero and fool of an eternal

ideal. Masereel has portrayed this person many times, always it is

himself. Several times he has let him die, he has placed him against a

wall in front of the soldiers' shotguns and had him shot, often he has

visibly perished in a hopeless fight with them much stronger world, with

these barracks, these judges, these newspaper and factory people, these

wooers, these ruffians and connoisseurs. But again and again he gets up,

again and again he begins his beautiful and difficult path, again and

again he falls from the sky with broken wings, only to swing himself out

of the gloomy chamber window of everyday life in enthusiastic hours. And

all these fights - that's the wonderful thing! - Not a preacher, not an

angry prophet, not an accusing judge, not a malicious satirist, but a

lover experiences all these battles, these sufferings, these wanderings

and agony of death. Something of that which makes him so drunk and

enthusiastic and that inspires his flight so ravishingly, something of

this distant, divine, blissfully anticipated, fervently sought, what he

finds in sun and sea, in flowers and animals, in beautiful bodies and in

beautiful pious ones Worshiping gestures and seeking out again and

again, something of the ray of this divine is also in his factories, his

night clubs, his prostitutes, his courtrooms, his distorted egoist

faces. On many of his papers, where the hero falls into the hands of the

Philistines and is stoned by the mob or rolled to death by the ice-cold

justice machine of the state, the bearers of the brute force may have

really angry, really wild, raw, beastly faces, but their grins reveals

infinite agony - they too go a difficult path, a path of suffering, the

wicked, the violent criminals, the lost brothers who want to kill the

living and eternal in themselves as they kill it in the persecuted hero.

They too suffer, these brutal violent people, they too are on their way

on a difficult, arduous path, lost people, plagued by fearful dreams,

convulsively doing stupid and wrong things. They too suffer, they too

are people, are brothers. As much as he seems to simplify with his rapid

wood-cutting technique, the artist loves to pursue the characteristic

expression, the characteristic gesture of his villains and evildoers

too, he studies the elegant top hat, the grimace of the policeman

snarling, the crease of the industrialist's trousers with the the same

love, the same devotion, curiosity and burning artist obsession as he

studies the shimmer of a naked body, the smile of a child.

In the woodcut series “The Idea” Masereel found one of his most

delightful symbols. There he sits at the table, the dear fellow, coaxed,

pensive, concentrated, waiting for the spark. And the spark comes and

ignites, from the artist's head the idea jumps brightly and easily, a

small, lovely girl figure, a shimmering, naked little Undine, whom he

greets with delight and gratefulness, presses to his heart, adores,

kisses full of love. But then the holy hour is already over, the idea

must go, it must go out into the world, to the others. Sadly, he says

goodbye to her, sadly he sees her making her way. She no longer belongs

to him, the dear little one, she has flown away and is now going towards

the world, towards her mission. It is received with curiosity, with joy,

in the midst of a swarm of people who are ready to grab it, exploit it,

and sell it on. She, the naked, beautiful fairy tale child, is quickly

put into everyday clothes, she wears her clothes sadly through the

streets, rushes from them furiously, races and dances naked and radiant

through the world, is gazed at by the people, suspected by the

Philistines, denounced by morality , taken away by the police, locked

up, dressed in new clothes. She finds her father and hero again, who

receives her blissfully, who is persecuted because of her, is captured,

is led to death - but she is always with him, makes suffering a joy, and

when he is shot and dies for his idea should, she places herself between

him and death, but has to see him die and help bury. She walks on

through the world, the dear little fairy, she enchants and frightens

people, is coveted and persecuted by them, she takes refuge in a print

shop, is reproduced, flies a hundredfold, comes into a thousand hands,

in front of a thousand eyes, excited love and contempt, admiration and

scandal - how happy and easy it swings up on the paper where it leaves

the press! It is pursued again, is burned, but while the burners glee

into the ashes, it is already floating away high in the air, conquering

the wire, the telephone, the train, the Morse set, the photographer and

film superior and mermaid with the whole complicated apparatus of our

mechanics, gets everything excited, confuses everything, spreads seeds

of unrest, of life, of love, of indignation, and in the end, after

eighty adventures, finds his way back to him, to hers Father and lover.

He's sitting and has just given birth to a new, beautiful idea - but

wasn't he shot dead? to bury? No, he's been living again a long time

ago, maybe since then he has died many deaths, gone through many

Gethsemans. She floats in to him and sees him sadly obsessed with the

new idea, in love with his new sister, but she too is not allowed to

stay with him, she too has to go out and begin her passionate journey.

Thus the ring closes, the Creator remains lonely.

I would like to wish that this idea will make this little, radiant

sorceress, quite a lot in love with herself, enchant quite a lot and

fill it with a longing for their homeland, our homeland. It is a spark

from beyond, a tender call from the higher world, a tender reminder of

our goal and our task, of the path of incarnation that lies ahead of us.

We don't want to smile at her or pursue her, this beautiful girl from

abroad, we neither want to pursue her, nor burn her, nor drag her down

and turn her into a whore. She is our dear little sister, a greeting

from our distant home.

The man who wrote this wonderful little picture story, and many others,

is a Belgian, and one day during the war he appeared in Switzerland, not

to cry out for revenge for his fatherland, but for the war itself to

explain. Day after day, joy and consolation for a loyal little group of

like-minded people, Masereel's woodcuts against the war, a new sheet

every day. The rest of us were all very busy at the time, we had to

shoot or guard prisoners, or bandage wounds or invent new substitutes.

But when I think back to that fantastic time, it seems to me that

Masereel was actually the only one who did something sensible, something

good and worthy of gratitude every day. I would like to take this late

opportunity to thank him for this.

Hermann Hesse

DOCTOR LOUIS LAVA

APPROPRIATE

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