Frans masereel biography

Frans Masereel was a Belgian Impressionist & Modern artist who was born in 1889. Numerous key galleries and museums such as Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Reinhart am Stadtgarten have featured Frans Masereel's work in the past.Frans Masereel's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from 1 USD to 61,092 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork. Since 1998 the record price for this artist at auction is 61,092 USD for Les Ouvrières (Die Arbeiterinnen), sold at Ketterer Kunst Munich in 2012. In the past 12 months, their decorative art have averaged 5,352 USD, while his paintings have sold for an average of 4,278 USD.Frans Masereel has been featured in articles for ArtDaily, Hyperallergic and Wallpaper . The most recent article is Andrew Jones Will Ring in the New Year with a Pair of Online Sales written for ArtDaily in December 2020. The artist died in 1972.

Artist's alternative names: Frantz Masereel

Up until twenty years ago, the Flemish woodcut artist Frans Masereel (1889-1972), most famous on the European continent for his “wordless novels”, remained virtually unknown in the US and the UK. However, over the past few decades, interest in his work has increased substantially in London as well as in New York. Masereel biographer Joris van Parys knows how that came about.

“Charging the static, blocky medium of the woodcut with the newly emergent force of cinema, Masereel created wildly kinetic visions…” This is how, back in 2015, Charles Siebert described in The New York Times Magazine the woodcuts of The City, Masereel’s impressive wordless book about life in a bustling 1920s metropolis. In 2017, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London displayed fifty of the one hundred woodcuts from the first limited editions published in 1925 in Munich (Die Stadt) and Paris (La ville). Curator Matt Williams acknowledged that London was quite late to realise the exceptional significance of The City – some thirty years after The Guardian’s laconic comment “only 65 years late” on the publication of the first British reprint (Redstone Press, London 1988).

For decades the entire Anglo-Saxon art world ignored the timeless qualities of the woodcuts that earned Masereel’s graphic stories a place of honour in the European book art of the interwar period. Among the rare admirers in post-war New York was the Anglo-Irish critic James Stern of The New York Times who in 1948 reviewed Passionate Journey, the first post-warAmerican edition of Masereel’s most acclaimed woodcut novel Mon livre d’heures (Geneva 1919). In the closing paragraph of his review Stern noted: “Unlike many other books, both of words and pictures, first publ

The painter and graphic artist Frans Masereel, born in the Belgian Blankenberghe in 1889, moved to Gent in 1896, where he began to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the class of Jean Delvin at the age of 18. In 1909 he went on trips to England and Germany, which inspired him to first etchings and woodcuts. From 1911 on Masereel settled in Paris for four years and then he emigrated to Switzerland, where he worked as a graphic artist for various journals and magazines. The woodcut series, mainly of sociocritical content and of expressionistic form concept, made Masereel internationally known. Among theses were the so-called image novels like Passion eines Menschen', Mein Stundenbuch', Die Sonne', Die Idee' and Geschichte ohne Worte', which dated all from c. 1920. At that time Masereel also drew illustrations for famous works of world literature by Thomas Mann, Emile Zola and Stefan Zweig. In 1921 the artist returned to Paris, were his famous street scenes, the Montmartre-paintings, came into existence. Since 1925 he lived near Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he painted predominantly coast areas, harbour views as well as portraits of sailors and fishermen. During the 1930s the number of illustrated books and single woodcuts decreased. In 1940 the artist fled from Paris and lived in several cities in Southern France. At the end of world war II Masereel was able to resume his resting artistic work and produced woodcuts and paintings. Since 1946 he worked for several years as a teacher at the Centre des Métiers d'Art' in Saarbrücken. In 1949 Masereel settled in Nizza. In the following years until 1968 several series of woodcuts were published, which differ from his earlier novels in picture' in basing on variations of a subject instead of being a continuing narrative. Furthermore he designed decorations and costumes for numerous theatre productions. The artist was honoured in numerous exhibitions and became a member of several academies. F