Frans MasereelEs gibt keine schönere Farbe als das Schwarz

It is a little like meeting old acquaintances. The figures that the Belgian artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972) has bequeathed to us, and the scenes and the stories that his pictures tell us, are inseparably bound up with the fascination of the silent films of the 1920s, of a Sergei Eisenstein, say, or of the early Alfred Hitchcock. That Masereel’s pictures are still able to exert a deep pull today is widely known, yet the sheets and books are worth a closer look beyond mere recognition. That is why it was and is an exceptional stroke of luck that the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen was able to acquire a large group of works by Masereel in 1989. The books with original woodcuts, the woodcut cycles and the individual woodcuts of this museum collection are supplemented in the current exhibition and in the book accompanying it – both of which celebrate the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death on 3 January 2022 – by numerous loans from private collections, thus offering a comprehensive retrospective of his complete work with almost 250 exhibits from the period between 1911 and 1971. Frans Masereel, who in 1953, alongside HAP Grieshaber, Erich Heckel, Gerhard Marcks, Ewald Mataré, Otto Pankok, Max Pechstein and Karl Rössing, was one of the founding members of the international woodcut association XYLON, of which he was the first president, made a decisive contribution with his narrative picture series to the great popularity of an art that understood itself politically in the humanist sense in the twentieth century. His groups of works „Idee. Ihre Geburt, ihr Leben, ihr Tod“, „Die Stadt“, „Mein Stundenbuch“ and „Die Toten sprechen“ have become legendary, to name but a few.

Exhibition:
Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, 16/12/2021 – 10/4/2022