Frans Masereel
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Frans Masereel was a Belgian painter and graphic artist who worked mainly in France. He is known especially for his woodcuts which focused on political and social issues, such as war and capitalism. H
Frans Masereel in his studio, by Jules De Bruycker
Cornucopia, a mosaic by Frans Masereel
From Mon Livre d'Heures (A Passionate Journey, 1919)
Wordless novel
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The wordless novel is a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using woodcut and other relief printing techniques, the terms
Frans Masereel
…Arno. Masereel's woodcut series, mainly of sociocritical content and expressionistic in form, made Masereel internationally known. Among them were the wordless novels 25 Images of a Man's Passion (1918), Passionate Journey (1919), The Sun (1919), The Idea (1920), Story Without Words (1920), and Landscapes and Voices…
Wordless novels flourished in Germany in the 1920s and typically were made using woodcut or similar techniques in an Expressionist style. (Frans Masereel, 25 Images of a Man's Passion, 1918)
Expressionist film and graphics inspired early wordless novels. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920)
Wordless novelists favoured relief printing such as in this wood engraving from Ward's Prelude to a Million Years (1933).
In He Done Her Wrong (1930), Milt Gross parodied Lynd Ward's Gods' Man (1929).