Passionate Journeys

Masereel on life and all that

25 Images of a Man’s Passion, Passionate Journey, Politische Zeichnungen and The City by Frans Masereel

It is a dark world. The stacks on the factory roofs produce black smoke by the million cubic feet. The roads are dark. They have tyres moving on them now, not horses’ hooves. But they are dark and scuffed and there are many people in the streets of this city. You see children running about in the street. They seem poor, but all children are poor when they are not rich. Do they have a mother and father? You wonder. You pick one boy up – he’s not playing with the others – and hoist him on your shoulders. He finds the whole thing very funny and you put him down.

You wander the city. It’s what you do. You see people working, people moving great cart wheels and moving horses and men. The trains go by, full of people, full of coal, full of something. The soldiers march through the streets, too, and you see them go. Their uniforms might be full of colour but all is black to you, all gradients of deep, dark hues. The theatres are full of people; the halls full of couples dancing. There is someone there for you, if you keep looking. You must keep looking; and though they’re not forever (no one is) your searches are sometimes, on occasion, rewarded.

Now dance!

More than a few evenings of company, sometimes. On occasion you know them their whole lives. You’ll mourn for them, in time. It’s the pattern of this life we have.

Even the fine fabrics and the sparkling jewels – real or fake, diamond or paste – seem dark to you, too. They’re etched out of something, an inky blackness. Like slate, jett. Everything is dark-hued to you.

Why do you see things this way?

There is a funeral procession outside as you go out, but you’re whistling. Other people have friends, lovers, relations to grieve. You’ve got to get moving. To the factory, perhaps, or to the political meeting. Always on the move, a slow ambulatory motion. Not going anywhere, not anywhere particular, just travelling through life.

You might find a platform one day and deliver a speech. Men without work are marching and you might join in. You’ll kneel before an altar if one is brought up before you. Your life’s a small canvas but it’s all you have. This life’s a small canvas but it’s all you have.

The weather is worse and worse. You walk more and more, these days. Too many of your old haunts are haunted. You’ve no one to see when the work is done. Out into the streets of the city you see the men marching past. Men under arms. They have something they love, something they care about. They sing songs about dying for what they love. You’d rather not have to, if it’s all the same. But they sing the songs regardless, heedless of you. Heedless of the man in the crowd who is walking the other way, who slouches a little while they are bolt upright, who is whistling, not thinking about much, not full of intensity as they are filled.

You’re working in a factory and it’s hard work, but such is life. Not much time left for all of this, now. You might take your walks in the woods and stare up, lying flat on your back, at the stars. The world exists, in your leisure time at least, to entertain you. You imagine the stars. How far away they are in the inky darkness. Someone told you they were very far away. You feel yourself disappearing into the great distances like a puff of smoke from the chimneys you’ve seen all your life.

One of the great visionary artists of his own time, Frans Masereel is strangely forgotten in the parts of western Europe that don’t speak German. Yet how many have caught the pre-war, the inter-war, the industrial state, cranking itself into constant motion. Coal dust and burning smoky fuels. Weddings and funerals, poor children in the street in packs, and workers and soldiers and the women one finds out and about in the evenings. Cheap amusements, dearly-won pleasures. The stuff of life, of life at a time when life seemed to have no meaning, little future. Where everything was to be made but no one was making the most of it.

All rendered in the darkest black, the necessity of the woodcut artist. A dark world, made briefly bright. Expressionism in still form. The spirit of the age. These wordless novels, harbinger of all art to come.