Frans Masereel - Die Sonne - 1927

Frans Masereel: AI turns it into a lofty tale. But the strength lies in simplicity, of technique and color. Masereel was the best of the wood-engravers, who used this difficult and labor-intensive craft to make graphics with few details, to get to the core. And then in black and white! The sun tells the story, Masereel's 'visual suite', which falls asleep above his instruments, and dreams that his alter-ego is the autumn sun. The 'sun' stands for the human quest, for happiness, wisdom and sex. Time and again he gets the lid blown off, and the well-to-do bourgeoisie want nothing to do with vitalism, which is seen as incitement. The Nazis thus banned Masereel's books. Literary-historical and comic-historically important: Masereel's graphic narratives sold very well as prohibitively expensive art, but he wanted a democratic art: the 'people's editions' were cheaper, and are now regarded as the very first 'graphic novels'. With publisher Kurt Wolff he conceived the people's editions to be provided with introductions by famous writers, such as Thomas Mann and here Heise, to also appeal to readers who were not initiated. Splendid copy, all 63 wood engravings in strong black-and-white. Well bound, no damage, some specks on the back cover. With an introduction by Carl Georg Heise.