![]() ![]() Madman’s Drum, with its African drum reduced to a mere decorative function that silences it, its cursed family whose astonished mother and daughter waste away in turn, and its tragic procession of desires restrained and shattered by an order as cruel as ruthless, is an unrealistic and magnificent work. Madman’s Drum is a complex narrative, extended on several decades, and which structure constantly threatens to crumble under the weight of immense aspirations, as Ward uses numerous graphic and narrative innovations. Ward’s first work, more than an accomplished success, vouches for this inclusion within a process and within the simultaneous development of an intensity point from where, here and now, everything remains possible : eventually Gods’ Man turns out to be a great book, since it is a necessary and generative book, an ideal opening.Ī wary sailor is studying the virgin land on which he has just set foot… This is the beginning of Madman’s Drum, a 118 woodcuts series and Ward’s first masterpiece. The link between the wood engravings that establish and constrain the narration would then refer to an array of broader relationships, between beings, techniques/customs, periods, to History considered as the essential condition for a critical relationship to the world, a full conscience, an être-là. With Gods’ Man, Ward shows his intention to follow a historical, human and temporal path – the novel in woodcuts, albeit a recent innovation, uses a thousand-year-old technique – before thinking about extending it rather than breaking free from it. In this sense, the sequence that follows, through a series of portrait of working artists, the journey of a Brush through the centuries is illuminating the Brush is described, in that succession, as a personal, intimate but also collective tool, the moment always as a moment in History. The 139 wood engravings that compose Gods’ Man are the result of application mixed with apprehension that sometimes curbs the enthusiasm of the first work : a meticulous exploration of the narrative possibilities offered by the novel in woodcuts (which Ward had discovered two years earlier reading Frans Masereel’s((Frans Masereel is seen as the pioneer of the novel in woodcuts with Die Passion eines Menschen, published in Germany in 1918.)) Die Sonne), cautious first attempts to test its limits, the diligent discovery of an open (thematic, graphic, symbolic) space which Ward will deepen in his following books. ![]() Instead, Ward’s work echoes with an essential timelessness today as much as yesterday, those comic pages are deeply moving because they capture the world and the wills it is shaped by, and impress by the ways they manage to do so.Īmbitious but featuring established motives that the author struggles to transcend, Ward’s first narrative remains his most conventional work, despite its true qualities. We will avoid approaching those works as outdated curiosities, reminders of an age whose tensions would have by now gracefully vanished as if by some democratic magic. As rich, passionate and excessive as Ward’s books are, they cannot be reduced to the status of proto-graphic novel which the novel in woodcuts is sometimes afflicted with when it takes on an early and accomplished form. Between the vast hope nurtured by potential revolutionaries and the profound angst that goes with the first totalitarian ambitions, the core of the artwork is filled with a combination of powerful and contrary affects. ![]() Lynd Ward is the author of six novels in woodcuts published in the United States between 19. ![]()
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