Masereel

uit Goddard: (nog bewerken):

Of course the war had an enormous and complex impact upon the arts (the Imperial War Museum in London has over 5000 works by artists among the allied forces alone).58 It is remarkable to consider the breadth of reaction to the war.

While De Bruycker was at work on his large visionary but traditional etchings in London, the Dadaists were (by 1916) living out their first wave of revolutionary performances and utterances in Zurich. Ghent-educated woodcut artist Frans Masereel (fig. 8), a friend of De Bruycker's, spent the war years in Switzerland to avoid serving in the Belgian military. While in Switzerland Masereel "became noted for stark woodcuts with pacifist and leftist themes, published in new, pacifist Swiss journals such as La Feuille in Geneva."59

Many artist from all camps were, at the outset, enthusiastic and optimistic about the war, but through personal experiences with the horrors of battle they were quickly disillusioned or battle-scarred in more profound ways. August Macke, Franz Marc, Antonio Sant'Elia, and Umberto Boccioni were killed in battle. Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Roger de La Fresnaye died of war-related illnesses. Georges Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Oskar Kokoschka were wounded, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner suffered from nervous disorders resulting from the war.60

The war can be seen as a crucible in which pre-war impulses, the authority of intense personal experience, and various reactions to war and the specific social and political evils it exposed interacted and propelled the arts along the main trajectories of modernism.

While De Bruycker participated in this arena, it was in a personal and idiosyncratic way. His earlier immersion in the microcosm of Ghent was superseded by apocalyptic images of war infused with Flemish cultural lore, frequently of a Bruegelian caste. This upwelling seems like a rallying of a cultural genotype in the face of threatened extinction.

De Bruycker was not alone in turning to popular elements of his native culture in time of war; Kasimir Malevich's wartime images made reference to Russian "Lubok" folk prints, just as Raoul Dufy's made reference to French "Images d'Épinal" folk prints.61 De Bruycker's startling wartime images yielded to a re-immersion in the microcosm of Ghent after the war, sometimes with a lingering visionary edge. Ultimately, De Bruycker's apocalyptic reaction to the Great War as he saw it from afar proved to be quite different from his reaction to the second German occupation of Belgium of 1940, which he witnessed in person.