The work of Frans Masereel and its role in the formation of the graphic art in Argentine modernism

The purpose of the article is to analyze the work of the Belgian artist Frans Masereel in the light of anarchist ideology, as well as its relevance for the creativity of Argentine modernist artists Antonio Ballester and Victor Rebuffo in the context of anarchist magazine culture in Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the proposing of a new perspective to study the work of F. Masereel, which has been considered exclusively in the context of communist ideology. Besides, this article enhances the discussion on the origins and development of Argentine graphic art in the first half of the twentieth century. The relevance of the research topic is the consideration of a paramount though little-discussed phenomenon in the context of Russian and international historiography, namely the multi-faceted relation between the artistic avant-garde and anarchism at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The significance of the article lies in the historical restoration of the persistent dialogue between the work and the biography of F. Masereel and the social and aesthetic tendencies of anarchism. Moreover, this article sheds light, for the first time in Russian historiography, on the study of such a vivid and distinctive phenomenon as the Argentine graphics of the first half of the twentieth century. The sources for this analysis are journals and magazines, among which stand out: La Feuille, Les Tablettes, Clarte, Les Cahiers d'aujourd'hui (In Europe), La Protesta, Contra: la revista de los fran-co-tiradores, Accion de arte, La Campana de palo, and Accion libertaria (In Argentina), which contains previously unexplored graphic works. The conclusions of the research elucidate not only the contribution of F. Masereel to the formation of the xylography as a paramount language in Argentine graphic art, but also to the consolidation, in the revolutionary Argentine art, of such themes and motifs, as the urban landscape, the jail, the worker, the martyr, and the Christ, which appear in the work of local modernist graphic artist A. Ballester and V. Rebuffo. Besides, F. Masereel's influence was discussed as an impulse for the formation of new genre tendencies in Argentine graphics. This is the case of the wordless novel, which was assimilated by the local anarchist magazine culture throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and further by V. Rebuffo in his wordless novel “Contraluz”. Thus, Masereel was considered not only as a carrier of the revolutionary anarchist worldview, but also as a stimulus for artistic innovations in European and Argentine graphic art. In the study, we relied on the methods of formal-artistic, iconographic analysis, iconological method, cultural-historical and sociological, as well as comparative methods.

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