TEXT: NONE
ARTIST: LYND WARD (READ MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST AND THE BOOK BELOW)
CONDITION: EXCELLENT / PERFECT — Clear, clean, bright and white. No marks, tears, creases or folds and GOOD MARGINS. GREAT DEFINITION. A REALLY INTERESTING IMAGE.
This PRINT is about 85 years old and guaranteed to be original. It’s an original ILLUSTRATION from the aforementioned book, and NOT A MODERN REPRODUCTION.
The print is 3 1/2" x 3 1/2". Matted the print measures 6" x 8". This is a standard size mat that will fit into a standard size frame—no costly custom frames required. Best to buy several, frame and cluster in a nice grouping.
ALL OF OUR MATTED PRINTS ARE WRAPPED IN CLEAR CELLOPHANE ENVELOPES, WHICH ARE BOTH PROTECTIVE AND PERFECT FOR GIFT GIVING.
About Lynd Ward and “Madman’s Drum”
One of the finest American wood engravers of the twentieth century and an outstanding artist of any era, Lynd Ward (1905-85) created a series of fantastic visual novels. The powerful imagery and psychological intensity of his wordless works have elicited comparisons to the writings of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, and they have exercised an enormous influence over latter-day graphic novelists. Ward's tutelage included studying under the direction of German woodcut and engraving master Hans Alexander Mueller. He published his first book, Gods' Man: A Novel in Woodcuts, in 1929. Like its successors, including Mad Man's Drum, Gods' Man consists solely of Ward's woodcuts, telling its story through imagery alone. Ward's hauntingly rendered works have been honored with such prestigious awards as the Library of Congress Award, the National Academy of Design Print Award, the New York Times Best Illustrated Award, the Caldecott Medal, and the Regina Award.
Lynd Ward’s second graphic novel Madman’s Drum explores the inheritance of a father’s crimes, the perversion and insanity of a life committed solely to intellect, and the banality of evil. Ward also explores the ways in which intellect provides a barrier to community, family, and happiness. Madman’s Drum speaks to the horrors of exploitation and the dissatisfaction inherent in the unstable industrial world but it does this from the perspective of the oppressors (a slave trader and an intellectual). The novel is divided into nine sections:
· 1. The father is introduced. He is a slave trader and comes across an African playing a drum. He steals the man and his instrument, sells his captive as a slave and returns home rich with a chest of gold and the drum he stole. He uses his wealth to upgrade his home, but lacking musical interest he places the drum on display, along with the sword he used to secure his family’s wealth. The slave-trader becomes a respected member of the community.
· 2. The main character – the scholar, is introduced. The father finds him playing the drum. He disciplines his child and sets him to work mastering the texts in his massive library. There will be no time for music, which the man associates with savagery. Paradoxically, he desires to return to his old job in Africa. The father is lost at sea. While he paid for his crimes, the family inherits the wealth and the drum and his father’s lesson to his son to savor the intellectual over the emotional.
· 3. Explores the adolescence of the scholar. He ignores the life around him for his books and embraces religion for the sake of his mother
· 4. The young man turns his back on sex, drink, and camaraderie. He is developing to be a strange young man. Learning in his books of ancient Egypt, he turns his back on Christianity by throwing a cross on the ground. His mother trips on the cross and dies in the fall. This section ends after his mother’s funeral.
· 5. The intellectual reaches middle age. He makes some astronomical discovery and but his results are taken with indifference by other astronomers. Reaching the peak of his career, he chooses to marry, not for love, but as something he has to do. He is brutally cold.
· 6. The misery of the wife comes into play. She produces two girls for the intellectual but she is very unhappy and unfulfilled. She meets a musician and enters into an affair, which ends in her death
· 7. The scholar’s second daughter gets involved with a labor organizer. He is told of the man and his communist sympathies so he arranges for his arrest. The daughter is dejected since the trial (which the scholar plays a key role in prosecuting) ends in the hanging of the labor organizer.
· 8. The scholar tries to persuade his second daughter to follow his path, but she rejects the intellect. She meets a womanizer (or maybe a pimp) who seduces her and begins selling her to the men of the community.
· 9. In the final section, the cold scholar learns that his daughter has become a prostitute. The pimp returns a small flower belt and throws the intellectual out on the street. He pleads for aid from the community, who viciously laugh at his misfortune. Finally, surrounded by the graves of the people in his life he goes insane, takes the drum he was forbidden to use as a child and goes off with the flute player.
A very strong theme here is the danger of the rejection of the cultural, emotional, physical realm for brutish intellect. The intellectual’s father found the drum – the symbol of the emotional and cultural realm – in “dark Africa” and acquires it by committing a brutal crime. The intellectual, by rejecting the physical and emotional is able to participate in horrible crimes – including the unfair judicial murder of a labor organizer. His intellect gave him the emotional distance required to be as brutal as he needed to be. Although Ward would not have had the language, he is describing the banality of evil here. Every attempt the intellectual made to move beyond his mind failed. Religion, marriage, career, and law all fail to break him out of his isolation. In some ways, they reinforce his isolation. At the end, he is baffled at the indifference and hostility of the crowd toward his losses, which is simply the end result of his own indifference to community.
All of our prints are bevel matted in a very high quality, and simple off-white/ivory matting. The BLACK ACID FREE BACKING, which is not attached to the print, but which should be kept with the print when framed, also meets the same high quality standard. We take pride in what we sell—look at our feedback.
All mats are acid-free and the small piece of tape used to attach the print to the top of the mat is artists tape. This print is truly ready to be framed and preserved.
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General Information
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