25 Images of a Man's Passion

25 Images of a Man's Passion, or The Passion of a Man is the first wordless novel by Flemish artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972), first published in 1918 under the French title 25 images de la passion d'un homme. The silent story is about a young working-class man who leads a revolt against his employer. The first of dozens of such works by Masereel, the book is considered to be the first wordless novel, a genre that saw its greatest popularity in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Masereel followed the book in 1919 with his best-known work, Passionate Journey.

Masereel had grown up reading revolutionary socialist literature, and expressed his politics in A Man's Passion; the work is also filled with religious imagery, as with the Common Man taking the role of the martyred Christ. It owed its visual style to Expressionism and mediaeval woodcuts. The book was popular, particularly in German editions, which had introductions by writers Max Brod, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann.

Frans Masereel (1889–1972) was born into a French-speaking family in Blankenberge, Belgium. When he was five his father died, and his mother remarried to a doctor in Ghent, whose political beliefs left an impression on the young Masereel. Masereel grew up reading Marxist, socialist, and anarchist works by such writers as Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin, and often accompanied his stepfather in socialist demonstrations. After a year at the Ghent Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, Masereel left to study art on his own in Paris. During World War I he volunteered as a translator for the Red Cross in Geneva, drew newspaper political cartoons, and copublished a magazine called Les Tablettes, in which he published his first woodcut prints.

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