Madman’s Drum is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward, published in 1930. It is the second of Ward’s six wordless novels. A slave trader condemns his family to the curse of a demon-faced drum he steals from an African.
About Madman’s Drum in brief
Madman’s Drum is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward, published in 1930. It is the second of Ward’s six wordless novels. Ward used a wider variety of carving tools to achieve a finer degree of detail in the artwork. A slave trader condemns his family to the curse of a demon-faced drum he steals from an African. In 1943 psychologist Henry Murray used two images from the work in his Thematic Apperception Test of personality traits. The original woodblocks are in the Ward Collection at Georgetown University’s Memorial Library in Washington, DC, in the Joseph Mark Lauinger Memorial Library at Washington University in D.C. The book had a Japanese publication in 2002 by Kokusho Kusho, and Dover Publications brought it back into print as a standalone edition in 2005.
It appeared in the collected volume Storyteller: The Woodcuts of Lynd Ward in 1974, and again in 2010 in the Library of America: Six Novels in Woodcuts, edited by cartoonist Art Spiegelman. The black-and-white images are not uniform in size—they measure from 4 by 3 inches to 4 inches by 4 inches. The work was well received upon release, and it encouraged publishers to publish more books in the genre. Ward spent a year studying wood engraving in Leipzig, Germany, where he encountered German Expressionist art and read The Sun by Flemish woodcut artist Frans Masereel. Ward returned to the U.S. and freelanced his illustrations. In 1929, he came across the wordlessness novel Destiny by German artist Otto Nückel, which inspired him to create his own: Gods’ Man.
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This page is based on the article Madman’s Drum published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
