Lynd Ward

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Lynd Kendall Ward (26 June 1905 – 28 June 1985) was an American artist and storyteller, and son of Methodist minister and prominent political organizer Harry F. Ward. He illustrated some 200 juvenile and adult books. Ward worked in wood engraving, watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint.

Ward studied at Columbia University and the State Academy for Graphics Arts, Leipzig, Germany, where he studied wood engraving with Hans Mueller. Upon graduating, Ward married author May McNeer and the newlyweds promptly sailed to Germany.

[edit] Novels in Woodcuts

Ward is known for his wordless novels told entirely through dramatic wood engravings. Ward's first work, God's Man (1929), uses a blend of Art Deco and Expressionist styles to tell the story of an artist's struggle with his craft, his seduction and subsequent abuse by money and power, and his escape to innocence. Ward, in employing the concept of the wordless pictorial narrative, acknowledged as his predecessors the European artists Frans Masereel and Otto Nuckel. Released the week of the 1929 stock market crash, the book was the first of six wood engraving Ward novels produced over the next eight years, including:

Madman's Drum (1930)
Wild Pilgrimage (1932)
Prelude to a Million Years (1933)
Song Without Words (1936)
Vertigo (1937)

[edit] Other works

In 1930 Ward's wood engravings were used to illustrate Alec Waugh's travel book Hot Countries. His work on children's books included his 1953 Caldecott Medal winning book The Biggest Bear, and his work on Esther Forbes' Johnny Tremain.

Ward's work included an awareness of the racial injustice to be found in the United States. This is first apparent in the lynching scenes from Wild Pilgrimage and appears again in his drawings for North Star Shining: A Pictorial History of the American Negro, by Hildegarde Hoyt Swift, published in 1947. Ward uses African American characters, as well as several different Native ones in his 1973 book, The Silver Pony.

In 1972 Harry N. Abrams published Storyteller Without Words, a book that included Ward's six novels plus an assortment of his illustrations from other books. Ward himself broke his silence and wrote brief prologues to each of his works.