Frans Masereel (31 July 1889 – 3 January 1972) was a Flemish painter and graphic artist who worked mainly in France. He is known especially for his woodcuts. His greatest work is generally said to be the wordless graphic novel Mon Livre d'Heures (Passionate Journey). He completed over 20 other wordless novels in his career. Masereel's woodcuts strongly influenced the work of Lynd Ward and later graphic artists such as Clifford Harper and Eric Drooker.

There is now a Frans Masereel Centre (Frans Masereel Centrum for Graphix) in the small village of Kasterlee in Belgium.

Frans Masereel was born in the Belgian Blankenberge on 31 July 1889. He moved to Ghent in 1896, where he began to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in the class of Jean Delvin at the age of 18. In 1909 he went on trips to England and Germany, which inspired him to create his first etchings and woodcuts. From 1911 on Masereel settled in Paris for four years and then he emigrated to Switzerland, where he worked as a graphic artist for various journals and magazines. His woodcut series, mainly of sociocritical content and of expressionistic form concept, made Masereel internationally known. Among these were the so-called image novels Die Passion eines Menschen, Mein Stundenbuch, Die Sonne, Die Idee and Geschichte ohne Worte, all of which dated from c. 1920. At that time Masereel also drew illustrations for famous works of world literature by Thomas Mann, Émile Zola and Stefan Zweig. In 1921 Masereel returned to Paris, where he painted his famous street scenes, the Montmartre-paintings. He lived for a time in Berlin, where his closest creative friend was George Grosz. After 1925 he lived near Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he painted predominantly coast areas, harbour views, and portraits of sailors and fishermen. During the 1930s the number of illustrated books and single woodcuts decreased. In 1940 he fled from Paris and lived in several cities in Southern France.

Lee Wagstaff (born October 27, 1969, London) is an English artist who spent four and half years acquiring all-over tattoos with designs based on cross-cultural geometrical symbols (circles, squares, swastikas, stars, etc.) drawing on religious influences from his Roman Catholic upbringing and Indian family members.

He studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Royal College of Art, London, and Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan, and has widely exhibited himself and his large format photographic self-portraits at fine art and performance art venues worldwide. His performance was featured in the Ornament Und Abstraction show at the Beyeler Foundation, Basel, Switzerland, and he was the first ever Western artist to be featured in the Art Annual, Kobe, Japan.

His Shroud, a self-portrait screenprinted in his own blood, was included in the Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition Impressions of the Century — 100 Years of the Fine Art Print.

“The emergence of Lee’s image on the Shroud elevates him to the status of a surrogate divine seemingly without the intervention of God. It comes off as both disquietingly heroic and at the same time spiritually arrogant” - David Bowie

Berthold Bartosch (December 29, 1893 – November 13, 1968) was a film-maker, born in the Bohemia region of Austria-Hungary (now part of the Czech Republic).

He moved to Berlin in 1920 and collaborated with Lotte Reiniger on her paper silhouette animations:

In 1930 Bartosch moved to Paris and created the 30 minute film entitled L'idee (The Idea) to which he is most remembered for. The film is described as the first serious, poetic, tragic work in animation. The film's characters and backdrops were composed of several layers of different types of paper from semi-transparent to thick cardboard. Special effects like halos, smoke and fog were made with lather spread on glass plates and lit from behind. The film was based on a book of woodcuts from Frans Masereel, The idea.

L'idee, when released in 1933, featured a score by composer Arthur Honegger, including an ondes Martenot, which is believed to be the very first use of an electronic musical instrument in film history. The following year, Franz Waxman's score for Liliom (1934) used a theremin.

Arthur Honegger (pronounced [aʁtyʁ ɔnɛɡɛːʁ]; 10 March 1892 – 27 November 1955) was a Swiss composer, who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. He was a member of Les Six. His most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which is interpreted as imitating the sound of a steam locomotive.

Born Oscar-Arthur Honegger (the first name was never used) in Le Havre, France, he initially studied harmony and violin in Paris, and after a brief period in Zurich, returned there to study with Charles-Marie Widor and Vincent d'Indy. He continued to study through the 1910s, before writing the ballet Le dit des jeux du monde in 1918, generally considered to be his first characteristic work. In 1926 he married Andrée Vaurabourg, a pianist and fellow student at the Paris Conservatoire, on the condition that they live in separate apartments. They lived apart for the duration of their marriage, with the exceptions of an attempt at living together in 1935, which lasted less than a year, and the last year of Honegger's life, when he could no longer live alone. They had one daughter, Pascale, born in 1932. Honegger also had a son, Jean-Claude (1926–2003), with the singer Claire Croiza.