Gargantua: Chapter XXII - "Les balancoirs"
1942
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
woodcut
Classification
Portfolio
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Rosenwald Collection
Accession Number
1964.8.1942
Art Historical Context
In the whimsical yet darkly satirical world of François Rabelais' *Gargantua andagruel*, Chapter XXII, "Les balancoirs ("The Swings"), a fantastical scene of giant revelry and playful excess. Bernard Reder's 1942 woodcut captures this episode with his signature grotesque humor and monumental forms. A Polish-born Jewish artist who fled Europe for New York in the late 1930s, Reder drew on folklore, biblical motifs, and literary giants like Rabelais during World War II, infusing his prints with a sense of defiant vitality amid global turmoil. This woodcut, part of the *Gargantua* portfolio from ...
About the Artist
Bernard Reder
Bernard Reder (1897–1963), born in Czernowitz, Bukovina—then part of Austria-Hungary and a vibrant center of Jewish and Hasidic culture—was the son of a Jewish innkeeper. At age four, he began drawing, but World War I interrupted his youth when, at 17, he was conscripted into the Austrian army and served in the trenches. After the war, Reder enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, studying...