Léo Schnug

Finally, it was time to pay tribute to the great illustrator of Alsace Léo Schnug, the comic book artist, forerunner of heroic fantasy, to the incredible life. He lived in the Belle Époque Strasbourg, torn between modernity and tradition, between France and Germany. Schnug, the tightrope walker of the local art, changed from the costume of the Holy Roman Empire to the soldier of the French Revolution. He had a lot of fun portraying a fairy world, with sarcasm and sometimes with panache. Inspired by the greatest masters of drawing, Albrecht Dürer, Urs Graf, Schnug is inspired by illustrators like Gustave Doré or Joseph Sattler, but Schnug finally made Schnug. He makes his weapons in Strasbourg, around artists like Charles Spindler or Gustave Stoskopf. His secessionist style hits the mark. He became the illustrator of historians, archaeologists, and collectors of antiquities. Thanks to the meeting of archaeologist Robert Forrer, Leo Schnug enters the big story. He will make the decorations of the castle of Haut-Koenigsbourg, property of a sponsor as prestigious as encumbering, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany. The castle will become a space of incredible confrontation in which Leo Schnug meets the glory. This may have been the step too much, in which Schnug is going to get lost. Decried, isolated, he slides irresistibly into the abyss, helped by alcohol, which consumes him slowly. When, in 1918, Alsace became French again, he fled to the psychiatric asylum at Brumath to find peace. He still draws soldiers whose secret he has. He has gone from a failed artist to a cursed artist.--Translation of page 4 of cover by Payot.