page_title: Wild Pilgrimage
section_title: Style and analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Wild Pilgrimage / Style and analysis
context_page_description: Wild Pilgrimage is the third wordless novel of American artist Lynd Ward, published in 1932. It was executed in 108 monochromatic wood engravings, printed alternately in black ink when representing reality and orange to represent the protagonist's fantasies. The story tells of a factory worker who abandons his workplace to seek a free life; on his travels he witnesses a lynching, assaults a farmer's wife, educates himself with a hermit, and upon returning to the factory leads an unsuccessful workers' revolt. The protagonist finds himself battling opposing dualities such as freedom versus responsibility, the individual versus society, and love versus death.
  Ward simplified his approach after the more complex, novelistic story of his previous book, Madman's Drum, returning to the simplicity of his first, Gods' Man. Wild Pilgrimage achieves more fluid pacing and varied imagery than the first two books, incorporating the influence of art movements such as American Regionalism and Futurism.
context_section_description: Unlike Ward's previous books, which had titles between scenes, Wild Pilgrimage provides the reader with no textual cues.  In 1937 Irvin Haas called Wild Pilgrimage the book in which "Ward became a master of his medium", praising in particular the quality of the clarity and richness of the artwork.
  Freedom and responsibility, individuality and society, and love and death are among the binaries the symbolic work abounds in.  Cartoonist Art Spiegelman comments that Ward had mastered a fluid rhythm of pacing with his third book, achieving a flow that minimized the need for the reader to spend time deciphering images before moving to the next page, while encouraging multiple readings and interpretations.  At the same time, Spiegelman writes, the images reward a closer look on rereading.
  Ward's images offer a diversity of textures, moods, detail, and composition, and mix in influence from movements such as American Regionalism and Futurism.  The seeming homoeroticism in the artwork drew attention, such as the prominent rear shots of the protagonist, the sort of imagery that prompted Susan Sontag to note Ward's work in her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'".  Writer Sarah Boxer found the prominence of such imagery distracting.  Spiegelman defends the book against critics who smirk at the Ward's artwork's affinity with the "fetishistic figures and landscape" of Thomas Hart Benton and the homoerotic art of Tom of Finland, saying the book's "passion and even its off sexual subcurrents are among its strengths", and calls it "in some ways the most accessible and satisfying" of Ward's books.
caption: American Regionalism and other movements influenced Ward's artwork.
  People of Chilmark, Thomas Hart Benton, 1920
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