averilburystedmunds: Painting Flanders: Flemish Art 1880-19!4

The new Sudbury Gallery displaying
locally-made brick and flint.

The newly-upgraded Gainsborough's House.

I was able to visit the recently-reopened Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, hence the previous blog on the artist. I did find the newly -built, three storey gallery, beautiful and exciting; in fact, incredible for a small town to be able to include in its attractions. This building and the careful restoration of the Grade 1 listed Gainsborough’s House, part late mediaeval, part Georgian and part Regency, apparently cost £10 million with huge support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and the entire project [by architectural firm, Zmma] is superbly accomplished. This new and separate building of local brick and flint, houses four innovative galleries with a Landscape Studio on floor three providing a flexible space for a variety of events, and one which boasts a Camera Obscura and a marvellous picture window offering spectacular views of the Suffolk landscape. The existing Weavers’ Lane Cottages have been re-organised to open up access to the historical print workshop, the largest in Suffolk now offering opportunities for traditional print-making to a new generation. There will be seasonal exhibitions at this Sudbury Gallery for print-makers to show and sell their work.

The era's artistic tendency to the pastoral
typified in Girl By The Leie. 1892
Emil Claus.

By a serendipitous chance, there was also an exhibition called Painting Flanders: Flemish Art 1880-1914 which I was keen to see. In the event, it was delightful with a list of names familiar to me and dear to my Flemish friends in Brugge too. Below are paintings and sculptures by several of those represented, with a mini-blog to enable readers to make or renew their acquaintance. During and immediately after the Industrial Revolution in Belgium, a pastoral artistic movement developed when some of the most radical and influential artists of the era blossomed until the First World War interrupted their dreams.

James Ensor's masks and grotesques.

Skeleton Painter in his Studio.
James Ensor.

Perhaps the best known artist of this group in Britain is

James Ensor, 1860-1949 who lived his whole life, virtually, in Oostende, He was a man of many masks, a painter and a printmaker and an important influence on Expressionism and Surrealism. He painted Life through the lens of the Carnival and was regarded by his fellow artists as a distant and solitary figure. Leon Spilliaert wrote of him in 1919 “ he lives in an old dilapidated house above a shop selling shells. Here he lives a sad and lonely life……. among his marvellous paintings…… He is vegetating in this ruined and ransacked town…… and always the same, sweet and good, sensitive and worried, childlike.” However, Ensor had not been forgotten by his fellow artists. Max Beckmann, Fernand Khnopff and Wassily Kandinsky all visited him, recognising him as a trailblazer and sharing his creed that art should be anything but banal, and his belief that religion and science are “cruel goddesses, drenched in blood and tears.” In spite of all, Ensor’s star was high enough that he was asked to give a speech, welcoming Einstein when he made an official visit to Belgium in 1933. And, by then, in 1929, the King had conferred a Barony on him.

Lady in Blue in Front of a Mirror.
Rik Wouters.

Portrait de Femme, blouse bleue

Attitude by Rik Wouters.
Large statue of Nel.

Rik Wouters, 1882-1916, son of an ornamental sculptor from Mechelen, started working in his father’s studio at 12, eventually pursuing a career as artist and sculptor. A visit to Paris in 1900 introduced him to the Impressionists and he began to prioritise the light and colour of painting over his original love of sculpture. He married his beloved Nel, his muse, in 1905 on whom he focused as his model in countless paintings and sculptures. Over the next few years(1912–1913), Wouters produced the best works of his short career, painting and drawing almost constantly during this period, making 50 canvasses in 1912. The Crazy Violence; Domestic Worries and De Strijkster are among the most famous of his art, all produced during this period. In 1913, he won the Picard prize.

Zelf portret met zwarte hoed.
Rik Wouters

Although his wife was the subject of the majority of his works, Wouters occasionally painted other people and places of particular interest to him. His other subjects included natural scapes from his local area (such as trees in the garden or a vase of flowers on the table) or close friends (such as his lifelong friend and fellow sculptor, Ernest Wijnants), all of which were painted in the same colourful and bright style. Additionally, Wouters produced a number of self-portraits over his painting years. The First World War enveloped Belgium in 1914 and Rik became, in turn, a soldier, a prisoner of war and, increasingly, a sufferer from eye cancer which, by degrees, darkened his world. He was released from the prisoner of war camp in 1916 because of his eye problems and the sombre tone of his subsequent paintings reflects his worsening health, seen in works such as Self-portrait with Black Eye Patch(1916) and Rik with Black Eye Dressing(1916). Wouters lost his eye to cancer 3 months before his death on 11 July 1916, a tragic and painful end to a short but talented artistic life.

Snow landscape in Oostende
Leon Spilliaert

Leon Spilliaert 1881-1946 was also born in Oostende but moved to Brussels at the age of 20 and would live and work between the two cities for the rest of his life. Self-taught, he forged his own artistic identity which was shaped by the affinity he felt with the writers and thinkers such as Edgar Allen Poe and Friedrich Nietzsche. Spilliaert's work is characterised by dramatic perspectives and a quiet luminescence. He is best known for a sequence of enigmatic self-portraits and for his atmospheric night-time scenes of Ostend. His visual explorations of the self and potent images of solitude align him with European modernists such as Edvard Munch.

Alone.
Leon Spilliaert

Emil Claus 1849-1924 had to overcome opposition from his father to try to become an artist before

Le Bateau Qui Passe
Emil Claus

enrolling at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts where he prospered, graduating with a gold medal. He achieved a local popularity very quickly, appealing naturally to the tastes of the bourgeoisie and later, under the influence of Claude Monet’s Impressionism, developed his own distinctive style called Luminism, in 1904 founding a group called Vie et Lumiere. During the First World War, he prudently fled to London where he awaited the end of hostilities, meanwhile painting, among other subjects, a series of views of the Thames known as ‘reflections on the Thames’, based on Monet’s style and exemplifying Claus’s most traditional Impressionistic style. He married Charlotte Dufaux in 1886, daughter of a Waregem notary, though the important romantic relationship of his life seems to have been with Jenny Montigny, a painter half his age, who initially followed master classes of his in Arsene, continuing to travel for many years between Ghent and Arsene to be with him until Claus died.