You don’t have to start with Pieter Brueghel, the grand master of the fantastic and the real, and delve into the fantasy worlds of the globally successful Belgian comic series to find that in the country inhabited by Flemings and Walloons, which has been called Belgium since 1830, the Reality has repeatedly been exaggerated into the fantastic with particular relish. A representative overview of Belgian art from 1870 to 1950, as the Kunsthalle München was able to put together from the rich holdings of the currently closed Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, is enough to sense the existential curiosity with which Belgian artists are concerned immersed, doggedly or in love with everyday reality depending on your temperament.
The concise sentences with which the Brussels writer Edmond Picard characterized the art of his country in 1887 under the title “The real fantastic”, they can not only be applied to the works of the well-known symbolists and surrealists, they also suggest something of that what distinguished the Belgian painters of naturalism from their European counterparts: “Nothing is as simple as one thinks. Events do not have the logic that our weak penetration ascribes them. There are underlying mysteries.” The exhibition traces these mysteries of reality hidden beneath logic.
Jan Van Beers’ “Kaiser Karl V als Kind” (1879) lounges almost obscenely in his monstrous armchair. Historically, of course, there is nothing to prove that.
(Photo: Hugo Maertens / KMSKA Collection)
How a history painter escapes the constraints of probability, but as a naturalist makes the depicted objects bloom, Jan Van Beers demonstrated in his 1879 painting “Emperor Charles V as a Child” in a virtuoso manner. For him, the future emperor is a boy in shimmering white tights who is lounging in a monstrous armchair, almost obscenely bored. Associated with him is a greyhound, also dressed in salon fashion, which has put its nose on the back of the armchair and neatly lifts its paw under the child’s hand. This studio scene, oozing with luxury, is so far removed from historical reality that the staged contradiction has almost surreal qualities.
French impressionism was creatively developed further in Belgium
French Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism inspired some Belgian painters to make extreme painterly experiments with the atmospheric phenomena of daylight. Above all, the neo-impressionist technique of splitting the color tones into individual basic colors, which are placed next to one another in tiny dots, has been creatively further developed in Belgium. In some pictures, the dab technique leads to the leveling of the depth of the room, almost to the dissolution of the motif. In Théo Van Rysselberghe’s portrait of a woman at the harmonium, however, the added color points give the figure and her bulging robe a plasticity that can almost be grasped by hand.
René Magritte painted his simply furnished canvas “Die Rache” (1938 or 1939) in warm, fleshy colors.
(Photo: Hugo Maertens / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021)
Since the pompous, loudly vying for attention, major works of Belgian symbolism are almost all brought together in the Brussels museum, it can be noticeably quiet in the corresponding hall of the Antwerp museum. In any case, Xavier Mellery’s intimate chalk drawings of stairwells suggest a deep calm. But if you immerse yourself in the subtly drawn uniform gray of the steps and railings, you discover shadows that must have come from an enigmatic deep-seated light source and thus underlay the magical silence with an eerie basic tone.
In the largest hall of the Kunsthalle, the Antwerp museum can impressively demonstrate how the initially wild painter James Ensor (1860 – 1949) developed an expressiveness that was shocking for his contemporaries in the 1980s and 1990s. Ensor’s path to modernity becomes an event here. A few of the masks that you know from his pictures are on display in a corner showcase. Piano music composed by Ensor can also be heard from this angle; With her salon-like, pleasing phrases, she makes it almost shockingly clear how far her creator, when he composed this, ventured as a painter, that is, removed from the salon.
As a twenty-year-old, Ensor cheekily smeared the colors on the canvas with a spatula when he wanted to paint a lady with a parasol on a breakwater. In a still life from the same year, he succeeded in sensually lifting the extremely different consistencies of a dry bundle of brushwood and a soft, moist ray spread out in front of his eyes and nose. But the similarity to nature is not the aim of his painterly experiments; he looks for expression and soon discovers the physical power of pure colors, which he lets fight against each other in his pictures. The red of the rhubarb stalks, the blue of the ceramic jug and the green of the curled cabbage leaves can pop out of a vegetable still life as if they were being driven by muscles.
If anyone really thought about the orgies of color in Impressionism, it was artists like Frits Van den Berghe with his “Blossoming Tree” (1930).
(Photo: Hugo Maertens / KMSKA Collection)
At some point, Ensor took one of the carnival masks from his parents’ souvenir shop, which were hanging on the walls and beams in his narrow attic, as an additional stimulus in one of his still lifes. The macabre expressiveness that lurks in the grotesquely distorted or primitively simplified features of the cardboard faces should not have escaped him. All he had to do was slide human-like bodies or dolls under the masks and draw hints of pupils in the eye slits, and they marched in front of him: the people in their stupid self-love and drooling malice, unmasked by the masquerade, exposed by the disguise, honorable representatives of bourgeois society in its true form. Ensor reinforces the satirical effect by making the masks more and more carnal, more and more obsolete. Yes, in some of the pictures the flesh has already fallen off the faces; the figures only hold their skulls in the air.
The carnival scary joke culminates in the small picture in which two costumed skeletons of apparently female sex are fighting with household appliances for a man who is hanging dead from the ceiling between them. Through the two open doors on the right and left, the neighbors stare maliciously and greedily at the domestic spectacle with their larvae faces.
In a self-portrait, Ensor painted himself with a skull
Incidentally, Ensor does not exclude his own person from his existential allusions. In the small self-portrait from 1896 you can see him standing peacefully in front of the easel in his attic room between many pictures. The only irritating thing is that two masks that look penetratingly alive are lying on the floor, a skull with eyes still glimmering in its deep sockets, but hanging on the wall next to the door and another on the top of the easel. These unsuitable elements must have had a strange effect on the only person in the room, because when the picture was finished, Ensor changed his own face into a skull, i.e. included himself in the existential symbolism that he initially developed as a painter purely playfully , but then condensed it into a very effective system of expression.
The exhibition then ends with some fine specimens of Belgian surrealism. A very unusual work by Paul Delvaux, who in many of his pictures ideally had naked women wandering through fantastic backdrops in a daydreaming manner, can be seen here, a large-format “Entombment of Christ”, which clearly deviates from the tradition of this motif: The solemn act becomes one clinically sterile environment celebrated by skeletons. In the paintings by René Magritte, one can relish the cheerful game that the painter plays with the layers of images lying one behind the other. The landscape painting, which stands on an easel in front of a wall, seems like a window to open the view through the wall into the open, at least it cannot prevent the white clouds that can be seen outside from coming in through this window and into the room sailing around.
In any case, Magritte sparked joyful laughter among the Parisian Surrealists when he made the figures of famous paintings disappear into coffins for the first time in his pictures, which have the exact shape of the portrayed. Probably the most beautiful example of the series started at that time is the coffin of the three figures from Manet’s masterpiece “The Balcony”. Of the three coffins that are set up behind the green iron grating at Magritte’s, the one on the left is so precisely bent that the painter Berthe Morisot, who sat there at Manet’s, could have comfortably remained seated as a model for Magritte’s work.
Fantastically Real / Belgian Modernism from Ensor to Magritte. Until March 6th in the Kunsthalle Munich. The catalog costs 38 euros.