|
|
|
 |
|
|
Both Emile Fabry (1865-1966) and
Jean Delville (1867-1953) proclaimed themselves
"idealist" painters and strove to elevate the public through their art.
Their work is consequently guided by edifying principles rather than by
formal invention. In this respect, they are representative of much
Symbolist art. Both displayed their work at the Rose+Croix Salon and
were at one point influenced by Peladan.
Fabry lived to be over a hundred; he left a corpus of highly mannered
works, all depressive faces and strangely swollen heads. These evoke the
theatrical world of Maurice Maeterlinck; in the words of
Felicien Rops,
Maeterlinck's works were suited to "women of the North, with brackish
hair, hydrocéphalie foreheads and other-worldly eyes, part angel and
part seal".
The
monstrous creatures of his painting The Gestures fit this description perfectly. Fabry himself described the
period before 1900 as "the period of my nightmare", acknowledging the
influences of Wagner, Maeterlinck, and Edgar Allan Poe.
|
|

Emile Fabry
The Initiation
|
|
|
|
|
|
Emile
Fabry
(b Verviers, 30 Dec 1865; d
Woluwe-Saint-Pierre-lez-Bruxelles, 1966).
Belgian painter and designer. He studied at the Académie
Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels under Jean-François
Portaels, and worked with the designer Cir Jacques. His
early Symbolist work, influenced by Maurice Maeterlinck
(1862–1949), expresses anguish through its depiction of
wild-eyed and deformed figures. He described this as his
‘nightmare period’, exemplified by The Offering
(1894; Brussels, Mus. A. Mod.). In 1892 Fabry took part in
the first exhibition of the group ‘Pour l’Art’, which he
founded with Jean Delville, and in 1893 and 1895 exhibited
at the Salons de la Rose+Croix, established by Joséphin
Péladan. In the late 1890s he began to work with the Art
Nouveau architects Victor Horta and Paul Hankar. At this
point his work became more serene and increasingly
monumental. He designed the interior of the sculptor
Philippe Wolfers’s villa, built by Hankar, and also the
interior of Horta’s mansion Aubecq. |
|
|
|
|
Emile Fabry
|
|

Emile Fabry
The Gestures
|
|
These depressive
faces and strangely swollen heads evoke the theatrical world of
Maurice Maeterlinck; in the words of Felicien Rons, Maeterlinck's
works were suited to "women of the North, with brackish hair,
hydrocephalic foreheads and other-worldly eyes, part angel and part
seal". |
|
|
|

Emile Fabry
The Judgement of Paris |
|
|
|

Emile Fabry
The Offering |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Emile Fabry
La Gaine |
|
|
|
|

Emile Fabry
Orpheus |

Emile Fabry
The France |
|
|
|
|
|

Emile Fabry
Harmonies |
|
|
|
|
|

Emile Fabry
Pour l´Art |
|
|
|
|

|
|
|
Emile Fabry
The Thread Of Life
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Emile Fabry
Nok a tengerparton
|
|
|
|
|
Delville was a devotee of the occult who published a book entitled
Dialogue among Ourselves. Cabbalistic, Occult and Idealist Arguments
(Dialogue entre nous. Argumentation kabbalistique, occultiste,
idealiste, 1895). In it, he developed various notions held by
occultists: he believed in a divine fluid, reincarnation, dangerous
telepathic forces, invultuation and ecstasy. These convictions guided
his hand in works such as The Angel of Splendor; a rather
over-deliberate vision of ecstasy, or Satan's Treasures,
in which luxurious bodies lie sleeping among the seaweed and coral as
Satan, with a dancer's agility, bestrides and takes possession of them.
|
Jean Delville
(see collection) |

Jean Delville
Portrait of Madame Stuart Merrill
1892 |
|

Jean Delville
The Idol of Perversity
1891 |
|
|
|
Jean Delville
(see collection)
|

Jean Delville
Satan's Treasures
1895
|
|
The work of Georges Minne (1866-1941)
exemplifies the anaemia and prostration of his age. It dwells
insistently upon subjects such as mourning and impotence: a mother weeps
over her dead child, adolescents are stilled amid the briars, men and
women are racked and contorted by guilt. It was not by chance that the
artist came to this sort of subject. Infant mortality was high at the
time, but the mother with her dead child may also reflect the lack of
spiritual perspectives experienced during the last decades of the
century. Minne's form, radiating the intense and suffering religiosity
of his country, is characterized by often painfully affected references
to postures and attitudes in the work of the Flemish primitives. Copies
of his Fountain of the Kneeling Youths (1898) are now to be seen in
Brussels, Ghent, Vienna and Essen. It is probably the best work of his
Symbolist period; elsewhere, the contorted gestures, the hysterically
knotted hands, convey the idea of pathos rather than pathos itself.
Minne stands on one of the outer limits of Symbolist sensibility.
|
|
|
|
Georges Minne
|

Georges Minne
Fountain of the Kneeling Youths
1898 |
|
|
|
|
George
Minne (b
Ghent, 30 Aug 1866; d Laethem-Saint-Martin, 18 Feb
1941).
Belgian sculptor, draughtsman and illustrator. He studied at
the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Ghent (1879–86) and
worked in Ghent (until 1895) and Brussels (1895–9) before
settling in Laethem-Saint-Martin, a village near Ghent. His
first works were delicate sculptures and sparse drawings of
grieving and injured figures. The emotional power of these
works was recognized by many Symbolist poets including
Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles Van Lerberghe and Grégoire Le
Roy, who saw in them an expression of their own pessimistic
view of life. He illustrated several of their collections of
poetry (e.g. Grégoire Le Roy: Mon Coeur pleure
d’autrefois (Paris, 1889); Maurice Maeterlinck:
Serres chaudes (Paris, 1889)). From 1890 he was involved
with the progressive element among the artists and authors
of Brussels. He exhibited for the first time that year under
the auspices of the avant-garde society Les XX in Brussels,
and two years later he participated in the Salon de la
Rose+Croix in Paris. His principal supporter was Emile
Verhaeren. |
|
|
|
|

George
Minne
The Outcast
1898
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Degouve de Nuncques
(see collection) |
|
|

William Degouve de
Nuncques
The Pink House |
|
|
|
|
|

William Degouve de
Nuncques
The
Angels of Night |
|
|
|
|
|
Leon Frederic
(see collection) |
|
|

Leon Frederic
The Lake, the Sleeping Water |
|
|
|
|
|
Leon Spilliaert
(see collection) |
|
|
 |
|
|
Leon Spilliaert
The
Forbidden Fruit
|
|
|
|
|
The intimate, dreamy works of
William Degouve de
Nuncques (1867-1935) show signs of the influence of both Mellery
and Khnopff.
The Degouve de Nuncques were an old French family who settled in Belgium
during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
Degouve de Nuncques' father was
a giant of a man who cultivated his eccentricity; in the words of the
painter's friend, Henry de Groux, he "detests anything that represents
authority, loves animals even more than mankind, and walks about with a
loaded shotgun to shoot at neighbors bent on harming his cats."
He encouraged his son to daydream, thus favouring the development of a
talent which owed more to imagination than to technical facility.
Degouve de Nuncques' work is sometimes awkward, but a painting like
The
Pink House is singularly evocative
of the feeling of homecoming elicited by a warmly lit house under a
starry sky. Many of his works may be considered poetic evocations of
childish daydreams, The Pink House among them. There is a childish innocence
to these nocturnal visions in which a black swan sails silently past
ivy-covered tree trunks, or angels kiss in the squares at night (The
Angels of Night) while chestnut
trees lift their white candle-sticks in the moonlight.
Leon Frederic (1865-1940), Belgian
painter, reached Symbolism through an overexacting realism. Torn between
Symbolism and naturalism, Frederic exhibited at the Brussels Salon in
1878, then with the Essor circle. In 1898 his works were exhibited at
the Salon d'Art Ideahste. He also painted vast sociopolitical canvases.
Frederic, an idealist painter torn between Symbolism and academic
realism and between lofty concepts and social commitment, produced
remarkable works of symbolic depth.
Born, like
Ensor, in Ostend,
Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) was the son of
a wealthy perfumer. He was the last of the Belgian Symbolists. For many
years he was afflicted with acute anxiety; his insomnia drove him to
wander nightlong through deserted streets and along empty beaches. He
haunted the street where
Ensor
lived, to the point where the latter
remarked that he could never take a stroll on his own because
Spilliaert
was always at his door.
Spilliaert's work achieved its characteristic form while he was still
quite young. By the age of 23, he was creating expressive and simplified
forms of great authority; his singular use of visual rhythms and voids
on occasion communicates a sense of anxiety worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.
One such painting is Vertigo, Magic Staircase (1908) in which a female figure descends a nightmare staircase of
ever larger steps. Other works stress a sense of solitude enhanced by
endless empty beaches and the silent sea. The horizontality of the
Belgian coast is made to seem as immutable as fate.
Spilliaert's mood shifted with the passing years. His marriage, the
birth of his daughter, and his move to Brussels during the twenties gave
his work a new orientation. As early as 1904 he had turned against his
Symbolist works and was tempted to destroy them. Fortunately they
survive, original in themselves and, like Munch, a significant point of
transition between Art Nouveau and Expressionism.
Leon Spilliaert
(see collection) |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
Leon Spilliaert
Moonlight and Lights
1909
|
Leon Spilliaert
Vertigo, Magic Staircase
1908
|
Leon Spilliaert
The
Posts
1910
|
|
Suffering from insomnia, this late Symbolist prowled by night
through the streets and along the deserted beaches that he
depicts. By the age of 23, he was creating expressive and
simplified forms of great authority; his singular use of visual
rhythms and voids on occasion communicates a sense of anxiety
worthy of Alfred Hitchcock. One such painting is Vertigo
in which a female figure descends a nightmare staircase of ever
larger steps. Other works stress a sense of solitude enhanced by
endless empty beaches and the silent sea. The horizontality of
the Belgian coast is made to seem as immutable as fate. But
humanity is present in the form of the truculent, metaphorical
eroticism inhabiting this desolation, as in The Posts
and The Forbidden Fruit. |
|
|
|
|
|
Constant
Montald
(b Ghent, 4 Dec 1862; d
Brussels, 1944).
Belgian painter, illustrator and teacher. He studied at the
Koninklijke Academie of Ghent, and first made his mark by
winning the Prix de Rome in 1886 with Diagorus Borne in
Triumph. This success allowed him to travel throughout
Europe and the Near East. In 1896 he took part in the first
Salon d’Art Idéaliste, organized by Jean Delville, and exhibited
there regularly. In the same year he became professor of
decorative art at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in
Brussels, a post he held for the next 37 years. He was a
founder-member of L’Art Monumental in 1920. In 1928 he
illustrated the Legend of Uilenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak
(Brussels) by Charles de Coster.

Constant
Montald
La fontaine de l'inspiration
|
|
|
|
|

Constant Montald
The Nest
1893
|
|

Constant
Montald
Jardin sous la neige
|
|

Constant
Montald
Nymphes dansant
|
|

Constant
Montald
Femmes a la fontaine
|
|

Constant
Montald
Ophelia
1893
|
|
|
 |