Twelve Artists: A Perspective of the Modernists

Selected by CHARLES J. ROLO

THE artists whose work is briefly discussed below and reproduced on the succeeding pages together offer, I believe, as representative a glimpse of modern art in Belgium and Holland as can be achieved in twelve illustrations: most of the dominant styles of the modern period in the Low Countries are exemplified. To achieve this diversity was one consideration that guided the selections; another was the fact that certain painters cannot be reproduced as satisfactorily as others.

Here, then, is a characteristic and, I hope, impressive perspective: it is not a panorama. It omits such modern masters as Constant Permeke, the great Belgian Expressionist; and Hendrik Chabot, whose awkward, harshly melodramatic canvases, stamped with a tragic genius, are powerful expressions of that somber strain which the foreigner soon discovers, somewhat to his surprise, in the contemporary arts of Holland. Also regrettably absent are the two pioneers of a contemporary school that is a significant expression of the Dutch spirit, Magic Realism: they are Raoul Hynekes and Albert Carel Willink.

If this perspective could have been broadened, it would have included René Guiette, a Belgian painter whose folklorish style has a singular refinement and charm; and the sculptor Oscar Jespers, whose St. Anthony is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and who collaborated on the basrelief which adorned the Belgian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair and which has been rebuilt at Virginia Union University. I would have liked to include such younger Belgian artists as Georges Grard, one of the rare first-rate sculptors of today whose entire work is a realistic glorification of the female figure; the painter Louis van Lint, currently an Abstractionist, whose Balconies and Facades can be seen at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and Gaston Bertrand, who is also doing outstanding work in the abstract vein. There are many, many others who should be mentioned; but, this, I repeat, is merely a perspective.

In the reproductions, and among the additional names just cited, Belgium figures more prominently than Holland. The reason is that, though Holland has made a good showing in the past half-century, Belgium has unquestionably produced a richer array of talents; and, insofar as recent and current work is concerned, Belgium displays a decidedly greater vitality. Artists everywhere have been influenced by the great French Modernists, but the younger Dutch painters have not been as successful as their Belgian contemporaries in assimilating these influences and arriving at a personal style of their own: They have nothing like the individuality or the force of the older artists by whom Holland is represented in these pages. The Director of Amsterdam’s Municipal Museum, Dr. Willem Sandberg, and his coadjutor, H. L. C. Jaffé, have been zealous and effective crusaders for the avantgarde. Even so, for the experimental artist there exists a more congenial climate in Belgium than in Holland.

Born of an English father and a Flemish mother, JAMES ENSOR (1860—1949) remained all his life a citizen of his native town, Ostend. The British strain in Ensor’s heritage has been mentioned to point up his affinity with Hogarth and Rowlandson; a misanthrope and a misogynist, his predilection was for savage caricature.

Ensor was an innate Impressionist, who did not need to seek models in the Paris School. In the eighteen-eighties he sometimes interpreted with real feeling the physical aspects of his familiar surroundings at Ostend; at other times he unveiled his secret world of masks, skeletons, and Pierrots. This duality seemed to guide his brush. The physical world kept it to a dark, even somber tonality, the world of fantasy seemed to incite it to a more luminous expression. His Entry of Christ into Brussels (1888)—a gigantic caricature teeming with daring in its technical detail — marks the full unfolding of his personality. Hereafter, the world of carnival and fantasy took the lead over interiors and landscapes (though still life remained in great favor). Now there came into being a fantastic gallery of snouts, sardonic leers, and grotesque faces, fraternally mixing with masks, from which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish them; and Ensor’s painting progressed uninterruptedly toward an ever more luminous expression. In the later years, the elements of fantasy overshadowed cruel satire. The design became more and more graceful, the touch lighter.

Having started, by choice of subject and atmosphere, from an external Impressionism, Ensor evolved toward an ever-growing world of unreality, remaining nonetheless a true Impressionist in technique. Placed at the crossroads of two epochs, keeping with his brush to the colorist researches of the nineteenth century and with his mind to the anti-naturalism of the twentieth, he represents the essence of transition.

— Roger Avermacte.¹

RIK WOUTERS (1882-1916), the son of a cabinetmaker, turned from sculpture to painting only to revert to sculpture. As a painter he was a revolutionist in the wake of James Ensor, and a great Impressionist in his own right. His short life was dramatic and painful, but his art was inspired by an instinctive wonderment at the beauty of nature and man. He was a Dionysiac artist who expressed his rapture with abandon and with force. His most famous work, The Wild Dancer (see reproductions), is a creation of incredible audacity. Rarely in the history of sculpture has such a violent movement been controlled by so sure a sense of equilibrium.

— Jan-Albert GORIS.

A painter of the Brabant landscape and of the humble interiors of workers and peasants, JEAN BRUSSELMANS (1884-1953), though in the very forefront of Belgian Expressionism, was the prototype of the profoundly independent artist who is unfalteringly inspired by his own highly personal vision. His is a severe, homespun universe, painted with masterly assurance, in strong daring lines and solid colors. Perhaps the dominant trait of his technique is his rectangular design: fields, houses, clouds, even boats, animals, and men, are traced in rectangular brush strokes. His dramatic landscapes express a contest between the forces of nature and the artist; the former are, so to speak, unleashed on the canvas and the artist marshals his technical resources to keep them in equilibrium. The result is an art that abounds in passion and yet achieves serenity.

One of the major figures in modern Belgian art, EDGARD TYTGAT, born in 1879, paints pictures full of fun, tenderness, and poetry — enchanting pictures which are strangely little known outside his native country. Tytgat is, above all, a teller of stories: his favorite subjects are the circus, musical performers, kermesses, processions, street scenes, children, and shy lovers. A delicate colorist with an intensely personal style, Tytgat reduces the world to the dimensions of a puppet show. Indeed his art has a folklore quality, and one might describe him as a Primitive were it not for his exquisite refinement. His vision combines the ingenuousness, the delight in fantasy, of childhood with an ironic sense of life’s absurdities that is often richly amusing, sometimes very sad, and almost always steeped in compassion.

After studying at the Academic des Beaux Arts in Brussels, RENÉ MAGRITTE (1898) joined hands with the Surrealist “revolution” in the mid-’twenties. Though he has remained faithful to Surrealism, his amazing inventiveness and exacting technique have kept his work continuously resilient and challenging. His inspiration is so rich that at one time, for two years, he painted a picture every day. His primary purpose is not to please the eye or merely stir the emotions: to Magritte, painting is an instrument of discovery— of understanding. His work bears a piquant relationship to that of the psychoanalyst. The latter seeks to enlarge self-awareness by unscrambling the images of dreams; Magritte scrambles the images of reality in an attempt to enrich man’s awareness of himself and the world. Thus he paints doors with a piece scooped out — as in his well-known Love’s Perspective (see illustrations) — because the very essence of doors is that they give passage. As one Belgian critic has said: “It is as though Rene Magritte had invented a new mythology.” Magritte recently had an exposition in New York, at the Sidney Janis Gallery.

With a human skeleton as his model, PAUL DELVAUX was working on one of his large, haunted canvases when this writer visited him in his cramped studio on the outskirts of Brussels last June. Now in his fifty-sixth year, this richly gifted artist conjures up a mysteriously poetic world pervaded by a cold sensuality: a domain in which, in Andre Breton’s phrase, “there exists a point where the real and the imaginary cease to be perceived as contradictory.”

Surrealist in spirit, classic in form - his clear-cut contours and meticulous design, his dramatization of subject and atmosphere hark back to Ingres — Delvaux has achieved mastery in a personal idiom that is infinitely startling. Nude women, painted with insistent exactitude in all their luxurious nudity, people a landscape with long, melancholy vistas reminiscent of do Chirico: a phantom landscape with Greek and Roman constructions (temples, arches, columns, ruins), mountains in the far distance, and sometimes a skeleton and/or a black-suited figure in a derby hat. Delvaux also projects his slightly pop-eyed nudes into the mechanical world, juxtaposing them with a locomotive or a trolley car. He paints them reclining on Empire-style couches; or in a room with skeletons; or being peered at through the detachable glass eye of his ubiquitous man with the derby hat.

In recent years, Delvaux has had expositions in London, Paris, and New York.

Born in Louvain in 1903, CHARLES LEPLAE obtained a degree in law, then decided to devote himself to sculpture. His evolution has taken the opposite course to that of most of his contemporaries. After a period of experimentation in the Expressionist and in the abstract vein, he emerged with a style that is profoundly humanistic. The exquisite head entitled Gabrielle (see illustrations) is a characteristic example of his portraiture. With its delicacy of sentiment, its acute characterization, its gracefully balanced volumes and harmonious proportions, the sculpture of Leplae expresses an ideal of beauty that is rare in contemporary art. Leplae’s work is represented in a number of museums in Belgium, Holland, and Denmark.

Born in London in 1915, MARC MENDELSON studied at the Art Institute of Antwerp and settled in his father’s home town, Brussels. He WAS one of the founding members of La Jcune Peinture Belge, an association, formed in 1945, of younger Belgian artists of varied inspiration but with a common experimental bent. A talented colorist with a deep feeling for inanimate objects, Mendclson has worked his way through several phases which have led him to abstraction. A distinctive feature of his art is the sensitive arabesque. He recently completed a monumental mural for the terrace of the Canterbury Restaurant in Brussels.

— Charles Rolo.

BART VAN DER LECK, born in 1876, has been a figure of great consequence in modern Dutch art. A friend of Piet Mondrian, he became a prominent member of “The Style” movement, founded in 1917, which sought to achieve a greater universality through “purification" — through reducing reality to its basic patterns and colors. It accented Functionalism and stressed the link between the painter and the architect.

In the painting of Van der Leck, the elements of space are replaced by the two-dimensional; and he works, chiefly, in the three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, to which he adds grey and black, and white backgrounds. Unlike Mondrian, he docs not always abandon the appearances of the world around us. He distributes his figures over and under each other as in Egyptian relief sculpture, and succeeds in attaining a new and arresting balance. To Van der Leck, art is very much a social force. In his groups and in his street scenes, he achieves a sense of human togetherness, an emotion of our common destiny, by the omission of the personal, the individualistic

CHARLEY TOOROP (1890) paints as if she were sculpting, in simple hard movements, and with a palette that runs to deep blues and dull red brown. Her style is human but aggressive: its realism is more than life size. This “more-than-realism” of Charley Toorop transfigures the intentional ugliness and vulgarity of many of her subjects. The force of her talent is well exemplified in her self-portraits, one of which is reproduced among the illustrations that follow.

PIET OUBORG (1893) has been one of the most consistently experimental of modern Dutch painters. After spending twenty years as a teacher of drawing at schools in the Netherlands East Indies, he returned to the Hague in 1939. In his forties, his drawings and paintings “were Surrealistic: he was fascinated by the sense of magic in the art of the Indies and injected it into his experiments. More recently, he has sought to put his ideas on canvas “in rhythms” and no longer in, forms borrowed from nature; and he has arrived at a pliable, unarchitectural Abstractionism.

PYKE KOCH, now in his fifties, is a self taught painter, who has patiently studied the technical secrets of the old masters. He paints in dark and light, using little color; and his work shows a deep preoccupation with the conflict between our world and our ideals. There is bitterness and tragedy in much of his painting, but there is also an awareness of beauty in his handling of drab and sordid subjects. The self-portrait chosen for reproduction is in a different vein, but it is a fine illustration of his masterly draughtsmanship. Koch’s art is generally defined as “Magic Realism": a school which pictures men and things not for their own sake but for the sake of the mystery seen around them, for the overtones of a larger truth.

— Hans Konigsberger.