CHAPTER SIX: THE MONGREL DOG
On a per-capita basis, if such calculations made any sense, few countries could match Belgium’s artistic heritage. Pierre-Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel, Jan van Eyck and Rogier Van der Weyden have made Flanders, if loosely defined, one of the cultural centres of the world.
To call these artists ‘Belgian’ is of course to strain a point. While there is at least one reference to van Eyck as a ‘Belgian prince’, the country-to-come wasn’t even a twinkle in a revolutionary’s eye in the days when the Flemish Masters criss-crossed an area that encompassed not only modern day Belgium but also Lille in France, Maastricht in the Netherlands, and Middelburg in Germany.
‘At my first exhibition in Germany, a specialist told me that he didn’t know that there were painters in Belgium,’ Luc Tuymans, one of Belgium’s best known painters, told journalist Guy Duplat. ‘I retorted that van Eyck formed the basis of three-quarters of the art of the Renaissance with Rogier Van der Weyden, that Flanders had a tradition of leading painters, and that Rubens had influenced even Velázquez. The world’s first great painting is in Ghent, it’s the Ghent Altarpiece, and in the American museums, the masterpieces of the Middle ages are all Flemish paintings.’
Laying claim, out of pride, to artists who predate your country is common. Dante Alighieri wrote his Divine Comedy centuries before the creation of the Italian state (he was born in the republic of Florence) though is nevertheless often referred to as an Italian.
Since its birth, modern Belgium has continued to produce world-class artists in various media, most of whom have clustered along language lines.
Francophone surrealist René Magritte, arguably one of the best known painters of the twentieth century, has been honoured with his own museum in Brussels. One of my favourite French-speaking artists, Félicien Rops, has a dedicated museum in the Walloon capital Namur.
Tintin creator Georges Remi produced some of the world’s most collectable comics. Pierre Culliford, creator of the Smurfs, continues to bring in substantial sums for his inheritors. They and other Belgians helped elevate comic book illustration to an art form with a global following.
The Flemish hit list is long and includes James Ensor, Léon Spilliaert, Frans Masereel and Constant Permeke.
Art historians debate whether there has ever been a ‘Belgian’ style in the applied or fine arts. Some point to subtle differences between French impressionism and the Belgian tendency to focus more on nature. There was a late-impressionist style called ‘luminism’ which was arguably Belgian though dominated by Flemish painters.
Brussels can still boast a remarkable collection of buildings in the Art Nouveau style, including the former home of one of the movement’s main architects, Victor Horta (visited by US actor Brad Pitt, despite the Covid lockdown, in 2021). Art Nouveau was however a European movement with a number of high density workhouses, including Lille in France.
Associating even the contemporary bunch of Belgium-based artists with the modern-day country requires mental gymnastics. It may have produced lots of artists, but art and Belgium somehow don’t go together.
Art has rarely if ever been successfully adopted by the state. There is a definitive painting of the Belgian revolution, commissioned by the state from Gustave Wappers, ‘Épisode des Journées de septembre 1830’, but it certainly doesn’t have the pride of place in Belgian culture that Delacroix’s ‘Liberty leading the French people’ does in France.
That is however not necessarily a bad thing. The absence of an imposing state laying down artistic norms may have even been a boon as far as creativity is concerned.
In his book ‘Une vague belge’ (‘A Belgian Wave’), Mr Duplat argued that chaos was advantageous for the creation of art. ‘To be a bastard…a mongrel dog…who lives in an open house, exposed to all winds, in a country that is so small that just by looking upwards you find yourself elsewhere: all this is not a failure but rather a breeding ground that has cultivated Belgian creators who are now minting it the world over’, he wrote.
Belgium does not ‘suffer’ from the ‘grandeur’ or, less diplomatically put, the chauvinism, of neighbouring France. In a country where identity is a potpourri, surely creativity can flourish? Isn’t Belgium a US-style melting pot for new ideas, free of all conformism? Doesn’t the study of chemistry show that chaos rather than equilibrium is the engine of the creative process?
Mr Duplat went to town with his metaphor. Didn’t the kings of yesteryear know that mixed-race children would grow up to be stronger than purebreds? Both Freud and Darwin showed that mutations and deviations ‘moved things forward’ while cloning and incest were ‘deadly’.
Falling back on a single identity was likely to lead to sclerosis. Belgian mongrel artists ‘haven’t had to suffer from an inhibiting national culture as the French have had to bear’. Changing a single verse of Molière is sacrilege in France whereas in Flanders ‘anything goes’. Multilingualism can also be a boon. Didn’t Kafka write in German while living in Prague?
The federalisation of Belgium was through this prism the rejection of a failed national identity. Was it also the start of new, regional identities? No, he wrote: Belgians feel first and foremost European (though I believe the Flemings feel first and foremost Flemish). Fragmentation has encouraged individuals, rather than artistic schools, to blossom.
Hmm. What Mr Duplat skimmed over was the fact that Belgian devolution led to a more assertive Flemish identity in art, backed by a cash-rich government keen to to export a ‘Flanders’ brand.
In Wallonia and Brussels, meanwhile, devolution was with reason seen as risky by the art community, both in terms of loss of identity and diminished financial support. The francophone community didn’t know how to respond to a resurgent Flanders and has since been hampered by local differences in its own search for an identity.
Chaos, as a policy, has its limits. It might allow for artistic sprouting, but bringing delicate trees into adulthood requires horticulture. Culture is in Belgium a devolved competence, and towns in Wallonia have failed to capitalise fully on both their art and their tourism potential as a result.
Separate budgets and an inbuilt reticence to cooperate mean there has frustratingly been no single ‘What’s On’ website for Belgian museums, depriving art lovers of an overview of current exhibitions.
Tourists in Brussels would no doubt benefit, given that the whole country is within reach, within a couple of hours, both by train and car. Those arriving in Brussels seldom step out of the city; for the expat community, Belgium outside of Brussels, with the exception of Bruges and Ghent, hardly exists, as if it were a cultural wasteland.
Devolution has triggered unseemly squabbles between the two main regions at international events. Controversy followed the Venice Biennale of 1970, when Flemish artists felt their art had been unduly squashed been Walloon works. The result was a very Belgian compromise: each region would display every four years.
Devolution has also fostered uncertainty and insecurity. There are huge numbers of artworks owned by the state which are never shown. In the chaos, many, perhaps thousands, of these artworks seem to have gone irretrievably missing. Flanders alone has lost more than 2,300, it was reported in 2018. Finding them again, if that is possible, is expected to take ‘decades’ and cost ‘millions’ of euros.
Collectors have understandably been reticent to lend to the state, and many works remain in private hands. Some masterpieces, such as James Ensor’s ‘Christ’s Entry Into Brussels’, have gone abroad.
The cultural separateness of Belgium’s communities is equally evident in the media, both state-supported and private.
The absence of a national broadcaster has accelerated the development of regional mindsets and undermined the remnants of a Belgian paradigm. ‘Our newspapers and television broadcasters focus entirely on Flanders, not for ideological reasons, but because this is the clearest definition of their target group’, wrote Bart De Wever in his previously mentioned work ‘About Identity’.
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