Surrealism in Brussels: from James Ensor’s Oyster Eater to Rachel Baes’s horror girls

When you say James Ensor (1860-1949), you say Ostend. The son of a British immigrant and Flemish souvenir shop manager was born in this Belgian seaside resort. Here he painted his most famous canvases full of skeletons and masks. And here he lived until his death.

That is why Ostend is commemorating the 75th anniversary of the death of its famous son in a grand manner these days. But Brussels has now also claimed him. In the context of the Belgian EU presidency, which runs until the end of June, two Ensor exhibitions have been organized.

It didn’t even require an artifice. As a 17-year-old, Ensor traveled to the Belgian capital to enroll at the art academy there. The exhibition James Ensor. Inspired by Brussels in the Royal Library (KBR) is dedicated to his early student work.

The drawings in particular are strong and reveal impressionistic influences. Ensor did not continue his training for long. He quarreled with his teachers, whom he called ‘a club of visually impaired people’, and developed a revulsion against critics, whom he later depicted as two skeletons fighting over a buck.

But the Brussels years were formative for Ensor and the KBR was the first public institution to purchase a work from him in 1892. The artist himself could regularly be found in the library. Walking past the exhibition in the stately halls, you as a visitor can imagine how he made discoveries in the print room.

Those who are hungry for more Ensor – and especially later work – can go to Bozar a stone’s throw away. The exhibition James Ensor. Maestro shows a cross-section of his oeuvre spanning more than six decades. There is a version of it hanging there, among other things The oyster eater, a young woman who shamelessly feasts on a richly filled table, and a compelling portrait of Ensor’s father on his deathbed.

Magritte and Folon

Brussels wouldn’t be Brussels if it had only put a Flemish artist in the spotlight in honor of the EU presidency. Entirely in the federal spirit of the country, an art giant with Walloon roots has been placed next to Ensor: René Magritte (1898-1967). This most famous surrealist in Belgium is the center of no fewer than three exhibitions.

The least of the bunch is paradoxically found in the museum that bears Magritte’s name. Here his work is contrasted with that of his younger colleague Jean-Michel Folon (1934-2005), whose watercolors of bleeding trees, all-seeing eyes and swarms of eyes look downright sickening next to Magritte’s paintings with powerful imagery, even though this is often the work of second garnish concerns.

Still, it is interesting to look at them. The endless series of bowler hats, apples, mirrors and deserted streets shows how a recognized great like Magritte had to search and experiment to arrive at the iconic images that we all know today, even if only from a poster or coffee mug.

Surrealism

A Magritte that definitely belongs in the ‘iconic’ category The realm of lights (1954). The painting of a country house shrouded in mysterious darkness in broad daylight is part of Imagine! 100 Years of International Surrealism. With this, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts celebrates the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto exactly a century ago.

Anyone who is not yet familiar with surrealism will be completely introduced to it in one fell swoop. Fairytale forests, melting clocks, monsters, sexually mutated dolls, trolls and impotent desert landscapes – all the ingredients of surrealism are present.

MeTookcriticism

Imagine! is divided according to recognized themes of surrealism, such as dreams and mythology, but what is innovative is the addition of symbolist artists who paved the way for the surrealists. The exhibition makers have also hedged against contemporary MeTook criticism by supplementing the usual surrealist canon with no fewer than seventeen female artists, who operated in the shadow of their macho colleagues a century ago.

But despite these interesting additions and the loans of absolute top quality, something is not right about this exhibition. He is simply too neat for an overview of anti-civil shin-kickers.

That certainly does not apply Histoire de ne pas rire. This overview of Belgian surrealism is designed as a labyrinth of apparently carelessly made partitions, on which six or seven works often hang rather than the two that actually fit there. Three exhibitions could have been created from this overcrowded presentation.

Horror girls and caged angels

Here too, Magritte is the unmissable common thread, with the highlight being the relatively unknown paintings from his ‘period vache’ in 1948. In an extremely short period of time, the artist shot about thirty unprecedentedly absurd and sometimes downright aggressive representations on canvas. Who l’Ellipsea green man with a bowler hat and a gun barrel instead of a nose, can never forget it.

At least as fascinating and disturbing are the horror girls by Rachel Baes (1912-1983) and the caged angels by Jane Graverol (1905-1984). But the greatest discovery of this exhibition is Marcel Mariën (1920-1993), who has been unjustly forgotten and should be given a major solo sooner rather than later.

His works include Cyclops glasses, a Pieta made of matches and a completely derailing film. Mariën worked with Magritte for a long time, and was even his protégé, but the friendship soured when, according to Mariën, Magritte became too commercial.

The master nevertheless has the last word in Brussels. Visitors leave the exhibition with a variation on his famous pipe painting, which tells them: ceci continue de ne pas être une pipe (this is still not a pipe).