And then there was mad Belgian symbolist Léon Frédéric (but whether before or after the egg-baby phenomenon I don't know) (couldn't find an efficient way of linking to this - Le Ruisseau - so had to download it) #LesBelges
Wide angle view of a 19th century marine painting, between two curly white columns on pale wooden parquet.
Extreme wide-angle view of the top of a large spiral staircase. Walls are hung with big 19th century paintings behind mannequins wearing Uniqlo garments beneath a fabulous big stained glass skylight.
Antwerp's Uniqlo recently moved into 17th century listed Osterieth Huis on Meir. Tbh honest the small rooms (which I guess they can't alter) don't seem ideally suited to retail, but the first floor landing, festooned with landscapes & marine views by Robert Mols (1848-1903) is splendid. #LesBelges
Rare televised Magritte interview! in French, with Dutch subtitles. The French is relatively easy to follow. Interviewer Jan Walravens is Flemish but speaking French; I think Magritte is speaking French with a Belgian accent, though maybe a native francophone could confirm or deny. #LesBelges
Oil painting of statues, high-sided hedges and strange four-legged creatures beneath the ornate towers of a castle. In a private collection; according to the Ransy Facebook page, it's not available to be lent out so the public can see it. Boo!
Jardin d'Italie (1958) by Jean Ransy (1910-1991) #LesBelges
Here's a Paul Nougé photograph, for comparison. #LesBelges
Photograph of the interior of the altogether nutty Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865) museum in Ixelles (currently closed for refurbishment etc; supposed to reopen later this year). Daylight floods in through skylights, illuminating monumental paintings in heightened romantic style, such as The Greeks and the Trojans Fighting over the Body of Patroclus, on the left. Visitors sit on banquettes. Wikipedia: "Wiertz died in his studio. His remains were embalmed in accordance with Ancient Egyptian burial rites and buried in a vault in the municipal cemetery of Ixelles." Completely normal.
Musée Wiertz (2017) photograph by Anne Billson #LesBelges
René Magritte interview (in French). Much to the distaste of the Parisian surrealists he never made the slightest effort to shake off his Walloon accent. "At certain moments he even enjoys exaggerating it, to the point where it becomes almost aggressive.” (Alex Danchev's Magritte: A Life) #LesBelges
![Infused with a distinct sense of mystery, 'La lumière du pôle' presents a pair of cracked and partially broken fashion mannequins standing amidst a desert-like landscape of steep-sided sand dunes. Behind them, a foreboding sky holds the threat of an oncoming storm. ☁️🌪 To the right of the two mannequins, a strange, amorphous bird like figure appears to hover above the undulating dunes. [Description by Christie's, which sold the painting in 2022 for 6,243,500 GB pounds sterling]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kcia3mwfxkukk7chouzyb5pu/bafkreierczi3lpafuhsrc64sn6ma7kc37fipzccpbbkodslvrfmrmb5dcy)
Infused with a distinct sense of mystery, 'La lumière du pôle' presents a pair of cracked and partially broken fashion mannequins standing amidst a desert-like landscape of steep-sided sand dunes. Behind them, a foreboding sky holds the threat of an oncoming storm. ☁️🌪 To the right of the two mannequins, a strange, amorphous bird like figure appears to hover above the undulating dunes. [Description by Christie's, which sold the painting in 2022 for 6,243,500 GB pounds sterling]
La lumière du pôle (1926-27) by René Magritte (1898-1967). Fromerly in the collection of Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti. #LesBelges
Wikipedia: The painting depicts a virago, Dulle Griet, who leads an army of women to pillage Hell... While her female followers loot a house, Griet advances towards the mouth of Hell through a landscape populated by Boschian monsters.. They represent the sins that are punished there. Griet wears male armour — a breastplate, a mailed glove and a metal cap; her military costume is parodied by the monster in a helmet beside her, who pulls up a drawbridge. A knife hangs from her side, while in her right hand she carries a sword, which may refer to the saying: "He could go to Hell with a sword in his hand."
Reminder: you have until Sunday to see Pieter Bruegel de Oude's Dulle Griet (1563) in the flesh, as it were, before Antwerp's Museum Mayer van den Bergh closes for an unspecified number of years to be refurbished. (Reproductions like this don't do it justice) #LesBelges
Gouache of a gargantuan tabby and white cat blocking a railway line. If a train were to come along, the train would probably not survive the encounter. In the background are half a dozen small houses with red roofs and some trees, painted in an almost pointilist style.
Raminagrobis (1946) by René Magritte ((1898-1967), who was more of a dog person, though did have a cat called "Raminagrobis" = Personnage du Pantagruel (Tiers Livre) de Rabelais; subsequently (La Fontaine) "Nom masculin désignant un chat de grande taille, souvent un matou." #LesBelges
Magritte, in his bowler hat, echoes the chin-on-hand pose of the tophatted, masked antihero Fantômas, whom he has painted looming out of a brick wall.
René Magrittte photographed next to his own painting, Le Barbare, destroyed in the London Blitz. #LesBelges
A big old mirror with a lot of black patches where the silvering has worn off, hung on a landing halfway up a staircase carpeted in red. I am steadying myself against the wall with my elbow, taking a photograph of my reflection with a Panasonic Lumix camera, carrying a red shoulderbag and tote bag, and wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, a knee-length black shirt and red sandals.
Happy birthday James Ensor BOTD in 1860. Here I am in his house in Oostende, 2013. #LesBelges
Fernand Schirren: composer, musician, percussionist, also the main pianist accompanying silent films at Cinematek from 1962 to 1982. Also composed the eccentric score for CARTOON CIRCUS (1972) showing as part of the Picha tribute @offscreenff.bsky.social 17h Sat 22/3 Cinematek in Brussels #LesBelges
Aha! That painting looks familiar! #LesBelges bsky.app/profile/anne...
Art Nouveau advertisement for Golden Bee coffee, hence the woman preparing coffee in a baroque-looking kettle thing is wearing a black kimono patterened with a recurring golden bee motif. She also has a bunch of sunflowers in her hair, as you do. The curlicues of white smoke rising up from the kettle thing are echoed, on the other side of the poster, in the form of sprays of white flowers rising up from a large vase, thus associating what is usually a bleary-eyed industrial-type breakfast process (preparing coffee while half asleep and not yet properly dressed) with the joys of nature in the form of flowers, bees, natural beauty etc.
C'est moi, le matin! Gebrande Koffies De Gulden Bie aka Golden Bee Coffee (1893) by Adolphe Crespin (1859-1944). Born & died in Brussels; un des premiers adeptes du japonisme en Belgique. #LesBelges
RIP Fred "Bekky" Beekmans (born in Antwerpen), bekend als frontman van de Belgische popgroep The Pebbles, who once shared the bill with Jimi Hendrix and The Small Faces at the Olympia in Paris. #LesBelges
The poster for REFLET DANS UN DIAMANT MORT: a pair of eyes peering intently out of a black Diabolik-style balaclava over a diamond containing the image of two men (one red, one blue) with guns, and an impression of dynamically shattering glass, or possibly shards of diamond.
Benelux premiere of REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND (poster artwork by Gilles Vranckx), the new film by Hélène Cattet and Brono Forzani: Offscreen Film Festival, 19h30 on Saturday 15 March at Cinema Nova in Brussels. #LesBelges www.offscreen.be/nl/offscreen...
Le chant du printemps (1968) by Jean Ransy (1910-1991) I wish printemps would hurry up & chant. Now in 3rd week of cold, with my future full of nothing but accounts & now Belgium is imposing obligatory new invoice system, which I BET won't be compatible with income from outside Belgium. #LesBelges
Art Nouveau poster for Absinthe Robette; the top half of a young woman with a shock of curly red/orange hair, standing in profile and lightly draped in diaphanous tranlucent fabric that doesn't do a very good job of concealing her nakedness. She is, somewhat ecstatically, holding up a tall glass of yellowish absinthe with a sugar cube balanced on an absinthe spoon balanced on the rim of the glass (hey! I have one of those spoons! but have never used it ever since I once tried to drink an absinthe cocktail at The Groucho Club and nearly vomited over a bunch of alternative comedians who were milling around, blocking my urgent flight to throw up in the toilets; I think I was coming down with flu, but have never dared touch the stuff since. Probably just as well). Anyway, the background is varying shades of green, patterned with curly Art Nouveau plantlife, or possibly tendrils of smoke.
Absinthe Robette (1896) by Henri Privat-Livemont (1861–1936), regarded as a Symbolist, but now better known for his Art Nouveau posters. #LesBelges
The word "oeuf" is handwritten in black, twice, in a fancy curlicued sort of way that somehow creates the image of a broken half-eggshell between the two words. Very clever, and also rather aesthetically pleasing. Underneath this, the name of the artist is written, or painted, in black caps.
Oeuf (no idea what date this is, or even if this is the correct title) by Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976). #LesBelges
An Art Nouveau dining-room: dark wooden furnishings and fittings with circular and thin rectangular embellishments. Also, murals of typically Art Nouveau ladies, all flowing hair and graceful limbs.
A mural depicting a couple of graceful semi-naked pale ochre Art Nouveau ladies (one bigger than the other and I'm not talking bra size) against a darkish eau-de-nil background.
A bright, airy breakfast room in the Art Nouveau style: white wood and walls, glass-topped table, the usual harmonious geometric shapes.
Is this a firescreen? I'm not sure. Anyhow it's decorated in an Art Nouveau style with more of a touch of the Vienna Secession (cf Gustav Klimt). Impression of all those straight lines stylised face and features is midway between Egyptian hieroglyphics and an electrical circuit diagram.
Inside Maison Cauchie, an Art Nouveau townhouse in Brussels designed by architect, painter & designer Paul Cauchie (1875-1952). (I'm sorry, I don't know who took the pictures) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchie... #LesBelges
The personal collection of Barry Humphries. A man of exquisite taste, so naturally there are Belgians in it: Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville. #LesBelges
Medusa gazes balefully out from benhind a blue veil beneath a shock of snakey eau-de-nil hair; in each hand is a shallow bowl overflowing with dribbly black liquid, flanked by black poppies exuding some sort of intoxicating smoke. Colored pencils and wax crayons, with pen and blue ink, brush and gold paint and blue gouache, over graphite, on yellow wove paper. It's a mood. A SYMBOLIST mood.
Hello, this is me serving breakfast to my guests. La Méduse (1893) by Jean Delville (1867-1953), who lived in St Gilles, in Brussels (where I used to live) and also, during WW1, Golders Green in London. Also taught for a while at the Glasgow School of Art. #LesBelges
Painted in the Romantic style: on some marble steps in a grand vestibule, a naked woman with very long hair is attempting to preserve her modesty by wrapping herself in a green velvet curtain. Meanwhile, her white horse is waiting outside. Guess she's gonna have to let go of that curtain eventually.
Your horse awaits, milady. Lady Godiva (1870) by Josef Van Lerius (1823-1875) #LesBelges in romantic-historical mode.
Eggshells (which seem empty but on closer examination might not be) carefully arranged on black, yellow and red backgrounds in the form of the Belgian flag.
Untitled (1965-1966) by Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976). Here is an article about him in the New Yorker, which I can't read because I don't have a subscription. www.newyorker.com/culture/cult... #LesBelges
Dressed in a suit, Ensor sits, looking uncomfortable, at the centre of the frame, in front of a pillar labelled "J Ensor 1895". He is surrounded by winged, horned, scaly, stripey, skeletal, multi-eyed, pointy-eared demons which are all poking or prodding him.
I prefer the graphic work of James Ensor (1860-1949) to his paintings. Title of this 1895 etching is Duivels die mij sarren (Demons Taunting Me), a 19th century selfie to which we can all relate. Just another day at the creative coalface for #LesBelges
