eon

Spilliaert, a Troubled and Troubling Painter

Lenin is said to have hung a painting by the Flemish painter Leon Spilliaert

(1881-1946) in his room in Spiegelgasse when he lived in Zurich. Unfor-

tunately we do not know which. Although Spilliaert had a number of faith-

ful admirers apart from Lenin, including the great Belgian poet Emile

Verhaeren, in his lifetime he was not generally considered to be a major

painter. Thus his Brussels dealer, Walter Schwarzenberg, exhibited

Spilliaert in his second rather than his main gallery. As Jean Milo, who

worked for Schwarzenberg, commented: `Spilliaert was considered a "mi-

nor master" at the time and we preferred the big tenors'. It was only in the

late 196os and early 197os, with the revival of interest in non-Impressionist

art from around 1900, that Spilliaert' s reputation started to take off,

although, at the international level, it still lags far behind his real stature.

The son of an Ostend hairdresser and perfumer, Spilliaert' s art was strong-

ly affected by his native town and its seaside setting. He suffered from a

stomach ulcer, which made him an insomniac and led him to become a night

walker. His nocturnal visions of Ostend are among his most gripping works.

What are the characteristics of these and other types of painting done by

Spilliaert? What made him different, special?

First, his colour. Spilliaert used few colours in any one painting, using

subtle tonal gradations rather than rich harmonies. He often used dark

colours — black and grey were his favourites — and they were clashing, acidic

and harsh rather than voluptuous. His use of colour was not so much de-

scriptive as decorative and expressive.

Second, Spilliaert was a masterly draughtsman. In his painting he used

line in an economical but telling way, often not as a separate pictorial ele-

ment but as a boundary defining shapes expressed as areas of colour.

Third, Spilliaert's handling of what we could call 'compositional space'

was strikingly original. His beaches, sea walls and steps are given an ex-

treme — even an exaggerated — geometrical interpretation that confers on

them an abstract rather than a representational quality. As Francine-Claire

Legrand observed: 'While Spilliaert's paintings may not have been large,his vision was. He discarded details to create the monumental on a small

212

ed.

arh

scale. This feeling for synthesis led him to quite new perspectival solutionsof pioneering significance in the development of abstract art. Not untilMondrian do we find a similarly daring use of space.'

Of course, Spilliaert was not a 'man from nowhere'. There were influ-

ences on his work, but they were no more than that – influences. He forged

his own style out of a strange inner vision. So, he was touched by Toulouse-

Lautrec' s line, by the flat coloured areas of the Nabis, by the velvety blacks

of Odilon Redon, by Art Nouveau patterning, by the fin-de-siecle emotions

of Symbolism, and so on. But if those and other influences touched his art,

they did not mould it. He absorbed them and used them for his own purpos-

es, remaining a 'loner' or 'outsider' , refusing to identify himself with any

particular movement or `-ism' .

For Spilliaert the subject of a picture was not of the highest interest. His

concern was the making of the picture: how to compose it, how to balance

its elements. Starting with a well-defined visual idea, he would play with it

in his mind until he executed his fully worked out composition on paper or

cardboard. On those materials, not canvas, because he worked almost

always with pastel, water-colour, wash or ink, which he preferred to oil be-

cause these media lend themselves to transparency and spontaneity of han-

dling.

Nonetheless, Spilliaert did have a number of preferred themes, including:

self-portraits, solitary figures, Ostend, the sea and the seaside, interiors and

trees.

Leon Spilliaert, Self-Portrait with Mirror. 1908.India ink, water-colour andpastel on paper, 48 x 63 cm.Museum voor SchoneKunsten, Ostend (© SABAM

Belgium 1998).

213

Leon Spilliaert, Vertigo.1908. India ink, water-colour and crayon on paper,64 x 48 cm. Museum voorSchone Kunsten, Ostend(© SABAM Belgium 1998).

That Spilliaert' s paintings more than those of most other artists were

landscapes of his emotions is most apparent in his self-portraits. These dis-

turbed and disturbing pictures, mostly painted in 1907 and 1908, are among

the most searching scrutinies of Self ever recorded. The artist' s strange face,

with its dark-ringed protuberant eyes and faint moustache, surmounted by

quiffed hair, recurs not just once in each self-portrait but sometimes several

times over, reflected in a mirror or series of mirrors that multiply the image,

which is often imprisoned in a geometric setting. These brutally candid self-

portraits, carried out in predominantly dark colours, pose the questions: who

am I? where do I come from? where am I going? No answer comes.

214 Leon Spilliaert, a Troubled and Troubling Painter

One of these paintings depicts the leaf of a calendar on which the number

2 is boldly printed. This has been thought to be a reference to the day of the

dead, All Souls' Day, the second of November. Did Spilliaert fix each self-

image as a step on the path leading to death? How different is this obsessive

self-regard from the traditional self-portrait, carried down from Renaissance

times, of the dapper, confident young painter looking at us nonchalantly

over his palette.

In Self Portrait with Mirror, of 1908, the only colour which relieves the

black, white and grey scheme is the faintly glimmering yellow that defines

the frame of the mirror enclosing Spilliaert' s spectral head and shoulders

and also the clock that serves here as a reminder that the passing of each mo-

ment brings death closer. As Andrew Marvell wrote: 'At my back 1 alwayshear time's winged chariot hurrying near' . Indeed, at the centre of this shad-

owy composition the artist' s head is caught in a spasm of terror. Does he ac-

tually see or hear death? The picture frame to the right contains no painting,

only a black emptiness. Does that indicate that we have already moved out

of the world of the living?

One of Spilliaert' s most memorable images of a solitary figure is SittingBather, of 1910. Here the waves of the sea, represented by irreal arabesques,

in the upper right part of the transversal composition, are strongly contrast-

ed with the geometry of the steps in the sea wall to the lower left.

Complexity is added by the tension between the downward thrust of the

parapet and the counter-thrust, at right angles, of the steps. Indifferent to this

compositional game, a girl in bathing costume and cap sits with her back to

us, looking down at the curvilinear lines of the waves. Like his mistress, a

little dog also fixes his gaze on the sea.

The coupling of perspectival geometry and arabesque in Sitting Bather is,

compositionally, one degree more sophisticated than the purely geometric

structure of Woman on the Dike (1 908), but this water-colour is nevertheless

Spilliaert at his most convincing. Six coloured triangular strips, pushing up-

wards, converge at the end of a sea wall. Perspectival geometry, as often in

Leon Spilliaert, Woman onthe Dike. 1908. Water-colour and crayon on paper,33.5 x 73.2 cm. KoninklijkeMusea voor SchoneKunsten, Brussels(© SABAM Belgium 1998).

215

Spilliaert, is taken to the limits of figuration, to the verge of abstraction.

Above, two horizontal bands of blue absorb the shock of the rising triangles.

Alone, isolated on the sea wall, stands a white-shawled, black-skirted wo-

man who, like the Bather, rejects all communication with the viewer, en-

gaging in a mysterious interplay with her Ostend seafront setting. No influ-

ence here, but parallels with the patterned compositions of Felix Vallotton

and the anguished loners of Edvard Munch.

The parallel with Munch is even more evident in Vertigo (1908). But in

this black-and-white study the figure of the woman is closer to symbolist

imagery of vampires, witches and femmes fatales than to the statuesque

bather and fisherwoman in the two paintings discussed above. Precariously

Leon Spilliaert, The Girlswith the White Stockings.1912. Gouache on paper,65 x 43.5 cm. Museum voorSchone Kunsten, Ostend(© SAB AM Belgium 1998).

21 6 Leon Spilliaert, a Troubled and Troubling Painter

****NgliMMK4A4.....:

Leon Spilliaert, Pieta. 1910.Pastel and crayon on paper,55 x 73 cm. GemeentelijkMuseum van Elsene,Brussels (0 SABAM

Belgium 1998).

poised on the steep steps of a conical tower, unbalanced, legs akimbo, hair

flowing, will she fall or throw herself into the dark void that awaits her un-

der the steeply plunging steps? Despite the painter's success in constructing

his pictorial structure from the series of steps, the woman is not totally ab-

sorbed into the composition as are the figures of the Bather and the fisher-

woman. Here the woman's emotion cries out to us from the picture. She tries

to free herself from the perils of her predicament. In the two other paintings

the women are integrated, synthesised into the space in which the artist en-

closes them.

Spilliaert's view of people was not only a vision of isolated 'psycho'

women. He began a process of celebrating the life and work of fishermen

and fisherwomen by monumentalising them – a process that Constant

Permeke' was to continue and carry through to its logical conclusion in his

massive silhouettes of stylised workers, both fishermen and peasants. In a

number of paintings, too, Spilliaert treated young girls in Nabi style. Of

these, The Girls with the White Stockings (i912) is perhaps the most relaxed

and charming. In a densely organised picture five schoolgirls are presented

in a decorative pattern. The pigtailed girls, who turn away from us, are re-

duced to completely flat decorative areas of colour ( muted blue and green,

ochre and black, heightened by the 'cut-out' legs in white stockings). There

is no drawing, no perspective, the whole painting being built up from blocks

of colour. Here, as so often in his painting, Spilliaert's use of colour is not

descriptive but decorative and expressive.

217

Leon Spilliaert, TheRestaurant. 1904. Water-colour and pastel on paper,47.5 x 47.5 cm. KoninklijkeMusea voor SchoneKunsten, Brussels (©SABAM Belgium 1998).

Similar in some ways to The Girls with the White Stockings is a religious

piece, Pieta, of 1910. There is a comparable merging of the figures into an

overall grouping of the actors in the Passion drama, though here it is diffi-

cult to distinguish the form of Mary Magdalene from the body of the dead

Christ, obscured behind her. Further back two black-robed figures – the

Virgin Mary and Saint John? – stand in attitudes of grief, but depersonalised

since we cannot see their downcast faces. The schematic background sug-

gests an Ostend beach and a grey-green North Sea rather than the hill of

Calvary or the city of Jerusalem. Christ's corpse is a sinuous yellow form

that holds the pictorial structure together like one of those S-shaped bodies

beloved of Rubens. Once again, the colour is not realistic but emotive.

Spilliaert was able to endow inanimate objects with a strange life of their

own. In that respect he was a precursor of Rene Magritte, who was to write

that his art was concerned with 'the inherent poetry and mystery' of the ob-

218 Leon Spilliaert, a Troubled and Troubling Painter

jects he painted: 'my conception of painting ... is to accord to objects theirfull value as objects'. Such an attitude underlies Spilliaert' s treatment of the

cardboard boxes he recorded in his father's shop and of his father's perfume

flasks. In The Restaurant (1904), Spilliaert takes as his theme the whole in-

terior of an empty restaurant.

No guests, no waiters disturb the mysterious silence of this deserted

room. A ghostly light is given off by the freshly ironed tablecloths and the

neatly folded napkins, as it is by the chandelier and the bracket lamps on the

walls – all in white. All is anticipation. We – like the room – await the ar-

rival of the guests who will never come, never push open the dark doors,

never cast their reflections onto the vacant mirror. This unquiet, disturbing

image is concerned more with l'attente than with tables, chairs and decor.

As he grew older Spilliaert became increasingly fascinated by the land-

scape of the lonely region of the Fagnes (in the Belgian province of Liege),

and also by trees. His paintings of trees are, broadly, of two distinct kinds.

First, pictures in which the bare branches, traced in dark colours, intertwine

against a background of clear sky. Second, in his last years, clusters of tree

trunks, bare, or almost bare, of branches, which are grouped like the great

columns of romanesque or Gothic cathedrals. Beech Stumps (1945), is a typ-

ical example. It is sometimes suggested that these late tree pictures, from

which people are conspicuously absent, represent a world-weary rejection

of humanity. Although there is, indeed, a somewhat 'withered' atmosphere

in these treescapes, it would be simplistic, in dealing with so complex a per-

son as Spilliaert, to insist too emphatically on an interpretation of this kind.

A brief look at a random selection of works by Leon Spilliaert could give

the very misleading impression that he had a ready-made artistic recipe

which he applied indiscriminately. A handful of Japanese arabesques, a dash

of Art Nouveau patterning, a touch of geometric simplification and a few

grains of symbolist malaise. All these elements are present in his work, and

many others besides. Indeed, according to his friend Henri Vandeputte, his

work numbered 'one thousand, one hundred and ninety-seven differentfacets' . But far from dominating Spilliaert' s work, these facets made signif-

icant but subordinate contributions to the art of the troubled and troubling

painter who was able to synthesise subject matter, technique, composition

and mood into a uniquely personal vision. It was, as Fernand Crommelynck

wrote in 1908, essentially Spilliaert' s gift for pictorial synthesis that set him

apart from other painters: 'Leon Spilliaert possesses, to a higher degree thanany painter of our time, the gift of synthesis.'

MICHAEL PALMER

FURTHER READING NOTES

LEGRAND, FRANCINE-CLAIRE, Leon Spilliaert. Antwerp, 1981. 1. see The Low Countries

TRICOT, XAVIER, Leon Spilliaert - les annees 1900 - 1915. Antwerp, 1996. 1 997-98: pp . 194-207.

219