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| A door to another world |
In Brussels recently I visited 62
rue Vautier in the Leopold district, housing a museum dedicated to
Antoine-Joseph Wiertz (1806-65). While mainly
known as a painter, he was also a sculptor and writer. It is the enormous canvases in the main
gallery, however, which make the greatest impression on entering the building. Having read about Wiertz in Fortean Times a few months ago I had
some idea what to expect regarding his themes, but walking into the cavernous
gallery was still a surprise. I found the
pictures remarkable, and think their creator deserves to be better known.
Driven by pride in his
achievements, he was keen future generations should enjoy them as well, to
which end he made a deal with the Belgian government that his work should be
kept intact in perpetuity and available for public display, despite his
contemporaries not being universally enamoured by it. He was unbothered by their indifference,
claiming it takes a couple of centuries for an artist’s reputation to bed down
and a definitive verdict to be reached.
In exchange for undertaking to donate his creations to the state, in
1850 the Belgian government, looking to cement the identity of the new nation,
financed construction of the building which became his final studio. As well as the large gallery there are three
smaller rooms (‘salons’) added after his death.
According to the brochure
produced by the museum, written by Brita Velghe, there are some 220 works in a
variety of media on display. Pictures
are crammed together in the sort of hanging style prevalent during Wiertz’s
lifetime. The end salon houses a large
display case containing smaller artefacts associated with him, and his death
mask is on display in the main gallery.
There are two maxims written in charcoal by Wiertz himself, translating
as: ‘Pride, a virtue which inspires great works and wounds the vanity of
others’; and ‘Modesty, a mask which flatters the vanity of others in order to
attract praise.’ He did not feel
the need for modesty, feeling it would be a dishonest pose.
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| Main gallery |
Self-confidence was necessary for
the young man to improve his prospects.
Born into very modest circumstances, his father encouraged his talent
and he was lucky enough to acquire benefactors who assisted his development. Through them he was exposed to a number of
old masters, particularly Rubens, who became a major influence, and with whom
he eventually considered himself on a par.
After training at the Antwerp Art Academy he was further submerged in
art history by stays in Paris and Rome.
He achieved early success and
made a reputation for himself, in the process becoming critic-proof, a
profession for which he had little time.
Nor did he care much for Paris, a city that had snubbed him, and he
published a pamphlet foreseeing a time when Brussels would become the capital
of Europe and Paris a provincial town.
In a way the EU returned the compliment, as rue Wiertz runs through the
European Parliament complex nearby.
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| Rue Wiertz |
As if to answer his critics, the
canvases got bigger and grander, but it is in his smaller paintings, with their
often morbid subject matter, that his view of the world is most clearly
expressed. If his reputation had rested
on the large pictures, it is doubtful whether he would be as well remembered. While he became imbued with the values of the
Romantic movement, often in tension with formal academic tendencies, he is also
seen as a precursor of the Symbolists and Surrealists, offset by a marked
gothic sensibility. As the list
suggests, he can be hard to pin down.
His oeuvre encompasses the large paintings, on classical and religious
themes, self portraits, and nudes. The
last includes La Liseuse de romans (The Reader of Novels), 1853, who
obligingly has stripped completely and lies recumbent to peruse her tome, oblivious
to a hand reaching in to steal one of the volumes lying next to her on the bed
(perhaps symbolising the self-indulgence and escapism of reading). The most interesting paintings, at least to my
mind, are those dealing with macabre themes, though the categories are not
mutually exclusive. Les Deux jeunes filles ou La Belle Rosine. (Two Girls, or The Beautiful Rosine), 1847, combines nudity and the
macabre by depicting a naked woman staring at a skeleton, no doubt pondering on
the way of all flesh, while La jeune
sorcière (The Young Witch), 1857,
has a naked young woman suggestively astride a broom with an old crone and
other shadowy figures watching her.
One virtue of Wiertz knowing his
own mind and not having to worry about the marketplace was his indifference to
what others thought. In his contemplation
of suffering his pictures may not be on the same level as Goya’s horrors, but
there is still a power to shock. The
titles of many of these speak for themselves: in L'enfant brûlé (The Burned
Child), 1849, a terrified woman pulls a baby from a brazier, alas too late. L'Inhumation
précipitée (The Hasty Burial),
1854, shows a terrified face peering out of a coffin in a vault as the
prematurely interred individual attempts escape. Le
suicide (The Suicide), 1854,
shows a man shooting himself in the head, the smoke from the pistol thankfully obscuring
his face.
More explicitly gruesome, in Le soufflet d’une dame Belge (The Outrage of a Belgian Woman), 1861, a
nearly-naked woman defends herself against a soldier about to rape her by
shooting him upwards through the bottom of his head, causing his face to
explode. (Apparently Wiertz’s wanted to
promote training in the use of firearms by women, and proposed the setting up
of a rifle range for ladies.) In Faim, Folie, Crime (Hunger, Madness, Crime), 1853, a woman driven insane by starvation,
though actually looking in rude health, has cut off the leg of her baby and put
it in a cooking pot, the wrapped corpse held on her lap with a stain from the
amputated limb seeping onto the material.
Her exposed breast contrasts the nurturing maternal attitude with the
monstrous act she has committed (but the salaciousness of the exposure undercuts
the horror).
There is still more maternal
agony in La civilisation du XIXème siècle
(The Civilization of the Nineteenth Century),
paired with Le soufflet d’une dame Belge
on the wall, the two in identical frames: a terrified woman clutching a baby
flees soldiers who are shooting at her at close range, a box with jewellery
spilling out at her feet. Now we are not
only talking about Belgium, we are talking about civilisation generally, or the
lack of it. Wiertz was acutely aware of
and sympathetic to the vulnerability of women and children, while leaving
himself open to the charge he was willing to use nudity to titillate the
viewer, employing classicism as a fig-leaf.
The cover of the Penguin edition
of Maldoror and Poems, by Comte de
Lautréamont, has a detail from L'Inhumation
précipitée, and unsurprisingly a detail appears on the cover of Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our
Most Primal Fear, by Jan Bondeson.
Bondeson, who regularly appears in Fortean
Times, contributed an article to the July 2018 issue, extracted from his
book The Lion Boy and Other Medical
Curiosities, which in part discusses Wiertz. After a general biographical sketch, Bondeson
uses Wiertz’s remarkable triptych Pensées
et visions d'une tête coupée (Last
Thoughts And Visions Of A Severed Head), 1853, to discuss speculation about
the length of time a decapitated head can maintain consciousness. (Clearly fascinated by decapitation, Wiertz
also painted Une tête coupée (A Severed Head), 1855, exhibited nearby,
showing a guillotined head in close-up on straw.)
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| L'Inhumation précipitée |
In 1848 Wiertz had had the idea of
being mesmerised in order to enter the mind of a convicted murderer as he was
guillotined. This Wiertz did while
standing on the scaffold, and he wrote an elaborate and frightening account of
the condemned man’s final moments until extinction, which by the calculation of
witnesses lasted three minutes (Bondeson points out that in reality, with blood
flow to the brain terminated, it would be a matter of seconds). The three panels of Pensées et visions d'une tête coupée show the stages of the
execution as a whirl of action, losing form as the dying man’s thought
processes decay. Wiertz included his
account as a légende in the triptych’s trompe-l’oeil frame (a form he was fond
of), and it was published posthumously in his collected literary works in
1869. Despite stating that Wiertz’s
description of his mesmeric rapport is given in full, the version in FT is abbreviated.
A fuller, though still not
complete, translation by Walter Benjamin and originally published in German in
1929, can be found in the English-language collection of his writings The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical
Reproducibility. In addition, the
editors provide a description of the three panels, which is useful as they are
rather murky. Benjamin had an interest
in Wiertz’s work and there are numerous references to him in The Arcades Project, including to
Wiertz’s writing on photography: Wiertz penned an article about the subject
after seeing an exhibition in 1855, and was one of the first to recognise both
photography’s own artistic potential and the impact the new medium would have
on painting. Elsewhere Benjamin refers
to the ‘panoramic tendency’ of Wiertz’s paintings, though it does not seem he
visited the museum to see the large-scale canvases for himself.
Benjamin describes him as
‘progressive’ and a precursor of montage (doubtless thinking of Pensées et visions d'une tête coupée). Less positively, he quotes Baudelaire’s
unflattering assessment of ‘that infamous poseur named Wiertz, a favourite of
English cockneys,’ actually a fairly mild beginning compared to the
foam-specked invective following.
Baudelaire refers to Wiertz’s notion of Brussels as capital and Paris as
province, which one suspects was what got him riled. Baudelaire asks what Brussels will ‘do with
all this after his death?’ Doubtless he
would have been grinding his teeth to see the Wiertz Museum still in existence,
giving the ‘poseur’ the last laugh.
According to the museum brochure,
when Wiertz died, in the museum, his body was ‘embalmed in accordance with Ancient
Egyptian burial rites.’ Presumably they
entailed submersion in natron for 70 days, having his brain removed through his
nose, and his organs preserved in canopic jars.
One suspects it was in fact embalming light, but if he had gone the full Egyptian it would have been a
fittingly bizarre end to a singular career.
He had wished to be buried in the garden, making him part of the museum
and therefore an exhibit in his own right, but permission was denied and he was
buried in the more bourgeois surroundings of the municipal cemetery at Ixelles,
a suburb of Brussels.
The description in the Rough Guide to Belgium & Luxembourg is
sniffy about Wiertz and the museum, focusing on the morbid and the nudity, and
overegging the yuck factor. By saying he
came to believe he was better than Rubens and Michelangelo, they invite the
reader to dismiss him as a talentless egomaniac with a penchant for melodrama,
which probably serves to put readers off visiting but is most unfair. There are fans though: Olivier Smolders and
Johan van den Driessche made a short film about Wiertz in 1991, Pensées et visions d'une tête coupée, though
sadly it seems to have done little to raise his profile. To its credit Dinant, the city of his birth,
has a statue of him, even though he left to go to the Antwerp Art Academy at
the age of 14 and did not look back.
Musée Wiertz was very quiet while
I was there, and this is the common state of affairs I understand (Bondeson
says that when he went in 2011 he was the only visitor). One suspects the Belgian government would prefer
not have to foot the bill for its upkeep, but I am glad they do as my time
there was a highlight of my stay in Brussels.
I was surprised how brief the official brochure – at least the
English-language version – is, and Wiertz surely merits a catalogue
raisonné. Entry is free, though opening
hours are limited, and I urge anyone visiting Brussels to make the time to call
in and experience this fascinating artist at first hand.
Update 24 July 2019:
Update 24 July 2019:
My son Keith while strolling round Brussels came across this elaborate statue dedicated to the memory of Wiertz. Designed by Jacques Jacquet, it stands in Place Raymond Blyckaerts. It was erected in 1881 and unveiled with great fanfare in the presence of, among others, Hendrik Conscience, influential novelist and first curator of the Wiertz Museum. Unfortunately these days one is as likely to see groups of drinkers in the vicinity as members of Brussels’ cultural elite.
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| Photograph courtesy Keith Ruffles |
References
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, Harvard University
Press, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical
Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W.
Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard University Press, 2008.
Bondeson, Jan. ‘Portrait of the
Artist as a Severed Head’, Fortean Times,
July 2018, pp. 36-43.
Lee, Phil and
Trott, Victoria (eds). The Rough Guide to
Belgium & Luxembourg, 7th edition, Rough Guides, 2018.
Velghe, Brita. Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865), Musées
royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, n.d.
