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Travel Belgium About Brussels Upper Town Musees Royaux Des Beaux Arts Symbolism And James Ensor |
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The Symbolists are clustered on Level +2
and amongst them are the disconcerting paintings of Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), a founding member of the Les XX art movement. Khnopff painted his sister, Marguerite, again and again, using her refined, almost plastic, beauty to stir a vague sense of passion - for she's desirable and utterly unobtainable in equal measure. His haunting
Memories of Lawn Tennis is typical of his oeuvre, a work without narrative, a dream-like scene with each of the seven women bearing the likeness of Marguerite. In Caresses Marguerite pops up once more, this time with the body of a cheetah pawing sensually at an androgynous youth. Also exhibited here - and a real surprise - is Psyche's Wedding , a delightful painting by that forerunner of Art Nouveau, the Englishman Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98). Antoine Wiertz, who has a museum all to himself near the EU Parliament building, pops up too, his La Belle Rosme a typically disagreeable painting in which the woman concerned faces a skeleton.
In a separate section on Level +2 is a superb sample of the work of James Ensor (1860-1949). Ensor, the son of an English father and Flemish mother, spent nearly all of his long life working in Ostend, his home town. His first paintings were rather sombre portraits and landscapes, but in the early 1880s he switched to a more Impressionistic style, delicately picking out his colours as in
The Lady in Blue . It is, however, Ensor's use of masks which sets his work apart - ambiguous carnival masks with the sniff of death or perversity. His Scandalized Masks of 1883 was his first mask painting, a typically unnerving canvas that works on several levels, whilst his
Skeletons quarrelling for a Kipper (1891) is one of the most savage and macabre paintings you're ever likely to see.
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