Flanders today
january 8, 2014 current affairs
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Fifty years a migrant
Misty mornings
Aside from having a syndrome named after him, Pedro Brugada has made Flanders a hotbed of cardiology research 7
A celebration across Flanders of the tradition of migration and a 1964 treaty with Turkey and Morocco 11
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Perchance to dream
Brussels’ new Fin-de-Siècle Museum shows one of art’s most startling transitions Georgio Valentino
Brussels’ newest museum spotlights the city’s history as an artistic capital at the close of the 19th century and its crucial international role in the spread of Modernism
T
he deepest sublevels of one of Brussels’ oldest buildings are an unlikely home for the Fin-de-Siècle Museum, the capital’s newest cultural attraction. But it makes some kind of sense. To begin with, the building is the seat of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts on Regentschapsstraat, where Belgium’s largest, most prestigious collections are housed in the Modern and Old Masters Museums. Then there’s the theme. Fin-de-siècle (the end of the century) technically refers to a time period, but the description is not as innocent as that. The close of the 19th century was lived by its citizens and artists as a time of decadence – as the end of the world as they knew it. The former were right, for this was a time of social injustice and political irresponsibility, the immediate consequence of which was the apocalypse of the First World War. It ended better for the artists. They welcomed the end of the old
order as the beginning of the new. When it came, the Great War was only more fuel for the modernist fire. The fin-de-siècle saw the spectacular death of the classical ideal, which was rooted in a belief no longer shared by a new generation of artists – that of a transcendent, harmonious beauty. These artists rather felt themselves at the threshold of something new, something modern, although the term had yet to be defined – hence the uncertainty bordering on foreboding. So the quintessential fin-de-siècle artwork exudes a dark, dream-like, subterranean atmosphere. The age of experimentation had begun. The Fin-de-Siècle Museum is dedicated to these years between 1865 – the year of seminal Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire’s self-imposed exile in “poor Belgium” – and 1914, when the outbreak of the war put an abrupt end to the proceedings. During this half-century, Brussels became an artistic as well as a political capital, thanks to so many indefatigably modernist young locals. Among them were visual artists like James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff, Constantin Meunier and Félicien Rops; architects like Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde; and men
of letters like Maurice Maeterlinck and Emile Verhaeren. The museum’s inauguration in early December was an all-star affair, attended by the international press, a sizeable delegation of federal and regional ministers and the man of the hour, Michel Draguet. Speaking at the opening, the Royal Museums’ director put the whole project in perspective. “The 19th century is a key moment in the history of European culture,” he said, “when modernity announced itself in a flowering of new forms to embrace a wave of new ideas”. Impressionism, Symbolism, Realism and Art Nouveau were all stylistic innovations that followed intellectual and social currents. They were reflections of a society in upheaval, torn between yesterday’s classical ideal and tomorrow’s promise of “progress”, alternately heartening and alarming. Most of these currents originated abroad, in Paris and later Vienna, but Belgian artists were early converts to this fledgling modernism, and their advocacy was crucial to its international spread. “Peripheral in comparison with the scene in Paris but central due to its role as a crossroads of Europe, the Belgian art world carried the modern movement forward in all its `` continued on page 5