25th January – 13th April 2020: ★★★★★
Belgium, land of beer, chocolate, charming medieval towns and cosy city breaks. If this is your idea of the diminutive Benelux nation then Léon Spilliaert is here to make you think again. Prepare to be drawn into an intoxicating world of insomniac melancholy that will forever change the way you see the home of Tintin and waffles.
Born in 1881 and working in the first half of the twentieth century, poor Spilliaert has been rather overshadowed by the famous denizens of Montmartre and Montparnasse of the same epoch, but this is unjustly the case. In his isolation from the ‘scene’ in Paris, living as he did in the coastal town of Ostend, he developed an idiosyncratic style that places him with no specific movement or trend. This stylistic orphan-hood may well account for his omission from most histories of modern art.
The advantage of this is that his time in the art historical wings has kept him fresh for this triumphant burst onto the stage in the first ever UK retrospective of his work.
A lifelong insomniac, many of Spilliaert’s works have the feeling of a waking dream – on in some cases, a nightmare. A room full of his nocturnal self-portraits, often reflected in the mirrors of empty domestic spaces, has a hunting and haunted quality. The deep-set, piercing yet glazed eyes and the wild hair speak of a crazed exhaustion caged by the starched collar and respectable parlour of middle class society. Spilliaert becomes the terrorised twentieth-century shadow to Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog.
These domestic settings of his portraits owe much to Degas with their harshly cropped interest in texture and interior space, but by taking away Degas’ bright pastels and turning to a monochromatic world of ink-wash, Spilliaert has given us interiors with no sense of interiority. No cosy living-rooms here, just cold, dark, almost metaphysical spaces. Whilst not picked out by the curators, his debt to Degas is clear once again later in the show in the form of a spectral portrayal of a girl, The Absinthe Drinker. A subject explored by Degas and adopted as a symbol of the underbelly of the modern world. Spilliaert’s Drinker leers out at us from lidless eyes set in balckholes, her skeletal face is really quite accosting.
Often, those sleepless nights would be spent walking the empty streets and desolate beach at Ostend, the result of which are many moody, misty landscapes that foreshadow film noir and even the darker moods of abstract expressionism. These coastal scenes of the flat, broad beach and the expanse of the North Sea are primarily about light, when it manages to glow from banks of mist or reflect off the wet sand. It is not the warming sunlight but silvery moonlight – cold, impersonal and quite quite beautiful.
Colour does sometimes enter into these works. Scenes at daybreak with deep dark blue skies and the occasional shimmer of pink and gold on the crests of waves. They seem to me quietly hopeful, portending the dawn after the long, sleep deprived night.
Any figures that do appear in these scenes are unidentifiable, simply shadows of a type – the walking man, the young girl – reminiscent of Edvard Munch and with all the metaphysical weight of the early works of Giorgio de Chirico.
The only disappointing thing about this show is that there isn’t more of it. Most of the works come from the early years of his career, although this does seem to be his most interesting period creatively – before family life in Brussels dampened much of his angst. But moreover, he deserves contextualising. I’ve mentioned some of those I believe to be his inspirations and influences but also a display of his contemporaries would nicely show just how different his style was.
Maybe that is asking too much of his very first UK show but it does certainly prove one thing – it is time to bring Léon Spilliaert in from the cold!
★★★★★
Morgan Haigh 