The most Belgian of all Belgian artists

The painting ‘Eight Ladies’ hangs in a separate cabinet of the exhibition ‘Flemish Expressionism’ in the Hague Art Museum. The artist himself had certainly agreed to that relative quarantine, although you don’t immediately see why. The ‘ladies’ sit four by four on chairs on either side of a table with playing cards. They are dressed like decent women, with shiny stockings, good shoes and neat collars. The card game can begin. Behind them, two doors open, leading to a row of dim rooms.

There is also a book on the table between them.

Showcase

Huit Dames et un monastere is called. Eight ladies and a convent. Writer: Edgard Tytgat, the same who made the painting. That book is real. Some sheets are in a display case near the painting. To lift a corner of the veil: in one of the drawings a large birdcage arises, with a clergyman next to it. Inside the cage, one of the women lies naked, while another is shoved in through the hatch by her friends. They are in varying states of undress, with old-fashioned corsets and stockings.

What started as a card afternoon degenerated into an orgy the Flemish way, with a touch of neatness, a pinch of absurdism and some strange sexual symbolism, flambéed by a good splash of Catholic local colour.

What started as a card afternoon turned into an orgy the Flemish way

Tytgat is by far the most Belgian of all Belgian artists of his generation. More Belgian than his friend Rik Wouters and even than those heavy Flemish people who paint brooding peasant scenes with asbestos and brown peat, a number of which can now be seen in the Kunstmuseum. Tytgat had humor and the guts to milk his provincialism to the bottom. Folk prints, picture books and altar wine, that was his menu. In 1914, like many Belgians, he fled to England. “To feel the charms of the manners and customs of one’s country one must be exiled,” he wrote.

This is how he started the mythography of the Flemish spirit. He made linocuts and woodcuts with scenes from his own life, full of Belgian folklore, and the occasional naked lady. In Watermael he had a house built as a rectangular box that seems to have been cut from a house cake. The front door was three meters above street level. Still later, when World War II broke out, he began to talk about the adventures of his eight ladies. They could be exhibited, but, according to his wife Maria and he, only in a separate cabinet.

Haags Kunstmuseum, Flemish expressionism, until 20 August

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