eon Spilliaert, a Troubled and Troubling Painter
Lenin is said to have hung a painting by the Flemish painter Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) in his room in Spiegelgasse when he lived in Zurich. Unfortunately we do not know which. Although Spilliaert had a number of faithful admirers apart from Lenin, including the great Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, in his lifetime he was not generally considered to be a major painter. Thus his Brussels dealer, Walter Schwarzenberg, exhibited Spilliaert in his second rather than his main gallery. As Jean Milo, who worked for Schwarzenberg, commented: `Spilliaert was considered a "minor master" at the time and we preferred the big tenors'. It was only in the late 196os and early 197os, with the revival of interest in non-Impressionist art from around 1900, that Spilliaert' s reputation started to take off, although, at the international level, it still lags far behind his real stature. The son of an Ostend hairdresser and perfumer, Spilliaert' s art was strongly affected by his native town and its seaside setting. He suffered from a stomach ulcer, which made him an insomniac and led him to become a night walker. His nocturnal visions of Ostend are among his most gripping works. What are the characteristics of these and other types of painting done by Spilliaert? What made him different, special? First, his colour. Spilliaert used few colours in any one painting, using subtle tonal gradations rather than rich harmonies. He often used dark colours — black and grey were his favourites — and they were clashing, acidic and harsh rather than voluptuous. His use of colour was not so much descriptive as decorative and expressive. Second, Spilliaert was a masterly draughtsman. In his painting he used line in an economical but telling way, often not as a separate pictorial element but as a boundary defining shapes expressed as areas of colour. Third, Spilliaert's handling of what we could call 'compositional space' was strikingly original. His beaches, sea walls and steps are given an extreme — even an exaggerated — geometrical interpretation that confers on them an abstract rather than a representational quality. As Francine-Claire Legrand observed: 'While Spilliaert's paintings may not have been large, his vision was. He discarded details to create the monumental on a small
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