The art of being Belgian

It’s hard to grasp that special something that makes a Belgian a Belgian. Foreigners often get lost in this complex country with different languages, mentalities and sensitivities. Some local politicians even try to make us believe that the concept “Belgian” doesn’t exist at all.

Retiring art critic Claude Blondeel, a fan of both Flemish and francophone art, is stepping up to say it does.

In Baza(a)r Belg(i)ë, the Brussels-based Blondeel, seen and heard for decades on VRT and radio culture programmes, tells his personal story of the Belgian art scene. He starts in the late 19th century with the surrealist painter James Ensor and finishes with Luc Tuymans’ intricate images of King Boudewijn from his mwana kitoko (beautiful white man) series, dealing with Belgium’s colonial past.

Imaginary museum

Walking through Blondeel’s “imaginary museum” in the Centrale, it becomes clear that he has an associative mind. So we go where his mind leads us. He juxtaposes the grotesque and the exuberance of the Cobra movement, for example, with the sobriety of the late Raoul De Keyser, focussing on the bare essence of painting with only one line and one surface.

He emphasises the direct connection between the North Sea (see the striking painting by Constant Permeke), and particularly Ostend as the birthplace of Ensor, symbolist painter Léon Spilliaert and rock star Arno, with their capital (and Arno’s home) Brussels, where the cross-pollination clash between the two mentalities and languages is most obvious.

“Living right at the border of the Germanic and the Latin world, in between the German of Goethe and the French of Proust, always inspired me,” says Blondeel.

A signed copy of Hugo Claus’ classic novel Het verdriet van België (The Sorrow Of Belgium) lies next to Congo: A History, the award-winning book by journalist David Van Reybrouck about Belgium’s former colony. By calling these two books the most important publications of the last 30 years, Blondeel, 65, illustrates how crucial self-criticism, perspective and not a little stubbornness were in the final 100 works chosen for the exhibition.

Belgitude

But how does he explain this mentality – what he calls “Belgitude” – to his foreign friends? “A Belgian is serious but does not take himself seriously,” he says. Blondeel prefers the jokes of Le Chat and Gaston to what he sees as the more mainstream Adventures of Tintin. And besides, “not having to negotiate with Moulinsart was a plus,” he says, referring to the organisation that looks after the legacy of Hergé as “hijackers”.

This Belgitude, a mix of blatant self-criticism, surrealism and a certain devil-may-care attitude, is also why we see an installation with a myriad of mops by Jan Fabre. These “Bic-Dweilen” all have symbolic statements on them, written with ink pens and a subtle strip with the three colours of the Belgian flag. “And what do we do with these? We clean the floor with them,” Blondeel notes.

On the other hand: It didn’t stop the royal family supporting Fabre. “And would you really prefer a president like Sarkozy, Berlusconi or Putin? Not me.”

L’union fait la force (strength in unity), says the critic, who spent his entire career working for the Flemish public broadcaster VRT, first as a producer, later as an art critic. He’s both quoting the national motto of Belgium and recalling the words of a French journalist who visited the exhibition and couldn’t believe it was organised in a year’s time.

And Baza(a)r Belg(i)ë is not just an exhibition. Before his retirement last month, Blondeel dedicated a radio programme to this final project, and there is also a book and a triple CD compilation (with one black, one yellow and one red CD). “In France, it would be impossible” to pull something like this off in one year, he says. “People rather work against one another. But here, everyone co-operated.”

Blondeel received a lot of support from Chantal Pattyn, the director of Klara, the classical radio station he’s worked for since 2007. She knew full well that most museums would be eager to give something back to Blondeel, who covered their collections and exhibitions for years. Nearly every work he wanted to show, he was loaned.

Nearly. “I wanted a saxophone from the Musical Instruments Museum and a painting by artist Antoine Wiertz, but Michel Draguet refused,” he says, referring to the director of the Royal Museums of Art and History. “But he has quite a reputation for that.” They did manage to get a saxophone from the Adolphe Sax museum, “but the Wiertz canvas is a real lack”.

When we met, Blondeel’s official retirement had only reached its third day, and he isn’t resting on his laurels. He’d just returned from a short holiday in Avignon, where he … what do you think? … visited the contemporary art exhibition Les Papesses. There he was reminded just how good our local art scene is. Ghent-based artist Berlinde De Bruyckere “excelled,” he says, next to other more internationally famous artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith.

“With De Bruyckere, Tuymans, Hans Op De Beeck … we have an extremely talented generation of artists,” he says. He names contemporary arts museums Wiels in Brussels, SMAK in Ghent and M KHA in Antwerp as “doing some really great things, as are the Brussels galleries. There’s only one thing missing: a place to visit our contemporary art collection in our own capital. We really don’t need an expensive, newly built project like Bilbao’s Guggenheim – just an empty space to show visitors what we already have.”

Despite the retirement, that’s a project Blondeel would like to put his weight behind. If it sounds like a faraway fantasy, only reached in one of Panamarenko’s flying machines, consider that he is now in negotiations to take Baza(a)r Belg(i)ë to Paris and Amsterdam.

Until 29 September

Centrale for Contemporary Art

Sint-Katelijneplein 44, Brussels
www.centrale-art.be