Poet Emile Verhaeren: a life in words and pictures

Verhaeren was at the peak of his national and international fame when he died on 27 November, 1916, after trying to jump on a moving train at the station in Rouen, France. After moving to Paris at the turn of the century, he had gained widespread acclaim as a pioneer of free verse in French Symbolism, recognised by the likes of Stéphane Mallarmé, Stefan Zweig and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Long before the federal state of Belgium would comprise of two de facto separate cultural communities, literature and culture in Belgium had one dominant language and one only: French.

From Belgium’s independence in 1830 onwards, Flemish developed as a language in which critics, artists and writers expressed themselves, such as in the historical novels of Hendrik Conscience, but the cultural and economic elite in Flanders remained largely French-speaking.

Verhaeren, who as a boy had been familiar with the local Flemish dialect of Sint-Amands near the river Scheldt, would almost entirely lose that language after his francophone education. As would others.

He attended the elite Saint Barbara Jesuit college in Ghent, a breeding ground for francophone Flemish writing talents. Verhaeren’s classmate and lifelong friend Georges Rodenbach would later write the novel Bruges-la-Morte in 1892, and a few years behind them, young Maurice Maeterlinck would be drilled in Greek and Latin at the same school.

In 1911, Maeterlinck would win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Verhaeren, who like Maeterlinck had by that time traded in Belgium for the flourishing art hub of Paris, had been mentioned for years as a candidate for the award himself.

The notion of Verhaeren – in Karel van de Woestijne’s words, the quintessential “Flemish man at the end of the 19th century” – as a “hesitant double being” trickles through the exhibition Verhaeren Revealed: The Writer, Critic and the Art of his Time.

When visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, a stately building in the Citadel Park, you’re struck by a storyline that revolves around the notion of bourgeois culture.

The selection of artworks Verhaeren wrote about and was influenced by (and sometimes vice versa) opens with “Octave Maus Reading” (1883), an early painting by Verhaeren’s friend Théo van Rysselberghe, also born in Ghent to a well-to-do French-speaking family.

This painting is the first of more to come that shows an essentially bourgeois act at the time – reading – in a typically middle- to upper-class setting, a salon. But Octave Maus, a lawyer, was also the secretary of Les XX (Les vingt or The Twenty), an artist circle set up in response to the conservatism of existing artistic institutes. Among its founding members were ground-breaking artists James Ensor and Fernand Khnopff.

In the same year as “Octave Maus Reading”, Verhaeren published his first poetry collection, Les Flamandes (The Flemish Women). In voluptuous verses, bursting with fiery descriptions of buxom figures, Verhaeren praised Rubensesque women – “masterful art, those girls are” – as well as the mythical Flanders they are part of.

As an art critic, Verhaeren would always remain fond of the Dutch and Flemish masters – Bosch, Brueghel, Rembrandt and Rubens. In them he saw grand artistic innovators: “Rembrandt revolutionised the art of engraving with the abruptness and decisiveness of a genius.”

In Ensor, Verhaeren found a contemporary equivalent of Rembrandt’s genius. “Ensor’s crazy pencil drawings are reminiscent of the oversized Rembrandts that were so universally mocked that they just can’t be ordinary or bad,” he said. “They seem to have been made during hallucinations. First they astonish, then they impress.”

The composition of Ensor’s painting “Willy Finch in the Studio” (1882) shows parallels with “Octave Maus Reading” and other interiors that depict people reading or artists at work. Ensor, however, used smudgy streaks and scraped away paint.

Later, he would go even further and unmask bourgeois culture in depictions of masquerades and grotesque scenes. Verhaeren had more trouble going along with this line of work, but continued to regard Ensor as a truly unique artist. 

Along more classic lines of late 19th-century Symbolism, “Bourgeois Interior” by Xavier Melley, son of a gardener at the Royal Palace of Laken, gives a shady atmosphere to familiar settings.

Verhaeren was drawn to the strong images of Symbolist art and would steer his own poetry along similar morbid paths before shedding his fin-de-siècle pessimism for love poems dedicated to his wife, and more celebratory reflections on the burgeoning modern world.

In retrospect, somewhat reluctantly innovating writers such as Verhaeren would be overrun by the avant-garde of Paul van Ostaijen and his generation, certainly in Flanders (even though Italian futurist loudmouth FT Marinetti praised Verhaeren’s Les villes tentaculaires (The Many-Tentacled Cities, 1895) as a precursor). More often than not, history is less than kind to transitional figures.

Verhaeren Revealed: The Writer, Critic and the Art of his Time, until 15 January, MSK, Fernand Scribedreef 1, Citadelpark, Ghent

Photo: Théo van Rysselberghe’s portrait of Verhaeren (1915)

Escaut! Escaut!
Emile Verhaeren reteams with his contemporaries and French-speaking writers Georges Eekhoud, Max Elskamp, Georges Rodenbach and Maurice Maeterlinck, each of them born around the Scheldt estuary. There are also walks, a radio series, and a book. Until 29 January, Letterenhuis, Antwerp.

Step Up!
Art and media centre Argos delves into its collection to present a selection of Belgian works at the intersection of dance, performance and visual arts from 1970-2000. The list of contributing artists reads like a who’s who of Belgian audiovisual arts. This is the first of three chapters focusing on Belgian dance and performance on camera. Until 18 December, Argos, Brussels

Jim Jarmusch
On the occasion of his new film Paterson, Cinema Galeries presents an exhibition and retrospective of independent American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. The silver-haired director’s universe is populated by poetic punks, lonely lovers and solemn strangers, incarnated by a young Tom Waits in Down by Law, or by a fabulous Adam Driver as a bus driver and poet of the everyday in Paterson. Until 12 February, Cinema Galeries, Brussels