Following damage caused in the Napoleonic period, Peyrat employed artists and designers from across Europe to convert the castle into an idealised version of a medieval palace – a sort of theatre of history. Marie donated the castle to the Belgian state in 1921, and in 1980 it became a museum of the Flemish Community.
ll of which helps explain the castle’s current exhibition Sehnsucht: een onstilbaar verlangen (Sehnsucht: An Insatiable Longing). Curated by the Dutch writer Oscar van den Boogaard, who now lives in East Flanders, the show could not have wished for a better home: a theme of yearning for what is lost, in a setting that represents the very same sentiment. Gaasbeek Castle is, in fact, the embodiment in stone and brick of the indistinct notion of sehnsucht.
Sehnsucht is a German word meaning something like “the sickness of painful longing”, and it’s probably most associated with the Romantic author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose second novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), contains two poems on the theme.
The word is said to have no exact translation in English, though “longing” and “yearning” seem to fit the bill perfectly well, in context. Sehnsucht need have no object or might have a non-existent or impossible one – such as the universal longing for a Golden Age that never was.
Translation or no, the feeling is universal, and it is the core of much poetry, literature and music. For William Blake, the longing was for a New Jerusalem; for William Wordsworth, the memory of a field of daffodils. Elgar’s Enigma Variations are an expression of Sehnsucht, as are the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss.
For Mignon, a character in Goethe’s novel, the longing was for Italy – “that land where lemon orchards bloom”. In Goethe’s poem titled “Sehnsucht”, however, the longing is for something more diffuse:
Alone and separated
From all joy,
I look to the vast horizon
On every side.
Mignon features in the exhibition in a small portrait from 1850 by the Dutch artist Ary Scheffer. A (fictional) girl stares into the half-distance somewhere over the viewer’s right shoulder – a typical attitude of sehnsucht.
The same distant, melancholy glance is seen in the exhibition’s first portrait. In “Xteriors VI” by Dutch photographer Desirée Dolron (whose name could itself be an expression of sehnsucht), an impossibly beautiful young woman with a Victorian hairstyle and dress contemplates something beyond us, both physically and imaginatively.
That sense of mystery of the subject’s yearning allows us to construct our own narratives. In the painting by 18th-century Italian artist Andrea Appiani, the young Ginevra gazes out of a window at a ship on the water. Her secret lover Ettore is aboard – but is he arriving or departing? Only her servant Zoriade knows.
The act of gazing out over the water is a common trope in depictions of sehnsucht, representing Mignon’s exile from some imaginary promised land. That’s a characteristic it shares with other melancholy genres like Celtic folk music and Portuguese fado. It appears in a painting by Alphonse Osbert showing a figure who appears to be Orpheus staring over a wine-dark sea, presumably mourning his separation from Eurydice. Orpheus also features in a work by the turn-of-the-20th-century French painter Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.
Towards the end of the exhibition, there’s a painting by contemporary British artist Diana Rattray based on an old holiday snap, in which a young boy, his face turned away from us, stares at an expanse of water; at what, or away from what, we cannot tell.
One of the exhibition’s most emotionally powerful work is also a rear view. In Eric Rondepierre’s “Champs-Elysées” a woman walking away from us in the gardens observes herself, walking in the company of a man. The woman is the artist’s mother, who used to visit him on a Sunday when he was in an orphanage, and take him to the cinema. The cinematic photo, in black and white, shows two levels of longing: the boy longs for his mother, while she in turn longs for something else.
In the photograph by Erwin Olaf, the story is more enigmatic. Titled “The Mother”, it shows a young woman sitting, eyes downcast, in a room done out entirely in white, as indeed is she. In the background, a pram; at the doorway, a boy, with riding crop and boots, is on his way out, his face also unseen. We look in vain for some clue: Is the doorway the portal between life and death? Is the boy the baby grown and departed?
Olaf gives nothing away. He’s more overt in the other work by him featured here. “Grief ” shows a young man in an attitude of some despair looking from a window into what appears to be a graveyard.
While grief might be seen to be the ultimate unquenchable longing, the notion of sehnsucht also extends to paradise – the unattainable perfection represented for Mignon by Italy. Two of the greatest epics of literature – John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Goethe’s Faust – concern themselves with the consequences of seeking to attain the unattainable paradise: for Faust, the essence of life; for Lucifer, dominion over God.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. The Chinese artist Yang Jiechang takes a satirical look at Heaven in his work “Stranger than Paradise”, in which the animals and humans of the Ark – arrayed on a series of acrylic cubes (the artist says they represent cities) – indulge in a riotous orgy of interspecies copulation. The small terra cotta figures seem to have stepped right out of a work by Hieronymous Bosch.
There’s also humour, as is so often the case, in the piece by Flemish artist Wim Delvoye. A sculpture in wood of a cement mixer is painted to look as if it were made of Wedgewood china, as if harking back to an imaginary time when building-site materials were of a nobler sort. “Physical Cosmology”, meanwhile, by the German artist Carola Mücke, an installation of light and sound, has to be seen (and especially heard) to be appreciated.
Gaasbeek Castle, Kasteelstraat 40, Gaasbeek
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