EIf EU-funded motorways and railway lines come to nothing, or if new buildings with gravity-defying pipe systems turn out to be barely habitable, newspapers in Brussels, Ghent or Bruges like to headline it with “This is Belgian surrealism!” It is immediately obvious to every lover of the country why Belgium is the only place of origin of true surrealist art. A hundred years ago, André Breton in Paris officially founded this movement with his manifesto of surrealism at the same time as Paul Nougé and the artists around him in Belgium, but the French surrealist movement was always more ornamental-aesthetic, harmless and, above all, far less political.
How old is Belgian surrealism?
Belgian surrealism not only radiated into the world stronger, longer (René Magritte did not die until 1967) and more heterogeneously; It also has significantly more and older predecessors than the French variety, with the country's symbolists, who in many respects overthrow all conventions. The doyen of pre-surrealism since the 1980s, James Ensor, has been honored with major exhibitions in his birthplace and hometown of Ostend as well as in Brussels since the beginning of the year; his colleague competitor Léon Spilliaert, as well as Fernand Khnopff and Félicien Rops, represent equally strange and independently symbolist early forms of Belgian surrealism.
100 years of surrealism
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Belgium's laughter and the politics of the dream
And when Belgians celebrate, they do it right: all of the foreshadowing artists mentioned, the real surrealists such as Magritte, Servais and Dalí, as well as even their overseas successors such as the early Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman with their surrealist phases, are presented with a sumptuous 140 works in the Royal Museums of the Netherlands Fine Arts in Brussels, which already houses the world's largest collection of Magritte paintings in its majestic giant halls. As if that weren't enough, the neighboring Bozar joins in with another 280 top works across all media such as painting, sculpture, collage, photography and film, from its own respectable collection as well as from fifty museums worldwide such as the Center Pompidou Paris Fundación Mapfre in Madrid, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Philadelphia Museum of Art – all locations where the spectacular exhibition will be shown after its end in Brussels.
The pictures on mirror bases create a captivating labyrinth
With a total of 420 works, two problems arise: It takes a lot of time to be able to grasp the educational value of the exhibitions. And the two shows, which are a few meters apart, must be sufficiently differentiated from a curatorial point of view. According to curator Francisca Vandepitte, the one in the Royal Museum under the title “Imagine” is an invitation to visitors to think as image-associatively as the Surrealists and is in ten of its core themes such as night, dreams, forest darkness, body and cosmos (a strong boost for Surrealism actually came again with the moon landing in 1969), none of them new in themselves, but charged with many refreshingly new ideas in the contrasts of works that have never been compared in this way before.
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