46 the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.ukBOOKS & ARTSExhibitions
It’s grim up north
Martin Gayford
Léon Spilliaert
Royal Academy, until 25 MayFrench Impressions: prints from
Manet to Cézanne; Piranesi
drawings: visions of antiquity
British Museum, until 9 AugustThe strange and faintly sinister works of
the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been
compared — not unreasonably — to those
of many writers, Edgar Allan Poe amongthem. But as I walked round the Spilliaert
exhibition at the Royal Academy, it was not
any of these that came to my mind. It was
the Father Brown detective stories by G.K.
Chesterton.
I wasn’t thinking of the neatly paradoxi-
cal plots, but rather of Chesterton’s mastery
of atmosphere. Consider The Absence of Mr
Glass (1914), which takes place in a ‘deso-
late’ seaside resort. As Father Brown inves-
tigates, ‘...the afternoon was closing with
a premature and partly lurid twilight; the
sea was of an inky purple and murmuring
ominously’.
This could be a description of a Spilli-
aert, the master — as it turns out — of
haunted Edwardian seascapes. He spent
his most productive years in Ostend, a sortof Belgian Brighton with royal connections
and a cheery, seedy atmosphere. He was
born there in 1881 and — on the evidence
of this exhibition — did almost all his best
work in the town.
Much of it belongs to a short period
in Spilliaert’s twenties, during which he
was lonely, ill and suffering from chronic
insomnia. The RA show includes an array
of self-portraits: haggard, wild-eyed and
with an air of gloomy desperation. These
were drawn by night in his studio, its win-
dows opaque black.
Spilliaert, though an eccentric loner (or
perhaps because of it), is nonetheless rec-
ognisably Belgian in mood. There are even
moments, such as the way the ripples are
a maze of crinkly, swirling lines when he‘Dike at night.
Reflected lights’,
1908, by Léon
Spilliaert© MUSÉE D’ORSAY, DIST. RMN-GRAND PALAIS/PATRICE SCHMIDTArts_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 46 26/02/2020 10:44