Pictures at an exhibition

Gerard Ceunis’ great niece, Elsie De Cuyper, has sent me a copy of the catalogue of an exhibition of the artist’s paintings that took place at Hitchin Museum. The document is undated, but since Ceunis died in 1964, I would assume that the exhibition took place in either the 1950s or the early 1960s, though of course it might be earlier. It can’t be earlier than the 1940s, which was when the artistic style known as ‘Tachism’, mentioned in Ceunis’ catalogue notes, came into vogue.

Part of the value of the catalogue is that it provides us with a list of what Ceunis himself considered to be his important works, assuming that he selected them for the show. Some of the titles are familiar and relate to pictures that have featured in previous posts on this site, but many are of paintings that are no longer in the public domain and which one would dearly love to see. Ceunis’ pictures of St Mary’s church and the market place in Hitchin can still be seen in the collection of what is now North Hertfordshire Museum, but it would be fascinating to see his depictions of other familiar places in the town, such as St Mary’s Square, Ickleford Mill and the lavender fields, all of which are included in this catalogue.  A large number of the pictures in this exhibition – at least half of them, by my reckoning – take flowers as their subject, confirming that they were a favourite subject for the artist, even if they weren’t (pace the obituary quoted in a recent post) his ‘best work’.

Another valuable feature of the catalogue is the inclusion of Ceunis’ own introduction to his work, which provides us with some insight into his aesthetic outlook at this stage in his life. His pragmatism and disdain for artistic jargon are a world away from the passionate espousal of Symbolism and Aestheticism that characterised his youthful manifesto for Iris, the literary journal that he co-founded with a group of friends in Ghent in the early 1900s. However, the catalogue notes also reflect Ceunis’ sense of humour, and his obvious capacity to communicate his ideas to a general, non-specialist audience. The reference to a ‘dirty dustbin’ being as likely a subject of art as a ‘splendid cathedral’ recalls the obituary mentioned earlier, in which Ceunis was quoted as saying that ‘a dustbin and a dirty backyard’ might form as good a subject for a painting as a ‘pretty cottage’.

It’s interesting to see the range of prices attached to the list of paintings and, from a historical perspective, to see them given in guineas rather than pounds. (For younger readers: a guinea was equivalent to one pound and one shilling.) The cheapest painting is offered at 12 guineas, the most expensive at 50. If the exhibition took place in (say) 1955, then the lowest price would have been equivalent to about £500 and the highest about £1400 in today’s money.

Only two paintings in the catalogue do not have a price alongside their title, presumably because they were not for sale. One of these is ‘Tessa’, almost certainly a portrait of the artist’s granddaughter, the daughter of his only child, Vanna. Perhaps it was this ‘negative’ painting of Tessa, a copy of which Elsie De Cuyper sent me recently:

The other painting not for sale was apparently a portrait of ‘Mrs Lillian Hall-Davis.’ Regular readers of this blog may recall that she was mentioned in an earlier post. Lillian Hall-Davis was a popular actress of the silent screen era, and a resident for a while of Hertfordshire. In his account of the summer he spent with the Ceunis family in Hitchin in 1929, in the novel Lago Maggiore, the Belgian writer Johan Daisne notes that Hall-Davis lived ‘in a country house nearby’ [my translation].

Lillian Hall-Davis (via en.wikipedia.org)

But how did Gerard Ceunis come to paint the portrait of a former film star? The answer may lie in Johan Vanhecke’s exhaustive biography of Daisne, a copy of which I’ve just received from the author, and in which I see that Lillian Hall-Davis is mentioned more than once. I’ll have more to say on this when I’ve translated the relevant pages of Johan’s book.

The ‘Individualism’ of Gerard Ceunis

Although most people who have heard of Gerard Ceunis think of him as a painter, I hope that earlier posts on this website have established that he was also a gifted poet and playwright. In addition, Ceunis was also heralded, while still living in Belgium, as an essayist and original thinker. In this regard, he was particularly known for his book, Het Individualisme (‘Individualism’), which was published in 1910, when its author was twenty-five years old.

Advertisement for publications from the Plantyn printing house of Antwerp, including Ceunis’ ‘Het Individualisme’

According to Johan Daisne, ‘Individualism’ was the only one of his publications that Gerard Ceunis looked back on with satisfaction. Christophe Verbruggen writes that, like many other intellectuals of this period, in his youth Ceunis ‘flirted with anarchism’: ‘Bouncing back and forth between Max Stirner, Nietzsche, but also Maeterlinck and Van de Woestijne, he developed an individualistic social vision that reflected his ideas about art’ [my translation]. Stirner (1806 – 1856) was a German philosopher and a member of the Young Hegelian group that also included Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. His key work, ‘The Ego and Its Own’, published in 1845, has been described as a major influence on the development of existentialism and individualist anarchism. Karel van de Woestijne (1878 – 1929) was a Flemish writer and editor who, like Ceunis, was greatly influenced by French Symbolism.

Cartoon portrait of Max Stirner by Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) (image via wikipedia.org)

Benjamin Biebuyck and Hans Vandevoorde, in a discussion of Nietzsche’s influence on Flemish culture [1], claim that Gerard Ceunis perceived in Nietzsche’s philosophy a ‘moral strength’. The same authors, while noting that ‘Individualism’ was also inspired by Stirner, describe the essay as curious or strange (‘merkwürdig’ in the original German text).

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to judge for ourselves, since it seems all but impossible to obtain a copy of Ceunis’ ‘Individualism’. (If anyone reading this has access to a copy of the book, I would love to hear from them.) However, we can perhaps get a brief glimpse of Ceunis’ thinking in this quotation from the book in Christophe Verbruggen’s article:

And if, when I say: love yourself, people, instead of proclaiming with hostility and envy, ‘see, that is the worst egoism, that is the rottenness of society’, would try to understand these words: Do we not try to love ourselves so deeply that we abhor all our weaknesses and flaws, all our wickedness and insincerity […] and so, to produce the good and true around us, unconscious of its meaning, equal to the sun’s warmth and light, through her, SUN = BEING.

Gerard Ceunis, untitled drawing (Cathcart collection)

Professor Verbruggen argues that Ceunis stood out from his contemporaries, including his fellow members of the Reiner Leven group, because of his refusal to ‘embrace the aura of the committed individual’ or to commit to the fashionable causes of either socialism or Flemish emancipation. As a result, ‘Ceunis the individualist grew increasingly isolated.’

While the text of ‘Individualism’ may be unattainable, we do have a contemporary – and very positive – review of the book, by Dr Jacob Prinsen, which appeared in the Dutch journal ‘De Beweging’ (‘The Movement’) in 1910 [my translation]:

Simplicity, order, clarity and also a certain thoroughness are the pleasant virtues of the small book on Individualism by Gerard Ceunis. When he takes you by the hand in such a calm and logical way, it is as if he is not telling you anything new, or is gradually drawing your attention to what was already consciously ready in your own mind.

Mr. Ceunis had to think long and deeply in order to present his results with such simplicity and clarity like a true teacher.

On spiritually perfectly healthy young people, who are just starting to think about the relationship of the individual to society, grope around in uncertainty, feel mysterious darkness all around them, this booklet must have a beneficial effect, or rather it must be for them, as though in the twilight of an empty room, a single electric lamp suddenly spreads an even, pleasant light.

Note

1. Benjamin Biebuyck and Hans Vandevoorde, ‘Nietzsche und das Deutschlandbild in Flandern zur Zeit des Fin de Siècle‘, in Hubert Roland, Marnix Beyen and Greet Dreye (eds.) (2011), Deutschlandbilder in Belgien 1830 – 1940, Münster: Waxmann

An artistic manifesto

I’ve written before about Gerard Ceunis’ key role in the launch of the Belgian literary magazine Iris, which first appeared in 1907. Thanks to the excellent dbnl website, and specifically its digital version of Raymond Vervliet‘s  De literaire manifesten van het fin de siècle in de Zuidnederlandse periodieken 1878-1914 , I’ve managed to track down a copy of the magazine’s artistic manifesto, published in its second issue, in March 1908 – and written by Ceunis himself.

The manifesto provides us with a useful insight into the young artist and writer’s aesthetic beliefs, confirming the suspicions aroused by reading his early poetry and plays, that he was strongly influenced by the French Symbolist poets, especially Baudelaire, whose Les Fleurs du Mal he quotes here, and by the ‘decadent’ art of Aubrey Beardsley and others. Like the Aesthetes of the late-nineteenth-century, Ceunis makes the case for an art that is sensual, dreamy and mystical, and for a literature that aspires to the condition of music.

Producing a readable English version of this text, depending largely on Google Translate, has presented me with a number of difficulties. As in his poems, Ceunis tends to coin new words and yoke familiar words together in unfamiliar combinations. Some of the words he uses don’t seem to be in any standard Dutch dictionary – perhaps they are particularly Flemish? – and in many cases I have had to hazard a guess at the meaning. In other cases, where a word has a number of alternative meanings, it is sometimes unclear which meaning the writer intends. I faced particularly difficulty with the word luwtje which can be translated as ‘lee’, or ‘shade’, or ‘shelter’, but in other cases as ‘gem’, and when combined with streel as ‘caress’. However, I hope that, despite these drawbacks, my version gives a sense of the main lines of Ceunis’ argument, and a flavour of his idiosyncratic literary style.

‘Art’ by Gerard Ceunis

Come, feathery gem [pluim-luwtje], caress my hair, and bring me soft scents – scents of the land and of heather – scents that sing with colours. And that massive movement and noisy bellowing of strong winds? Has that great force gone away then? No! that giant thing still rumbles on, perhaps more powerful than ever perhaps, but … the wild sighs of the wind float silently between, in, above and below it, and the great forces flying by may from time to have been so bold as to cast snooty [orig. in German: hochnäsig] looks and laugh mockingly at that faintly sentimental dream, but now they have become better friends. They know each other well; and that is why I can allow myself to be comforted by caresses [streelluwtjes], without these great loebers [?] ruining my pleasure.

And these gems [luwtjes] delight us so much and so often now in our modern art; that soft, inward, intimate note sings so much from the new work of today that we may hope to see the scent of a fine soul slowly rising to the heights, into the distance beyond the merely human; so that ‘art’ becomes an inappropriate word and we feel the need for a new word. We would call it music if ‘music’ had only remained a little more aristocratic.

They know each other, so these gentle caresses [streelluwtjes] and these strong winds will blow together across the earth and respect each other. But the latter needed the greater force in order to be born, and groaned with strong life-consciousness and with mighty skill, while the former, by contrast, were of fine-scented air, were born of a more subtle feeling, more deeply intense in the soul, like fine dream-enticing perfume.

Let us call a work of violent movements and loud cries grand and majestic, because it arouses our admiration and awe at the massive effort required for its creation, but on the highest level of art we will place those images and chants that resonate with the eccentric and beautiful depths of the soul.

Art has only one goal: to give us the highest pleasure and the most intense desire. Only that!

Henri Eugène Augustin Le Sidaner, ‘The Illuminated Pavilion’ (via wikipedia.org)

And art is all life, seen, dreamed, dreamt [gedroomd, verdroomd,], sifted, by our soul. And the artist is indeed the happy man who will taste the first and deepest impression of his art, even he does not succeed in articulating his feelings or his thoughts. For a frail melancholy smile, a dream-glimpse of the eyes, of deep pools [een droom-blik uit oogen, van diepe meren], aren’t these the most delicious poems without words, without creation? We carry the essence of art, that is to say the feeling, with us everywhere in our shy soul and we ask for no more massive forces than patience-work to stimulate the pleasure-ground, to bring about fine emotions through art-work.

And the art-creations of men will certainly arouse in us admiration for their genius and talent, but will only move us to exquisite pleasure or ecstasy, to the extent that the work, whether great or small, has intensity of life and feeling.

But, I hear it said, without creation there is no art, so that creation is …

Of course! without creation one cannot arouse emotion, but without an inner feeling one cannot create. Every artist, before putting his hand to the work, has been struck by an impression. That is his greatest achievement. The rest is vanity, or greatness, as people say.

Although art is: to embody, the emotion that stimulated and compelled the act of creation, this is its god and if not ‘art’ itself, then it is something more exalted.

So as I said of this fragile, intangible soulful art, we hope to see its scent rising to such a height, so far beyond the merely human, like Baudelaire, like Aubrey Beardsley, like Lautréamont, and to go from hell to heaven, like Memling, like Tinel, and, moving on to the more healthy, like Beethoven, like Whistler, like Sidaner, like Storm.

Aubrey Beardsley, ‘The Mysterious Rose Garden’, 1895

To think that it is now called decadence, effeminateness, morbidness or something like that, something which can cause harm to such a heavenly thing as art, to the ideal, to the sublime and to the supreme, that is to say to what intoxicates us with aesthetic pleasure, to what bestows upon us the highest spiritual desire?

Now, we are not Greeks, and neither wisdom nor virtue will be the essence of our art.

Civilization takes such astonishing steps forward, and art purifies itself. Wisdom and virtue are almost a whole world away, and now art can walk freely without having to preach morals, and without being tempted in that direction. And the down-to-earth man is satisfied now, he thinks his position is high enough (every healthy man is subject to dizziness), but he thinks that something that still needs to be cleared away is that sickly, sad-melancholy face in art.

Decadents – as one calls those sensitive souls inclined to sickness – and mystics, will always guarantee me the unworldliness, which I find in their work, as well as the delicate pleasure they seek to give us.

Not for you, down-to-earth man – for you, it has to be healthy, full of life, isn’t that right? You are right, you have much more wit and cleverness than me, but I beg you, do not touch my soul with your coarse, earthy hands.

It is just as stupid to say that a work is naïve, or decadent, and therefore of lesser quality. But people are so dignified, genteel. The platonic is a little too clean, naive, oh so naive, and decadence is a little too sickly for them. Now, the general public would prefer healthy chunks of life, full of lively natural energy.

Music has surpassed all pretensions to be art. Music is infinity, the absolute, eternal beauty, the poetry of the softly floating, indefinable feeling, of being a divine soul.

Poetry, prose, painting, drama, in short, all kinds of art want to sing, and unconsciously aspire to the purple dreamy air where music lives. That is their noble, their highest art. And in order to reach that height, personality, talent and technique will have to combine so harmoniously in every way so that one does not see the words, hear the sounds or notice the colours, but simply feels what the artist felt.

The means of artistic expression is only a side issue. By the deep-intense feeling of the artist, who wants to remove all matière from his work, to let the intimate soul-felt image appear in all the serenity of impalpable poetry, as it floats within him, all means, all expressions join each other and rise dreamingly to that height, to the tactile delicacy of something more than merely architectural music.

Émile Claus, ‘A Corner of my Garden’ , 1904 (via wikipedia.org)

And we do not want to see the means of expression to begin with, but rather the embodied image, the art-expressed impression. And so we mention Baudelaire and Aubrey Beardsley in one breath, so many works by the harmonist Claus suggest to us Beethoven’s Pastorale, and so we experience Le Sidaner and G. Rodenbach like a melancholic poem.

Belgian Symbolist poet George Rodenbach (1855 – 1898), via wikipedia.org

And just as a symphony sings out our wonderful dream-pleasure, a colour symphony can generate the same desire in us. A tune can make us smell; perfume will propel sounds to us; tones and sounds are both sung; all the arts are transformed into misty opulence, rising in the dream-air like soft scents and floating there swathed like a divine thing – like God – enveloped and adorned with the lofty garment of music.

Étienne Carjat, ‘Portrait of Charles Baudelaire’, 1863 (via wikipedia.org)

Now that we are attempting to move towards a higher art, into a fineness of feeling, with poetry and music gradually growing together or rather, now that the caresses [or soft gems? streel-luwtjes] are increasingly being recognised, now that poetry is actually becoming more poetic, and now that the poet is also deriving his songs from prose-art and from painting, so now the need for a harmonious bringing together of the different kinds of art will gradually become more apparent to those who are sensitive and especially to the dillettantes.

As Baudelaire told us in his famous poem:

Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfant.

Many articles about ‘La fusion de l’art’ have been published. It has not yet become a reality. Some defenders of the idea think that it must be accomplished in the theatre, others argue that advancing such a thought is naive and utopian.

Those arguing for and against are unaware that a completely harmonious fusion in art has existed in Roman Catholic churches for many centuries, and in synagogues during ceremonial services (1). And in fact a highly idealistic, symbolist, mystical art, with all the side effects of aesthetic opulence.

It may not be naïve to imagine this artistic fusion in the theatre, but it is directly against art. They are waiting are for a time that will never come, in a hall intended to contain the largest number of people. And since this fact will always remain, the ideal is not to be expected from the theatre, at least not in full.

The Dutch writer Frederick van Eeden (1860 – 1932), via wikipedia.org

With Minnestral, Fr[ederik] van Eeden seeks to reform the lyrical drama; but the action must not be suppressed, and must always retain its value. Here, therefore, there is an endeavour to unite two types of art on the stage through music-spectacle, in which music and spoken word should not replace one another, but should alternate in this sense, that the music of the invisible orchestra only sounds, when nothing is spoken, and never drowns out the diction or makes it unclear.

So Mr van Eeden wants to save the word, which is usually lost through music.

In Wagner’s drama we already find action playing an extraordinary role, and yet, where sometimes the divine Wagnerian music conjures magic, word and action decline into a very secondary role. Who indeed needs word and action when he is under the intoxication of the ‘Murmures de la forêt’ from Siegfried?

Arthur Rackham, illustration from ‘Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods’, 1911

I already said that music surpasses what art is, and seeking to bring the word up to the same level as music can only happen by doing violence to the latter. Either the music will colour and adorn the word, or word and action will enhance the impression of the music. But even more than the word, the impression is heightened by mise en scène, to which the action belongs; word and music by themselves can offer everything, and will never unite into a harmonious whole, in which both arts remain equal.

Therefore it is not desirable for there to be this kind of an art-combination [kunst-vereeniging]. However, Mr. van Eeden seeks merely to alternate the two, so this performance will only further demonstrate whether the alternate incursion of music and word will lead to a harmonious whole, and whether the new self of this music-spectacle will make a more aesthetic impression than opera.

1. Iris will discuss this harmonious cooperation between different art forms in future issues.