CoBrA, Expo 58 and Broodthaers
After the war young Belgian artists sought a freer, spontaneous art. Christian Dotremont and Pierre Alechinsky took part in CoBrA, the 1958 world’s fair gave Brussels the Atomium, and Marcel Broodthaers made art a question of language and museums.
Directly after the liberation young painters gathered in the group Jeune Peinture Belge, which took up abstract art from Paris. Some of them looked for something wilder. In 1948 the Belgian Christian Dotremont, together with Danish and Dutch artists, formed the group CoBrA, after Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. They wanted to paint spontaneously, like children and folk artists, and mixed image and writing. Pierre Alechinsky, who joined in 1949, became one of the group’s best-known painters.
René Magritte went on painting and in the 1950s and 60s became world-famous, not least in the United States. His series The Empire of Light, in which a street lies in night-time darkness under a bright daytime sky, became one of his best-known images. Paul Delvaux painted railway stations and nocturnal women, and Pol Bury made sculptures that move so slowly the motion is barely visible.
In the 1960s Antwerp and Brussels became important places for the new international art. The Wide White Space gallery in Antwerp showed Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers and the young Panamarenko, who built flying machines that could never take off. Broodthaers, who had first been a poet, made works from mussels, eggshells and books and created a fictitious museum of his own that questioned what art and museums are.