Les XX, Symbolism and Art Nouveau
Around 1890 Brussels was one of the most open art cities in Europe. The group Les XX showed the newest work from Paris, James Ensor and Fernand Khnopff painted masks and dreams, and Victor Horta created Art Nouveau in iron, glass and stone.
In 1883 twenty young artists broke away from the official salons and formed Les XX, ‘The Twenty’. Each year they invited guests from abroad, and their exhibitions in Brussels showed Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne and Toulouse-Lautrec earlier and more comprehensively than almost anywhere else. Its successor, La Libre Esthétique, continued from 1894 and also showed decorative arts and posters.
Symbolism had a particular strength in Belgium. Fernand Khnopff painted still, enigmatic women and empty cities, inspired by Georges Rodenbach’s novel about dead Bruges, and Jean Delville painted idealist visions. James Ensor in Ostend went his own way with masks, skeletons and crowds in screaming colours, and Léon Spilliaert drew lonely seafront promenades in black ink.
At the same time architecture and design were renewed. Victor Horta made the iron structure visible and bent it into plant-like lines in the Hôtel Tassel of 1893, often counted as the first Art Nouveau house. Henry van de Velde designed houses, furniture and bookbindings before moving to Germany, and Constantin Meunier made heroes in bronze of miners and dockers.