Expressionism and Surrealism
Between two occupations Flemish Expressionists painted peasants and fishermen in heavy, earthy colours, while René Magritte and Paul Delvaux in Brussels made Surrealism a picture of the everyday world suddenly turned strange.
The First World War left deep marks. Large parts of the country were occupied for four years, and West Flanders became a battlefield. Several artists spent the war years in exile in the Netherlands or England, and there they encountered new currents. When they came home, Constant Permeke, Gustave De Smet and Frits Van den Berghe formed the core of Flemish Expressionism, with large, simple forms and pictures of country life and the sea.
In Brussels and Antwerp there was at the same time a brief but lively abstract art, with Victor Servranckx, Jozef Peeters and Georges Vantongerloo, who was among the founders of De Stijl in the Netherlands. Galleries and journals linked Belgium with Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam.
Belgian Surrealism grew up around the poet Paul Nougé and the painter René Magritte. Magritte painted ordinary objects – a pipe, an apple, a bowler hat – in a precise, almost advertising-like style, but placed them in contexts that make the viewer doubt what pictures and words mean. Paul Delvaux filled nocturnal cities and railway stations with naked, sleepwalking women. In Hainaut a separate Surrealist group formed with a more political orientation.