Van Gogh, Ensor and Art Nouveau
Vincent van Gogh, James Ensor and the Brussels salons carried the Netherlands and Belgium into the heart of modernism.
Around 1885 a new generation of artists began to break with both the academies and the grey realism of the Hague School. The best known of them, Vincent van Gogh, started out as a follower of the Hague School but found his own vividly coloured style in France. He sold almost nothing during his lifetime. Today he is one of the most famous artists in the world, and his life has become a myth of the misunderstood genius. The myth is only partly true. He was a widely read and highly deliberate artist.
In the same years Belgium was one of the countries in Europe most open to new art. In Brussels the artists’ group Les XX organised exhibitions to which they invited the most radical painters in Europe, from Seurat to Gauguin and van Gogh. James Ensor in Ostend painted masks and skeletons in garish colours. Fernand Khnopff created enigmatic Symbolist images. Belgium became a centre of Symbolism, in both painting and literature. The Brussels public got to see more new art than the public in most other capitals.
Around 1900 Brussels also gained a new architecture. Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde created Art Nouveau, a style of flowing lines inspired by plants, in iron, glass and wood. In Amsterdam Hendrik Petrus Berlage built his Stock Exchange in a severe and honest brick architecture. At the same time the young Piet Mondrian began to paint ever more simplified landscapes. All this prepared the way for the abstract art that would come after 1914. It was a time of unusually many new ideas.