Moving from the Royal Academy’s “Gauguin and the Impressionists” exhibition to its concurrently running Léon Spilliaert show was like moving from the light into darkness. Nowhere in the latter was there anything remotely akin to the former show’s Plum Trees in Blossom by Pissarro (1894) or Flowers and Fruit by Matisse (1909); about the only plant life we encounter with Spilliaert is in his Hothouses I (1917), in which the giant vegetation looms over the viewer in huge black silhouettes, like terrifying Triffids marching at night. It is all about the night with Spilliaert.
Spilliaert (1881–1946) is very much honored as an artistic prophet in his own country of Belgium, but hardly anywhere else. Largely eschewing oils (in which he was unsuccessful), Spilliaert suffered in critical estimation, with many dismissing him as a minor artist. Curated by Anne Adriaens-Pannier and Adrian Locke, this is his first monographic exhibition in Britain and the largest ever outside his native country. And what an exhibition it is: some one hundred works brought together in three rooms. On entering these, the dominant medium of not-quite-monochromatic watercolor and Indian ink wash creates an extraordinary impression. There’s monochromatism, but no monotony here: the intensity of his work is part of the experience. The viewer is drawn into Spilliaert’s eerie, crepuscular world and remains there, totally absorbed, for the next hour. The exhibition moves to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris from October 13 until January 10.
Spilliaert does not slip easily into any