Foreword by Luc Tuymans. Text by Anne Adriaens-Pannier, Noémie Goldman, Adrian Locke, Will Stone, Anna Testar.
A luminous loneliness: reveries from Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert, rival of Ensor and exponent of Nietzsche and Poe
Although often associated with Belgian symbolism, Léon Spilliaert, largely self-taught as a painter, demonstrated a peculiarly individual style. He was born in the coastal city of Ostend, and created many of his most radical works there. An introvert and insomniac who suffered from poor health as a youth, Spilliaert wandered the night-time streets of the North Sea resort, creating mysterious and highly atmospheric depictions of its dark docks, beaches and promenades. He drew influence from such painters as Odilon Redon and James Abbott McNeill Whistler as well as the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Nietzsche; his visual explorations of the self and potent images of solitude also align him with European modernists such as Edvard Munch and Vilhelm Hammershøi.
This book brings together more than 100 works from international public and private collections across Belgium, France and the US, including a series of haunting self-portraits that Spilliaert created in his twenties. Various authors, among them the scholar behind the artist’s catalogue raisonné, discuss the artist’s singular approach and put his career in context alongside that of his more famous compatriot and contemporary James Ensor. Acclaimed Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, in many ways the heir to Spilliaert’s legacy, provides a foreword.
Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946) was born in Ostend and moved to Brussels at the age of 20. He lived and worked between the two cities for the rest of his life. From 1903 to 1904 he worked for Edmond Deman in Brussels, a publisher of symbolist writers, whose work Spilliaert was to illustrate; that same year he stayed in Paris, where he discovered the work of Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose influences he acknowledged.
"Self-portrait (with Drawing Board)" (1907). Indian ink wash, brush, colored pencil and watercolor on paper, 52.7 × 37.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of William S. Lieberman, in honor of A. Hyatt Mayor, 1980.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Guardian
Laura Cumming
A vital opportunity to catch sight of [Spilliaert's] dark and startling art in all its precise originality, and to understand him as more than a painter of the cold North Sea.
Art Newspaper
Jose da Silva
Spilliaert’s brooding, dark works [are] painted by a man whose eyes have become accustomed to nuances of night light.
Time Out London
Rosemary Waugh
Spilliaert was remarkably consistent. He found his niche and stuck to it. And that niche was: desolation.
ArtDesk
Sarah Kent
A sense of unreality – of a world seen through eyes robbed of sleep – permeates the work. ...Like a life lived in front of the mirror and the drawing board, rehearsing melancholy as well as experiencing its clutches.
BBC: Culture
Cath Pound
Léon Spilliaert’s eerie, enigmatic works inhabit a twilight netherworld between reality and dream.
Apollo
Samuel Reilly
An artist who has shunned external influences in favour of personal solitude and his morbid curiosity in what he found to hand. [...] Spilliaert offers an example of how much you can see by staying right where you are.
ARTFIXdaily
Editors
An introvert and insomniac who suffered from poor health as a youth, Spilliaert wandered the night-time streets of Ostend, creating mysterious and highly atmospheric depictions of its dark docks, beaches and promenades.
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"When I first encountered the work of Léon Spilliaert," Luc Tuymans writes in this enlightening new exhibition catalog, "I was enchanted by its awkwardness, its appearance divulging itself as if an apparition. Under blue nocturnal light, his work reveals itself from different vantage points, where objects and people undergo a process of metamorphosis, morphing into ghostlike presences. The perspective stretches to an ultimate vanishing point. Colors emerge from an atmospheric context. Shadows contain and at the same time conceal the image."
Above: "Beech Trunks," 1945. Indian ink, pen and watercolor on paper, 60 x 49 cm. Private collection.
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.75 x 11.5 in. / 176 pgs / 130 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $63 ISBN: 9781912520220 PUBLISHER: Royal Academy of Arts AVAILABLE: 4/21/2020 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Royal Academy of Arts. Foreword by Luc Tuymans. Text by Anne Adriaens-Pannier, Noémie Goldman, Adrian Locke, Will Stone, Anna Testar.
A luminous loneliness: reveries from Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert, rival of Ensor and exponent of Nietzsche and Poe
Although often associated with Belgian symbolism, Léon Spilliaert, largely self-taught as a painter, demonstrated a peculiarly individual style. He was born in the coastal city of Ostend, and created many of his most radical works there. An introvert and insomniac who suffered from poor health as a youth, Spilliaert wandered the night-time streets of the North Sea resort, creating mysterious and highly atmospheric depictions of its dark docks, beaches and promenades. He drew influence from such painters as Odilon Redon and James Abbott McNeill Whistler as well as the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Nietzsche; his visual explorations of the self and potent images of solitude also align him with European modernists such as Edvard Munch and Vilhelm Hammershøi.
This book brings together more than 100 works from international public and private collections across Belgium, France and the US, including a series of haunting self-portraits that Spilliaert created in his twenties. Various authors, among them the scholar behind the artist’s catalogue raisonné, discuss the artist’s singular approach and put his career in context alongside that of his more famous compatriot and contemporary James Ensor. Acclaimed Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, in many ways the heir to Spilliaert’s legacy, provides a foreword.
Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946) was born in Ostend and moved to Brussels at the age of 20. He lived and worked between the two cities for the rest of his life. From 1903 to 1904 he worked for Edmond Deman in Brussels, a publisher of symbolist writers, whose work Spilliaert was to illustrate; that same year he stayed in Paris, where he discovered the work of Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose influences he acknowledged.
