Jean De Bosschère

Jean De Bosschère(1878-1953)
(later geschreven als De Boschère)

een Belgisch dichter, essayist, romanschrijver, schilder, boekillustrator en kunstcriticus”.


Stephen Goddard:


The Belgian enthusiasm for the Flemish Renaissance serves to introduce Jean de Bosschère, one of De Bruycker's critics, who also left Belgium to wait out the war years, primarily in London. De Bosschère had many talents: he was an author and critic who spent his later years in Paris in the circle of Antonin Artaud nd André Saurés; he was a talented artist who illustrated many of his own literary texts in styles that can be loosely associated with the graphic art of Aubrey Beardsley (fig. 16) and later the surrealists; he was an intimate and important correspondent with Belgian poet Max Elskamp; and, what is germane to this discussion, he authored several early texts on various aspects of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Flemish painting and sculpture.74

These include a monograph on the Antwerp Renaissance painter Quentin Metsys

(1907), one of the first studies of Renaissance sculpture in Antwerp (1909), and a long article on Bruegel and "our taste in painting" for the Parisian review L'occident (1913).75 De Bosschère reviewed De Bruycker's works in two wartime group exhibitions in London and he penned a longer article on the artist in 1918.76

At this time De Bosschère was still fairly steeped in a Walter Pater-like estheticism. He took pleasure in describing the etcher's trade as resembling that of a tinker and he evoked the French etcher Charles Cotett's description of biting the plate as "delectable cookery! [cuisine delectable!]." De Bosschère conjures up an image of the etcher as a sort of necromancer, lost to the real world "like those who seek the philosopher's stone."77

Without making reference to Bosch or Bruegel ("great names cast a shadow," De Bosschère notes), De Bosschère finds in De Bruycker a remarkable visionary, especially in the great wartime prints such as Weer klepte de Dood over Vlaanderenland and Kultur! (cat. 19, 20), and not simply someone who makes clever use of the fantastic.

Although De Bosschère nowhere spouts a nationalistic or fervently Flemish phrase (he was, after all, francophone, despite his upbringing in Lier, near Antwerp), it is significant that during his wartime stay in London he produced his lovely books, Christmas Tales of Flanders (1917) and Beasts and Men (1918, a collection of Flemish folk tales).78

Both works were extensively illustrated by the author. As with De Bruycker, De

Bosschère's drawings have been related to the spirit of Ulenspiegel, and described as satirical and grotesque.79 Although we do not know exactly what works De Bruycker refers to (probably the illustrations for the two books of Flemish tales), we know that he admired De Bosschère's watercolors when he saw them later in an exhibition in London. He described them as "extraordinarily interesting. Flemish proverbs and tales so nicely interpreted!"80 While in general their careers are highly dissimilar, during the war years De Bruycker and his critic De Bosschère had a brief convergence in which they mustered strength and working material by evoking their cultural heritage in the face of war.


Stephen Goddard