The art of Belgium is on display

Even getting stuck on a royal roof can't deter a determined visitor

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, December 1, 1996

Page: C9

Section: Travel

The Thermae Palace is a turn-of-the-century pile that's a bit ragged around the edges but an impressive example of neoclassicism nonetheless. It's huge. The trek from the lobby to my room in a distant corner of the building was daunting, so to exit one evening I took the fire escape that was conveniently located just outside my door. The stairs led down to the roof of the royal gallery; I took a pleasant stroll along it. Then I tried to get back into the hotel. The fire door had locked behind me, and loud knocking produced no results. The circular staircase linking the roof and the beach was locked for the season. There were people below taking seaside constitutionals; I contemplated yelling for help but was dissuaded by the stereotype of the dumb American.

At the far end of the roof, separating it from the grounds of the royal residence, is a forbidding barbed wire fence. And in the middle of the fence is a tall rusting iron gate, shut with a hardware store padlock that goes to show the Belgian royals aren't over-concerned about security, at least not when they're at the beach. You wouldn't find that kind of amateur lock at Buckingham Palace. Joke though it was as a safety device, I couldn't pick it. But I could and did climb over the gate, in the full evening regalia I'd already donned for a dinner party. If anyone saw, they at least didn't report the spotting of a cat burglar to the local constabulary.

There is no record of whether Leon Spilliaert ever got stuck on the roof of the royal gallery. But he sure did paint it a lot, and it looks exceedingly bleak in his pictures, a dark, surreal dream of a place. Spilliaert, who was born in Ostende in 1881 and spent virtually all his life there, isn't the most famously depressed of the town's painters. That honor goes to James Ensor, who depicted people wearing ghoulish masks or skulls instead of heads. Ensor, who was born in Ostende in 1860 and died there in 1949, is an update of the late medieval creepiness of Hieronymous Bosch.

Ostende isn't the most significant art town in Belgium. It's not even close, not with competition including Ghent, Antwerp, Bruges and, of course, Brussels itself, where I saw a fine current exhibition on Art Nouveau pioneer Victor Horta during my visit, and reacquainted myself with the voluptuous Art Nouveau buildings that cut a rebellious architectural swath through a mostly traditional city.

But Ostende has its own art personality, an odd one. It's defined on the one hand by its painters of the recent past -- Ensor, Spilliaert, Paul Delvaux and Constant Permeke -- and on the other by its Museum of Modern Art, which is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary. It's not a purpose-built museum: It used to be a supermarket. It's impressive that Ostende bothers to have a museum, though, given that Ghent and other art towns are less than an hour away by train.

Ostende's modern museum sticks to Belgian art; hence the anniversary show, ``Ensor, Spilliaert, Permeke, Magritte, Delvaux,'' an exhibition of works by five of Belgium's most accomplished painters of the last century or so, all with strong connections to Ostende. Except Magritte, that is -- but you can't really have a modern Belgian paintings show without the man who helped define surrealism, the painter of eyeballs that turn corners.

A visit to Ensor's house is an enlightening prelude to the show. The artist grew up over the curio shop his family owned. You look at the exotica that's still in the glass cases -- shells, stuffed animals, Chinese ornaments and, especially, the masks -- and instantly understand the sources of his weird imagery. Ensor's was a classic 19th-century artist success story, starting with the rejection from official circles that only made his eventual triumph the more dramatic. By the time he died, his government had bestowed a barony on him; after his death, the town of Ostende bought his house and turned it into a public museum.

Paul Delvaux, too, has his own museum -- in St. Idesbald, not far from Ostende. And Delvaux has an Ostende presence outside the show in the Museum of Modern Art. He painted a vast and bizarre mural for the local casino, using his characteristic repertory of images: zombie-faced seminude women with skin an unhealthy sheet-white, draping themselves around fragments of classical architecture. He often depicted them by a chill gray sea, like Ostende's. The casino mural has a galumphing mermaid, too. The present casino itself is a confused building -- 1950s tacky, with Hawaiian-looking carpeting and that wacky mural. Ostende has had a casino since the middle of the 19th century, when its leaders decided that tourism was so important to its future prosperity that they'd construct gambling rooms within the walls of the Town Hall itself.

Permeke and Spilliaert are the two artists in the Ostende show most likely to elicit a ``Who?'' response from Americans. This is actually a plus. You can visit museums in Tokyo, Houston and Paris and see the same brand-name artists, to the point where you forget what continent you're on. It's good to see some artists you don't see everywhere else, and it's especially rewarding to discover them on their own turf, to connect the way they painted with the environment they lived in.

Permeke's house, 10 miles out of town, has, like Ensor's, been converted into a museum. Permeke was brought up in Ostende and died there, in 1952; his was a northern sensibility, kin to van Gogh's, with a dark palette and darker thoughts. Ostende had a huge influence on him. Among his paintings with ocean-related themes is a powerful ``Fisherman's Wife,'' a squatting, triangular mother-goddess type whose basket for fish is bigger than the boats in the background.

Spilliaert is the revelation of this show. Perhaps his work isn't better known because most of it is on paper, and paper's sensitivity to light limits the amount of time it can be shown. Ostende had a profound effect on Spilliaert's imagery. Again and again he painted a long stretch of empty beach. His seascapes are simplicity itself. Reduced to a couple of diagonal bands of soft color, they are virtually abstract. His figures look haunted or hunted, similar to those of the slightly older Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.

Spilliaert's 1908 Indian ink on paper view of the royal galleries shows countless columns marching into the distance, next to a cold black sea. Nearly a century later, the scene is the same, a perfect place for a nocturnal walk, especially if you're in a mood to brood. Stay on the gallery's ground level, though, so you don't get stuck on the roof.

At the same time that Ensor was painting macabre visions in Ostende, Victor Horta was designing buildings in Brussels that look as if they're made out of plants. They curve and curl, like flowers and leaves. Squeezed between more traditional buildings on crowded avenues, they are still so startling they can stop you in your tracks.

Horta is acknowledged as one of the fathers of Art Nouveau, a rebellion against Victorian stiffness and eclecticism, a vote for organic form and modern materials like cast iron. It's odd, given Belgium's patriotic pride in its own artists, that his work had never been the subject of a full-blown retrospective until the recent opening of ``Horta'' at Brussels' Palais des Beaux-Arts. The end of this century seems an appropriate moment to reexamine what happened at the end of the last, as this exhibition does in great detail. (Alas, the show is less than completely intelligible to English speakers because the labels are in French and Flemish only. At the Ostende museum, they're in French, Flemish, German and English.)

The Horta exhibition is also a good starting point for a tour of Art Nouveau architecture in Brussels, and the bookshop at the Palais des Beaux-Arts carries an indispensable paperback guide, ``Art Nouveau in Brussels.'' It comes with a handy map marked with the style's major sites, so you can check out, say, the Old England department store, designed by Art Nouveau architect Paul Saintenoy and named in honor of Liberty's of London, the headquarters of Art Nouveau in England.

The Brussels house Horta built for the engineer Emile Tassel in 1893 was the first full-blown example of Art Nouveau architecture. It stunned the design community with its innovative use of iron and steel to create the whiplash curves that became Horta's signature. He made iron bend like fiddlehead ferns. The Tassel staircase is a riot of curves that writhe over floor, walls, columns and balustrade.

Horta, and the other pioneers of the movement, believed that architects should not only design buildings from top to bottom, but should design all the fittings and furnishings as well -- right down to the keyholes and hinges. The Brussels show features Horta's bronze lamp that looks as if it's wrapped with vines, and his little table made of a chunk of fossilized wood mounted on curving iron legs ending in feet that look like lily pads. Art Nouveau was also resolutely up-to-date: See the telephone built into the apron of a table from Horta's own house, borrowed for the exhibition, or the night tables built into the sleek headboard of a bed.

Horta's house became a museum in 1969, which is important since several of the best examples of Art Nouveau are still private homes whose interiors are inaccessible to the public. The Horta house is a rare chance to experience Art Nouveau's complete integration of architecture and furnishings. Beds, chairs and tables are crafted from lines that swoop and soar, and there is a daring use of asymmetry in windows and a folding screen. The dining room walls rise to a vaulted ceiling; both are covered in white enameled brick. Bedroom closets undulate, looking ready to jump off the wall. Skylights at the top of the four-story house send light streaming all the way down the open stairwell; a slim, elegant column in the entry way, a radiator in disguise, sends heat all the way up.

The story of Art Nouveau has a sad chapter. The style's short-lived reign ended with World War I. After that, Art Nouveau fell out of fashion, and some of Horta's masterpieces were destroyed. The Maison du Peuple, commissioned by a liberal political party, was one. It was a place of fresh air and ample light, the opposite of the slums the workers inhabited. The Horta exhibition includes models of the building, which was massive yet graceful, with a wavelike facade. The building's plans still exist; there are dreamers in Belgium who want to reconstruct it.

Meanwhile, a great public building by Horta that still stands is the Palais des Beaux-Arts, a vast 1920s complex built not in the Art Nouveau style, but in that of its jazzier successor, Art Deco. Horta here created a structure whose rectilinear style has also been called Cubist. He had changed with the times. The Palais, the setting of this memorable show, is also its culmination.

``Horta'' is at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, rue Ravenstein 23, 1000 Brussels, through Jan. 5. The exhibition is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. It is closed on Mondays. Admission is about $8.