Brussels 1900

In the autumn of 1900, at the recently inaugurated Grand Palais in Paris, visitors to the Universal Exhibition discovered a Belgian section within the exhibition dedicated to foreign nations that sparked unanimous enthusiasm: nearly 150 paintings and sculptures from Belgium appeared as a true revelation. This Parisian recognition established Brussels as one of the great European artistic centers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The exhibition restores this extraordinary cultural abundance through more than 250 works: paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, posters, jewelry, photographs, architecture, and graphic arts. The exhibition was produced in partnership with the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Royal Museums of Art and History, and the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), and benefits from an exceptional loan of works from these three institutions.

A young state born from the revolution of 1830, Belgium experienced rapid economic growth in the 19th century. Brussels quickly became the showcase of this new modernity: a cosmopolitan, industrial, and intellectual metropolis at the crossroads of French, English, and Germanic influences. Artists, writers, architects, and critics invented new forms of expression there in a constant dialogue between aesthetic avant-garde and social transformations.

The journey, organized into seven thematic sections, explores this diversity of movements and sensibilities that makes the Belgian scene around 1900 so unique.

The exhibition opens with artistic circles like La Libre Esthétique, true laboratories of ideas that shaped Brussels' cultural life at the end of the 19th century. These avant-garde salons brought together Belgian artists and international creators, mixing all disciplines in a shared ambition for modernity. Exhibitions, conferences, and concerts created a new space for intellectual exchange in Europe, fostering fruitful collaborations between painters and writers, such as those that united Léon Spilliaert and Maurice Maeterlinck, Émile Verhaeren and Théo Van Rysselberghe, or Max Elskamp and Henry van de Velde. Symbolism, social naturalism, spiritual idealism, and decorative research intersected there in a creative effervescence without equal, driven by major figures like James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff, Léon Frederic, or Jean Delville.

The following sections explore the great themes that permeated Belgian art around 1900, notably the taste for mystery, dreams, and the supernatural. Artists developed universes nourished by esotericism, myths, and exploration of the unconscious. This idealism found a major expression in the work of the painter and theorist Jean Delville, founder of the Pour l'art circle and a central figure in idealist art salons.

The exhibition then addresses the other side of the "Belgian soul": the exaltation of nature. The representation of the landscape took multiple forms nourished by the major international trends of the time: the impressionism of Anna Boch or Juliette Wytsman, the pointillism of Théo Van Rysselberghe, Georges Lemmen, or Georges Morren, the luminism of Émile Claus, or the naturism of Léon Frederic and Firmin Baes. The attention paid to nature and the cycles of life also reflected an idealization of the rural world, envisioned as a refuge in the face of industrialization and profound urban changes.

Another section is devoted to the representation of people at work, an omnipresent theme in a Belgium in the midst of industrial change. Sensitive to the socialist and humanist ideas championed notably by Edmond Picard and Émile Verhaeren, artists like Constantin Meunier, Léon Frederic, or Eugène Laermans developed an engaged art, attentive to the working-class condition. Their works testify to the harshness of labor, but also to the dignity and strength of the people in the face of the upheavals of the modern world.

The exhibition also focuses on the relationship to the Flemish tradition, which is constitutive of Belgian identity. All artists, regardless of their tendency, referred to it: in religious or mystical iconography, but also in the very materiality of the works—triptychs, tapestries—or in motifs inspired by Gothic architecture, the Flemish Primitives, or 15th-century Burgundian sculpture. Modern creators thus presented themselves as heirs to a prestigious past.

This period also saw the birth of an ideal of "total art," where painting, sculpture, architecture, furniture, typography, jewelry, and book arts participated in a single ambition: to bring art into every aspect of daily life. Brussels thus became one of the cradles of Art Nouveau, driven notably by the revolutionary architectures of Victor Horta, Paul Hankar, and Henry van de Velde.

Finally, the exhibition addresses the complex links between this artistic golden age and the colonial enterprise led by Leopold II in the Congo. The arrival of new materials, notably ivory and exotic woods, fueled the formal research of Belgian artists while taking place within a political and economic context that is now being questioned. This essential historical dimension is integrated into the tour to restore the tensions and contradictions of this Belgian modernity.

The journey concludes with the notable presence of Belgian artists at the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition, where their participation sparked lively critical enthusiasm and earned many of them medals.