As the 19th century turned into the 20th, the burghers of Ostend on the Belgian coast slept at night safe in the knowledge that their town, with its prairie-like beaches and heroic architecture, its hippodrome and its casino, its bathing huts and hotels, was one of Europe’s most fashionable and thriving fleshpots. In the small hours, however, had they listened carefully, they would have heard the door of the perfumery at Kapellestraat 2 open and then close as an attenuated figure with a baroque coif of hair stepped into the darkness. The insomniac, troubled by stomach ulcers, would walk up and down the deserted promenade, along the empty arcades, on to the seafront buttresses, and absorb a monochrome and simplified world of silence, silhouettes and the occasional corona of gaslight.
When, after hours of wandering, Léon Spilliaert returned home, he would take up a board, pin a sheet of paper to it, rest it against the back of a chair and begin to draw impressions of the sensations and images provoked by his nocturnal roamings. “I am living in a real phantasmagoria,” he wrote, “all around me dreams and mirages.” Not that he saw his pictures as untethered to real life: painting, he thought, was “cerebral work, therefore realistic”. The works he produced, however, are ghostly, dreamlike, unsettling, intense and profoundly strange. They are also almost unknown to a British audience, something the exhibition of 80 examples of Spilliaert’s work – mostly from private collections – at the Royal Academy in London hopes to put right.
Content from our partners
