Art History News: Jean Brusselmans Painter by Nature

Bozar - Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels

2 Oct.'26 → 31 Jan.'27

Curator: Ann Geeraerts

From 2 October 2026 to 31 January 2027, Bozar presents the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to Jean Brusselmans (Brussels, 1884 – Dilbeek, 1953) since 1980. Featuring 120 paintings, drawings and engravings – including masterpieces from major museum collections as well as little-known gems – Bozar celebrates one of the most distinctive painters of the Belgian avant-garde.

From the beginning of the 20th century, Brusselmans developed a unique oeuvre, unbound by artistic trends yet firmly rooted in the tradition of painting. Through 120 works and dialogues with his contemporaries – such as Léger, Mondrian, Morandi, Wouters and Permeke -, the exhibition delves into the world of this singular painter, between abstraction and figuration.

Light for all things

Brusselmans’s view of the world was as modest as it was profound. He painted simple elements from his immediate surroundings and imbued them with a monumental presence. “Art lies in casting light on all things, even the most thankless and the poorest.” he said. For him, there was no hierarchy amongst subjects. This conviction went hand in hand with a social awareness: “I had long realised that there was a need for strong and popular art.”

A journey in twelve chapters

The exhibition takes 1914 as its starting point, the year in which the artist settled in Auderghem and turned his back once and for all on academicism and realism.

Through a thematic and chronological approach, divided into twelve chapters, Painter by Nature traces his evolution up to the early 1950s: the journey of an artist who relentlessly sought the essence of things and strove to organise chaotic reality into clear and reasoned compositions.

A singular approach

Brusselmans’ work spans almost the entire first half of the 20th century, a period during which European art shifted from the realism and academicism of the 19th century to a host of new movements, ranging from Luminism and Brabant Fauvism to Flemish Expressionism, Surrealism and Constructivism.

Brusselmans was generally described as a Flemish expressionist, a label with which he himself strongly disagreed. Despite belonging to various artistic circles, such as L’Effort, the Brabant Fauvists, La Libre Esthétique, L’Art vivant, Les Compagnons de l’Art and Kunst van Heden, he remained an individualist.

He translated his personal world and his very way of being into an authentic pictorial universe, where, in his own words, “not a single brushstroke is too many or too few.” Brusselmans sought to paint “naively, purely and powerfully, to be natural.”

Back at Bozar

With this exhibition, Brusselmans returns to the Centre for Fine Arts Brussels, where he had held his first major solo exhibition in 1931. His connection with the institution was close and multifaceted: he was a founding member of the artists’ group L’Art vivant, which had its premises there, and created monumental theatre sets for the operas staged there, such as Schönberg’s Erwartung (1936) and Vondel’s Lucifer (1937). During his lifetime, the Centre for Fine Arts was a major promoter of his work, hosting three major exhibitions in the 1930s and a fourth in 1952. Posthumously, the Centre for Fine Arts dedicated a further exhibition to him in 1979.

Partners: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, KBR, MSK Ghent, Musea Brugge, Mu.ZEE, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.

Alongside the exhibition, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, as major lender, are presenting some thirty works on paper by Brusselmans in the Spilliaert Room of the Old Masters Museum, just a stone’s throw from Bozar. The exhibition "Jean Brusselmans: The Artist at Work" runs from 18 Nov. to 9 May ‘27.

This is how Brusselmans’s unique pictorial language developed, taking on its characteristic form from the 1930s onwards, oscillating between figuration and abstraction, tradition and modernity, reality and imagination, serenity and dramatic intensity.

Wall texts

Introduction

Jean Brusselmans (1884-1953) is one of

Belgium’s most idiosyncratic painters. This

exhibition marks the return of his work to the

Centre for Fine Arts (Bozar), where his first major

solo exhibition took place in 1931, followed by

several more.

Painter by Nature takes 1914 as its starting point:

the year Brusselmans moved to Oudergem and

definitively left academicism and realism behind.

Through 120 works – paintings, drawings and

prints – the exhibition traces the artistic journey

of a painter who tirelessly sought the essence of

things and endeavoured to organise chaotic

reality into clear, thoughtful compositions. It

reveals how Brusselmans gradually developed a

unique visual language that assumed its

characteristic form from the 1930s onwards,

poised between figuration and abstraction,

tradition and modernity, reality and imagination,

stillness and drama.

The exhibition situates Brusselmans’ work within

the context of his time through dialogues with national and international contemporaries. These reveal sources of inspiration and artistic affinities while, above all, highlighting his distinctive position: one that can only be described as radically autonomous.

Jean Brusselmans’ authentic approach to painting continues to inspire artists today. At Bozar’s invitation, contemporary artist Kristof Santy (b. 1987, Roeselare, Belgium) enters into dialogue with the master, with a new commission that brings lost works back to life.

Just before the First World War,

Brusselmans’ work underwent a major

stylistic shift. He left behind the sombre

realism of his formative years and began

experimenting with colour, influenced by

his artist friends Rik Wouters and August

Oleffe, key figures in Brabant Fauvism.

His many visits to museums also exposed

him to developments in international art.

He freely combined Paul Cezanne’s

oblique perspective, the French Fauvists’

autonomous and expressive use of

colour, and the juxtaposed brushstrokes

of artists such as Georges Seurat and

Vincent van Gogh, forging a style that

explored the full potential of painting.

During this exploratory period,

Brusselmans laid some of the

foundations for his later work. He

constructed his compositions using

robust, rectangular brushstrokes –

precursors to the ‘constructive brick’ that

would later become his trademark. At the

same time, motifs and techniques emerged that he would continue to develop throughout his career. In In the Garden (1916), for example, he created a pictorial collage, bringing several portraits of his wife Marie together in a single image. This approach reveals an artist who is less concerned with recording reality than with recreating it according to his own pictorial logic.

Following the First World War and the

break-up of the Brabant Fauvist group,

Brusselmans turned his back on

charming garden scenes and colourful

female portraits. Soft colours gave way to

a darker palette. He painted workers –

labourers on the canal and farmers in the

hills of Dilbeek – on a monumental scale

and mid-action. Flemish Expressionism,

then flourishing with artists such as

Constant Permeke, Gust De Smet and

Frits Van den Berghe, undoubtedly left its

mark on his work.

Brusselmans, however, soon looked

beyond this movement with which he did

not wish to remain associated.

Preparatory drawings reveal how his

approach became increasingly

schematic. His work grew flatter, while

composition became crucial as a means

of imposing order and assigning each

figure or object its place. The Walk (c.

1929) also reveals the influence of

Cubism. Yet this increasing emphasis on

formal organisation never led to complete

abstraction. However reasoned and constructive his working method became, Brusselmans continued to take visible reality as his starting point.

Brusselmans and his family

moved more than ten times in

and around Brussels before

finally settling in rural Dilbeek

in 1924. There, he bought a

modest house in the

Koudenaerde neighbourhood

and, with his characteristic

sense of humour, named it De

Kouden Haard (The Cold

Hearth). The house became an

anchor for the artist, who

spent many years observing

the rolling Pajottenland

countryside beyond its walls. It

was here that he found his own

signature style, both literally

and figuratively, as well as

plenty of inspiration. He

painted the natural

surroundings of his home,

regularly returning to a

particular view as a recurring

motif. Between 1929 and 1940,

he produced more than ten variations on the landscape overlooking the Broekbeek Valley. Across them, we see time and the seasons pass.

Brusselmans draws our gaze to several blind façades at the centre of the landscape, surrounded by market garden plots. The cottages are depicted in highly simplified form. Occasionally, the roof of his own house appears in the top right-hand corner. Deeply connected to this landscape, the artist reduces it to its most essential forms: the plots become a geometric pattern, the façade an abstract plane, as do certain shadows and clusters of trees. Above them, heavily modelled clouds drift past. Everything is flat.

These works offer a quintessentially Brusselmansian interpretation of the Brabant landscape, developed through his characteristic serial approach. With each variation, he reinvents his vision. And each one compels the viewer, like the artist himself, to look more closely and experience the painted landscape with ever-greater intensity.

In the 1930s, the economic crisis was

raging, modernism was under

pressure, and Brusselmans was barely

making ends meet. Yet he was more

productive and creative than ever,

producing some of his finest works in

rapid succession. What prevails is an

unmistakeable pleasure in the act of

creation, a delight in colour, texture

and the painterly gesture.

Brusselmans himself referred to this

as his ‘heroic’ period.

Like a builder, Brusselmans

constructs what might be described

as the anatomy of his landscapes.

Their skeleton is the geometry of the

Brabant countryside: rectangular

fields, rounded or oval crowns of

trees, expanses of colour on blind façades, the cross-shaped sails of the windmill in Neerpede… In his studio, he revisits these elements and assembles them into a mental landscape. The view becomes a ‘vision’.

Over this skeleton, the paint becomes skin. Brusselmans plays with different ways of applying paint, often within a single work. At times he spreads it thinly, almost transparently; elsewhere he applies it roughly in his characteristic thick, broad brushstrokes, or uses a distinctly oily, impasto-like technique. In the spring scenes, blossoms sit on the canvas like tangible buds of paint. The colours are exuberant and sometimes used autonomously: soft pink fields, a spectrum of spring greens, blue willows and fields – a symphony of colour embedded in the landscape. Together, texture and colour create dynamism and rhythm.

Jean Brusselmans’ work continues to

inspire younger generations of

painters today. Kristof Santy is one of

them. For this exhibition, Bozar invited

Santy to undertake a special

commission that brings him into direct

dialogue with the master’s lost works.

In 1936, Brusselmans painted four

monumental sets for a performance of

Arnold Schönberg’s Expressionist

opera Erwartung here at the Centre for

Fine Arts. The seven-metre-long

panels formed a movable stage set for

the story of a woman who wanders

through a forest at night in search of her

lover, only to find his lifeless body. The press widely praised Brusselmans’ visual interpretation, whereas Schönberg’s atonal music met with rather more mixed reactions. It was a significant artistic commission for Brusselmans. From then on, his paintings took on an even more pronounced theatrical and decorative dimension.

Unfortunately, nothing remains of the four panels today. Drawing on the scant archival material available, Santy recreated the sets for the first and final acts, experimenting with a technique that was new to him: pastel on unprepared linen. The result is entirely his own, while remaining true to Brusselmans’ visual language. As Santy puts it: ‘I made it with my own hands, but the thinking behind it is shared with Jean Brusselmans.’

Brusselmans found inspiration

in his own modest world. Even

as a child, he painted

household objects – pots and

pans, jugs and pitchers –

fascinated by their three

dimensional qualities. The

classical still life thus became

part of his artistic repertoire at

an early age. Throughout the

1920s, his still lifes grew flatter

and were increasingly

structured according to a strict

compositional scheme, an

evolution that is also apparent

in his landscapes. Gradually,

Brusselmans reduced the

number of objects he depicted

and developed his own visual

vocabulary, with which he

could compose endlessly new

sentences.

In his still lifes, Brusselmans creates a tension between this austerity and the richness of his imagination. On the one hand, the artist sparingly uses the motifs, perhaps a reflection of the family’s poverty throughout the 1930s. If they carry any deeper symbolism, it is surely one of hardship: a meagre herring, slices of humble black pudding, a half-eaten loaf of bread, or an empty potato basket.

On the other hand, from this modest array of everyday objects, Brusselmans evokes an entire world. He seeks a purely pictorial beauty, stacking and arranging objects in a quest for harmony and tranquillity. His still lifes often take on a decorative dimension too, with background patterns derived from textiles or wallpaper. This reflects Brusselmans’ growing interest in mural and decorative painting during this period.

Unlike his still lifes, Brusselmans

painted relatively few interiors.

These date mainly from the

1930s and are generally confined

to the living room, kitchen and

attic of his house in Dilbeek.

In 1936, he painted an early

version of his living room. At the

centre stands a small round

coffee table with a bouquet of

roses. In the left-hand corner

hangs a Chinese print, a gift from

his friend Luc Haesaerts. The

painting in the centre depicts a

window, creating the illusion of a

view beyond – a traditional art

historical device.

Three years later, Brusselmans

returned to the same interior in a

far more ambitious version. He

filled the painting with the

familiar objects that recur

throughout his oeuvre: the painted plates in the cupboard, the ornately decorated earthenware jug, the large shell, the head of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, the basket of apples – and his wife Marie. Wearing her best dress, she forms the focal point of the scene, yet remains one motif among many.

Here, Brusselmans brings together not only different motifs, but also different genres – still life, portrait and interior – as well as different painting techniques. Large Interior thus becomes a painterly treatise: a synthesis, a painted collage. He offers us a glimpse not only into his intimate world, but also into his artistic universe. The building blocks of this collage can be traced in different forms elsewhere in his oeuvre. In this way, the very interplay between recurring motifs becomes a leitmotif of his work.

Drawing was fundamental to

Brusselmans’ practice. Most of his

drawings are studies for paintings and,

therefore, form part of the creative

process rather than being ends in

themselves. As such, they are often

sketchy and rough. Brusselmans drew

on paper or directly onto canvas in

chalk. He frequently used the

traditional grid method, dividing the

composition into squares and

transferring it to the painting in this way.

Notes on colour, the division of the

surface and dimensions show just how

meticulously he prepared his paintings.

The drawings reveal how the artist

thinks and sees, and how he became

increasingly attuned to the structure of

what he sought to depict – to the

underlying scheme of a landscape, a

still life, a figure or a pose. His emphatic

handling of line betrays the influence of

his training as a graphic artist: from the age of fourteen, Brusselmans worked as an apprentice at the Belgian Society of Lithography.

In the 1920s, Brusselmans also produced a modest body of prints. He published two portfolios of etchings and created eight woodcuts, three of which are on display here. This aspect of his work has generally been overlooked and rarely exhibited, yet it is closely connected to his painting. Certain paintings were based on his engravings, while some prints are quite literally quoted in the paintings.

Jean Brusselmans 2 Oct.'26 → 31 Jan.'27 25

Brusselmans did not depict the bourgeoisie

or high society – a refined world far removed

from his own. Instead, he mainly painted

people from his immediate circle: family

members and a handful of artists, art critics

and collectors. He affirmed his status and

identity as an artist in around a dozen self

portraits, usually depicting himself at his

easel or holding a painter’s palette.

Brusselmans created his most exceptional

portraits when he looked for inspiration

close to home, depicting himself or his wife

Marie. ‘If a working-class girl decides to

make herself beautiful, she pushes all the

ladies aside,’ Brusselmans believed. From

the time they met in 1910 until her death in

1943, he painted Marie frequently. She

rarely appears in a formal pose, but is

usually shown going about her daily life,

reading or working. Sometimes she is

wearing her best dress, made from a

distinctive fabric. After Marie’s death, he

also painted his new partner, the art teacher

Mariette Richald, on several occasions. She

was probably the model for later portraits such as Nude with a Shell (1945) and Seated Young Woman (1946).

Strikingly, a considerable number of Brusselmans’ portraits and self-portraits have a sketchy, sometimes even unfinished quality. Some are indeed unfinished; others are signed but still appear incomplete. Brusselmans struggled with the portrait genre, but also consciously pursued an aesthetic of the unfinished, allowing the painting process itself to remain visible.

Jean Brusselmans 2 Oct.'26 → 31 Jan.'27 26

In the 1930s, Brusselmans

received several major

commissions for decorative

paintings, including work for the

theatre and the 1935 World’s Fair

in Brussels. For the latter, the

architect Victor Bourgeois invited

him to create a monumental mural

for a hairdressing salon. Around

the same time, Brusselmans also

created Beach View with Bathers,

the largest work in his entire

oeuvre. The figure of a bather

combing her hair in front of a

screen appears both in the mural

and in the earlier Bathers (1934). It

is a striking example of how

Brusselmans continually refers to

his own work, revisiting favourite

themes in countless variations.

In these large-scale compositions, Brusselmans creates dynamism through the figures in the foreground. Like a director orchestrating his extras, he arranges and rearranges them within the composition. He constructs their bodies according to mathematical proportions, drawing inspiration from the classical Greek canon, among other sources. For Brusselmans, as for Fernand Léger, the human body had no greater status as a pictorial motif than a vase or a paraffin lamp. Yet while Léger subjected the human figure to mechanical logic, Brusselmans drew on a classical tradition, translating it into a modernist visual language.

Many of these works hover between finished and unfinished. Underdrawings, corrections and overpainting sometimes remain visible, revealing not only the creative process but also the artist’s thinking. Looking closely, we can see how he adapts, removes and repositions figures in his quest for a harmonious composition. At times, this culminates in a synthesis of motifs revisited over many years, as in Bathing Vagrants (1936). Other works, such as Beach View with Bathers and Skaters (1933), remain unfinished yet lose none of their expressive power. Beach View with Bathers even appears on the Flemish Masterpieces List, where it is described as a ‘painterly manifesto of the unfinished’.

Throughout his life, the home-loving

Brusselmans made an annual trip to the

coast, leaving the Pajottenland behind to

paint the sea. He worked extensively in

the harbour of Zeebrugge, visited the

Casino in Heist and stayed in Knokke,

Blankenberge, Ostend and

Oostduinkerke at various times. He never

fulfilled his dream of one day living on the

coast, but the sea remained a cherished

subject throughout his life.

Brusselmans believed that, above all, a

painter should seek to capture the

dramatic power of the sea. He was

fascinated by the spectacle of the

elements, translating storms and

torrential downpours, rainbows and

blazing sunshine, into extraordinarily

theatrical scenes. Some of these works

seem almost like miniature stage sets,

with clouds, waves and dunes resembling

cardboard backdrops.

The artist was particularly prolific between 1936 and 1939. While staying in Ostend, he painted the first version of Storm in 1936, followed by a second in 1938. The work represents an expressive pinnacle, composed of simplified, geometric forms – even the sea does not escape Brusselmans’ constructive gaze. Sunlight shines like a theatrical spotlight, while the rolling motion of the waves seems to come to a halt. It is no coincidence that Brusselmans created the first version in the same year that he painted the monumental sets for Arnold Schönberg’s Erwartung.

From his home De Kouden Haard,

Brusselmans regularly turned his

gaze to another aspect of the

surrounding landscape. From the

mid-1930s onwards, he looked

towards the Ninoofsesteenweg and

the village centre. He painted this

view repeatedly in the years around

and during the Second World War,

continuing until 1950. Unlike the

earlier archetypal landscapes,

which he depicted throughout the

changing seasons, Brusselmans

painted this view mainly in winter –

perhaps reflecting a period of

immense hardship, marked by the

war and the death of his muse,

Marie, in 1943.

The landscape is cold, desolate and

still. Yet despite the wintry palette,

Brusselmans imbues most of these

scenes with an extraordinary richness of tones, colours and brushstrokes, using paint that, like snow itself, continually assumes different forms. The setting sun infuses the sky with shades of pink, yellow and grey, casting its evening light onto the façade of the tall house beside St Ambrose’s Church, which Brusselmans sometimes includes and sometimes omits.

Brusselmans paints both from nature and from memory. The many variations on these winter landscapes suggest that he is increasingly working from painting to painting. From concept to concept. From paint to paint. This is no longer a faithful representation of the Brabant landscape. The deliberate revisiting, reworking and transformation of the same motif is now deeply ingrained in his practice and touches on the very core of his artistry: the landscape has become a pretext for exploring the possibilities of paint.

Jean Brusselmans 2 Oct.'26 → 31 Jan.'27 29

In the final phase of his life, Brusselmans

embarked on a new artistic path. He

reworked earlier themes into large,

theatrical paintings that are far more

exuberant than his previous work: busy,

highly staged and crammed with

caricatural and comic figures. There is

more than a hint of horror vacui (fear of

empty space). Not everyone appreciated

these late works.

Brusselmans drew inspiration from

Hieronymus Bosch, among others, as well

as from the tradition of satirical cartoons.

The visual language of popular Épinal

prints also remains recognisable. Yet it is,

above all, the influence of James Ensor

that resonates through these humorous

and grotesque scenes. Carnival (1952),

completed barely a year before

Brusselmans’ death, is a tribute to the

master.

Like Ensor, Brusselmans did not take himself too seriously and was always ready to poke fun at himself. In Les Compagnons de l’Art (The Companions of Art) (1949), he depicted his fellow members of the artists’ association of the same name, in a humorous light. Brusselmans placed himself at the bottom of the composition as a jester, recognisable by the emblematic can he wears like a crown. Brusselmans was well aware of his idiosyncratic position and clearly unafraid to question both it and himself with the necessary dose of humour.

Biography

Jean Brusselmans was born in 1884 in Brussels and grew up in a working-class neighbourhood steeped in artistic and anarchist ideals. At fourteen, he began working as a lithographer at the Société Belge de Lithographie, but soon received permission from his parents to study drawing and painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. There, he met Rik Wouters and became acquainted with Brabant fauvists like Auguste Oleffe and Edgard Tytgat.

In 1910, he met Marie-Léonie Frisch at the Royal Theatre of La Monnaie. The couple married in 1911 and had a son, Armand. Over the following years, the family moved ten times within Brussels. Brusselmans joined the artists’ collective L’Effort and met artists such as James Ensor. He first exhibited in 1912 at Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels.

His first solo show was held

in Antwerp (Galerie

Breckpot) in 1921, followed

by a 1924 solo exhibition at

Le Centaure in Brussels,

where he would exhibit

repeatedly. That same year,

the family purchased a

small home in rural Dilbeek,

in the hamlet Koudenaerde.

From his studio window,

Brusselmans painted

countless versions of the

ever-changing natural

landscape.

From the 1930s, he became more prominent in the Belgian art scene. He co-founded L’Art Vivant—alongside artists such as Floris Jespers and Gust De Smet—received a first retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (organized by L’Art Vivant), and became a member of Les Compagnons de l’Art. He was knighted in the Order of Leopold in 1932 and received several decorative commissions, including a large-

scale mural for the 1935 World Exhibition in Brussels and the sets for Schönberg’s Erwartung in 1936.

This period marked the peak of his

career. Exceptionally prolific—he

sometimes painted up to 50 works a

year—Brusselmans referred to this as

his “période héroïque.” Despite critical

acclaim, commercial success remained

elusive. Financial hardship forced him to

paint advertisement panels under a

pseudonym and to sell household

belongings.

During World War II, he produced

relatively little but continued to exhibit,

notably at Galerie Apollo in Brussels.

Both he and Marie fell ill; she died of

deprivation in 1943.

After the war, Brusselmans gradually resumed his artistic activity. His work received growing appreciation. The young generation behind the Jeune Peinture Belge exhibition at the PBA saw him as a major influence. In 1947, he exhibited internationally for the first time, in Paris. His final retrospective was held at the PSK in 1952. A year later, he died of a heart attack at home in Dilbeek, aged 68.

Biography

His first solo show was held

in Antwerp (Galerie

Breckpot) in 1921, followed

by a 1924 solo exhibition at

Le Centaure in Brussels,

where he would exhibit

repeatedly. That same year,

the family purchased a

small home in rural Dilbeek,

in the hamlet Koudenaerde.

From his studio window,

Brusselmans painted

countless versions of the

ever-changing natural

landscape.

This period marked the peak of his

career. Exceptionally prolific—he

sometimes painted up to 50 works a

year—Brusselmans referred to this as

his “période héroïque.” Despite critical

acclaim, commercial success remained

elusive. Financial hardship forced him to

paint advertisement panels under a

pseudonym and to sell household

belongings.

During World War II, he produced

relatively little but continued to exhibit,

notably at Galerie Apollo in Brussels.

Both he and Marie fell ill; she died of

deprivation in 1943.

IMAGES

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Jean Brusselmans Painter by Nature

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