Starting this month, Belgium’s Royal Museums of Fine Arts honour Pierre Alechinsky, a Belgian-born artist who had his first exhibition in Brussels 60 years ago. Renée Cordes reports
For the past two and a half years, Anne Adriaens-Pannier of Brussels’ Royal Museums of Fine Arts has been planning an important birthday celebration. It’s not for herself, but for Pierre Alechinsky, a Brussels-born abstract artist known for his use of bold colours and large repertoire of techniques – very logical given his background in illustration, printing and photography.
To commemorate his 80th birthday on 19 October, Alechinsky proposed a retrospective at Brussels’ main art museum. “We were very surprised,” confesses Adriaens-Pannier, head of the museum’s department of public services. “We also felt very honoured.” She put all other projects aside to work on this one.
Fortunately she got lots of help from the artist. Although he rarely makes public appearances, Alechinsky will be in Brussels for the opening before heading home to Bougival, a leafy suburb 15km west of Paris that was once home to Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-August Renoir. Alechinsky has lived there since 1951.
It’s not often that the museum hosts an exhibition of a living artist. The last one featured Antwerp-born Panamarenko in 2005, but Alechinsky’s influence is much greater. The winner of numerous prestigious art awards, he’s deemed one of the world’s greatest living artists.
He has also had major retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and Paris’ Centre Pompidou. Alechinsky isn’t interested in opening his own museum, but he has donated works to museums opened by artists he respects, such as Denmark’s Silkeborg Art Museum.
“He’s very generous in making donations to museums,” says AdriaensPannier, adding that most of the nearly 200 works in the exhibition come from the artist’s private collection.
So what can visitors expect to see? “The pictures are grouped both in chronological order and by series,” Adriaens-Pannier explains. “This provides a very good idea of how the artist worked.” The exhibition beings, appropriately, with Mer Noire (1988-90), a work that combines ink and acrylic resin on paper mixed with fabric – typical of the variety of techniques in Alechinsky’s work. He dedicated the work to his father, a Russian-born doctor who emigrated from the Crimea to escape religious persecution.
The reception area will also feature an enlarged version of Alechinsky’s signature on the wall, one traced by his right hand and the other a reversed image by his left hand, drawing attention to the fact that he writes with his right and paints with his left hand.
A rare treat are some early paintings that haven’t been exhibited since his last major exhibition here, at Lou Cosyn’s gallery in 1947. The gouaches, made with a paint that gives an opaque matt finish, and lithographs created at the Marais workshops in Brussels from 1949-51, reflect Alechinksy’s participation in CoBrA, a European avant-garde movement. The term, coined by Christian Dotremont, comes from the initials of the artists’ home cities: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Alechinsky wasn’t a founding member of the group, but an enthusiastic adherent of its emphasis on bright colours, dramatic brushwork and distorted human figures.
In his post-CoBrA period, Alechinsky continued to experiment with different techniques and formats. He was especially fascinated by printing and graphics, often purchasing antique books at flea markets and then painting over them.
Starting in 1961, he took frequent trips to New York where Chinese painter Wallace Ting, whom he had met in Paris in the 1950s, introduced him to the possibilities of acrylic paint. At the age of 37, Alechinsky painted Central Park (1965), his first acrylic with ‘remarks in the margins’. The central image, featuring a serpent in green, orange and black, is surrounded by black and white cartoons that seem to conjure up all that’s bad about city life.
During the 1980s, the artist seemed to become obsessed with discs and concentric circles, as well as volcanoes and mounds. The circles and bold colours still apparent in his work today are in part inspired by his fond memories of Mardi Gras in the Belgian town of Binche. The first carnaval after the end of World War II left a particularly strong impression, with all the bright costumes and the oranges tossed to onlookers who hadn’t seen the fruit since before the war.
Alechinsky also pays tribute to his Belgian cultural heritage in Hommage to Ensor (1956). Many of the painting titles are word plays, although not always apparent, even to native French speakers.
But no matter how abstract the images in Alechinsky’s works, says Adriaens-Pannier: “The point of departure was reality, not ideology.”
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