KHNOPFF, Fernand

“After Flaubert”, indebted to the striking light effects and rich impastos of Moreau’s work of the 1870s and Gustave Flaubert’s novel La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874), marked Khnopff’s lifelong fascination with literature. It explores evocative expression, which, along with his association with the Jeune Belgique literary movement, put Khnopff in the Symbolist camp.

This work restages a popular domestic genre subject, a woman reading. Khnopff titled the painting Hortensia, the French word for the hydrangea that dominates the foreground. A single bright red blossom placed suggestively on the tabletop punctuates the inventive composition.

The quiet, intimate interior scene is a modern variation on a tradition stretching back to Vermeer, a touchstone for nineteenth-century Belgian artists. Khnopff updated the motif by turning pictorial convention on its head. The figure - typically the focus of composition - is set in the far left corner and partially cut off by the door frame; pride of place is given to the blossoming hydrangea, placed just off-centre in the immediate foreground. This inventive layout, accentuated by the cropped, close-up viewpoint, creates the feeling of a private moment glimpsed in passing.

Although Khnopff produced few works in the vein of Hortensia, certain qualities developed in the canvas were key to his mature style: the muted palette, the carefully articulated geometries of the interior, and the sense of contemplative harmony. The association of women with flowers became a leitmotif in his art, albeit with heightened symbolic resonance.

The painting is based on a line from a poem called “Who shall deliver me?” by Christina Georgina Rossetti, sister of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It includes standard Khnopff symbols, a bust of Hypnos, an image of Bruges, flowers and a mirror, all placed in an extremely refined rectilinear composition recalling works by Whistler and Seurat exhibited at Les XX. A painting such as this exemplifies Khnopff’s carefully studied approach. He stressed the importance of having a preliminary idea, often derived from prose or poetry. The resulting work was then carefully drawn, composed and finished to be enigmatic and evocative.

In 1883 Khnopff was a founder-member of Les XX, the most avant-garde and internationalist art group in Europe. He designed their logo and exhibited Listening to Schumann (1883), a painting characterized by a Symbolist concern for introspection and an impressionist style indebted to James Ensor’s Russian Music (1881).

The painting is signed and dated upper left: FERNAND KHNOPFF 1883.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 31 minutes):

Schumann: Symphony No. 1 in B flat, Op. 38 (Spring Symphony)

Khnopff’s interest in the face in sculpture culminated in several three-dimensional works, the first of which was Mask of a Young Englishwoman.

The photos served Khnopff as memory and documentation of themes that he worked on in certain paintings. In Memoires (Memories), for instance, he used photos of his sister Marguerite to assemble several views of her in a collage amidst a new environment. Seven young women, dressed trendily, are standing in a park-like landscape, executed in sketchy brushwork in contrast to the detailed rendering of the figures. Khnopff has drawn the figure group directly according to photos of his sister Marguerite and arranged them in front of the background like a collage, with forgoing a cast shadow deliberately.

Six of the women are holding a tennis racket, but they do not play tennis, which was about to become popular at that time. Instead, they are standing paralyzed without communicating with each other and staring into the nothingness, every single one appears like caught in her world. The picture is filled with the melancholic atmosphere of an autumn afternoon and reflects bygone moments that rise from a subjective inner world and superimpose the objective outer world. In Memoires, Khnopff suspends the unity of space, time and narrative and makes his sister, multiplied by the magic number seven, become a forerunner of the lonely manichini by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), one of the originators of Pittura Metafisica.

Sexual, even perverse, undertones appear in some of Khnopff’s favourite themes, as in the portrait of 1887 of his sister Marguerite Khnopff, which he eventually installed in an altar-like setting in his studio and kept until his death. She appears in a tight, plain, high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-length dress, enclosed in a sparse, carefully balanced rectilinear setting that previews the interior of the house he would build for himself nearly two decades later. The powerful image of a woman held in check, almost in bondage, by her clothes and her environment had a special meaning for Khnopff, and he used it often.

The landscapes the Belgian Symbolist Khnopff painted around Fosset in the Ardennes at different times of his life are mostly deserted. This painting, too, seems strangely lifeless, despite the presence of the game warden. Seemingly withdrawn, he is standing stiff as a board in the meadow. As if he had been added to the unspectacular setting with hindsight, he is not even casting a shadow. It shows that the artist was concerned not with the representation of exterior reality but with inner awareness.

A nude woman makes an offering to a portrait bust on an altar. She looks out as though the viewer’s appearance has interrupted her ritual. Khnopff’s Symbolism mixed admiration for medieval and Renaissance imagery with a fascination with the occult, ritual, and the dream world. The altar here resembles one in his home, created to revere Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep. The blue cartouche at the centre is inscribed with a partially effaced NEVERMORE - a quote from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. This soft pastel drawing is characteristic of Khnopff’s muted and hazy style.

A theme of temptation seems to be the subject of Caresses, in which a semi-nude androgynous figure resists a female-headed leopard. The striking and provocative image suggests the struggle of artistic idealism against sensual temptation.

The many sphinx (a winged monster having a woman’s head and a lion’s body) figures in Khnopff’s work are not allegories; as Mallarm� interprets them, they are “ideas” of the senses.