From now until March 17, 2019, you can visit Retrospective of the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Knopf, at the Petit Palais in ParisThis rare exhibition brings together about a hundred works by the mysterious painter, engraver, and sculptor, reflecting the complex aesthetics of the unique artist and placing him in his time, the end of the century, next to his contemporaries, painters and writers, Gustav Klimt, Gustav Moreau, Franz von Stuck, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Gabriele Dante Rossetti and his sister Christina, Emile Verrein, Georges Rodenbach, Joseph Feldman, Jean Laurent, Gregoire Le Roy, and more.
Here is a short video about the exhibition:
Symbolism, between Impressionism and Surrealism, arose as a reaction to the former and paved the way for the latter. The Symbolists were influenced by their Impressionist counterparts but also challenged and rebelled against them, arguing that the goal of sublime art was not to internalize the external world but to externalize the internal world.
Thus, the Symbolists opened more and more gates and doors to an enchanted, mystical dream world, nourished by the subconscious, from which all the great myths of human culture took shape. The god of sleep Hypnos, mythological figures and hybrid creatures such as Oedipus, the Sphinx, Medusa, ritual scenes including doors, altars, incense offerings and winged spears – all of these and more are prominently present in Knopf's works.
The great Belgian Symbolist artist, in his own way, paved the way for the Surrealists in his search, starting with Magic Realism, for the strange, the rare, that which lies beyond material reality, thus connecting his special world to that of René Magritte and that of Salvador Dali.
The exhibition that opened at the Petit Palais in Paris allows the visitor to follow the path of Fernand Kopf and visit the house-fortress-theater-workshop-temple that he built for himself in Ixelles, southeast of Brussels, according to precise plans that were guided by him and executed by the renowned architect Victor Horta.
In this exhibition, the visitor will be introduced to the main themes that appear in the artist's work, from the landscapes of his childhood to the portraits of children commissioned by aristocratic and high-bourgeois families, from the dreams he had following the images of the Flemish primitives to the memories associated with his childhood city of Bruges, from fantasies to nude paintings, from the sophisticated use of the art of photography to personal mythologies, stamped with the seal of Hypnos, to sleep.
Fernand Knopf invites the visitor to a dialogue beyond time and rationality but here and now, as well as to thoughts and reflections on the self, his selfhood, his identity, his reflections and his various relationships with his family and colleagues. Symbolism, according to Knopf, is not an escape to another place but an expanded and renewed reading of reality that unites with the kingdom of dreams to serve and express it.
A symbolist salon at the heart of the exhibition, equipped with catalogs and photographs, as well as audio stands scattered throughout, with tapes and headphones, will deepen the visitor's acquaintance with the world of the artist, who, like all symbolists, grasped the secret of the connections between color, sound, voice, smell and sight, and expressed them in his own style. Knopf's deep affinity for literature, photography, music and mysticism, and the way in which he explored these avenues are illustrated in a most fascinating way.
Knopf, like many other symbolists of his time, had a deep connection to music, and the exhibition's curator, Michel Darga, offers visitors the option of a musical visit to it. On a guided tour with lyric singer and certified lecturer in art and musicology, Grégoire Ischou, you can visit the exhibition while listening to about a dozen pieces of music from Knopf's time, performed by the guide.
An extensive series of activities, lectures, concerts and workshops, around Fernand Knopf (for French speakers), accompanies the exhibition, according to the schedule of events published by the museum. Can be found here.
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Autobiographical landmarks
Fernan Knopf was born in 1858, in the family castle in the town of Grambergen-le-Tremond, Belgium. The son of a father who was a senior judge, a scion of an ancient Austrian aristocratic dynasty, Fernan enjoyed a comfortable material life all his life.
In 1860 the family moved to Bruges for the appointment of their father as a prosecutor, but regularly returned to the castle in Batremond during the holidays. In the summer, the sons spent their time at a large country estate (about two hundred hectares) in the village of Fosse, overlooking the Laval Valley, in the Ardennes, an estate purchased by Mrs. Knopf's father, i.e. Pernan's grandfather. Pernan's first paintings are dedicated to this misty landscape, its houses and lakes, which include the Fosse Bridge, also called the Knopf Bridge.
In the same year, 1860, Georges, Fernan's brother, was born, who played a central role in his life. Georges, who became a poet, translator, art critic, musician and musicologist, an expert on Wagner, left no real trace behind him because of his unprofitable habit of stealing literary plagiarisms from those more talented than him. However, the gregarious Georges greatly promoted his brother, who was withdrawn from him, with the help of the extensive network of connections he built throughout Europe. Among Georges' friends whom Fernan introduced to his brother were Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Laforge and Émile Verran. Mallarmé was Fernan Knopf's favorite poet.
In 1865, the year of the birth of his sister Marguerite, his father left again and the family moved to Brussels. Fernan deliberately did not see Bruges again, in order to preserve in his memory the image of his childhood city, as it had been imprinted on him at that time. In 1877, 1878 and 1879 he spent the summers in Paris and returned to Belgium in 1880 after a year's stay there. The works of Gustave Moreau, Eugène Delacroix, Edward Burne-Jones and Alfred Stevens had a profound influence on him. After his return from France, he turned his attention mainly to England.
In 1883, in Brussels, together with James Ensor, Felician Rupes and others, he participated in the founding of the “Circle of Twenty”, a group of avant-garde artists that operated from 1884 to 1893 to promote painters who represented for them the ideal of modernism. Although he lived most of his life as a solitary dandy-hermit and spent hours secluding himself in his house, which served as a tower of ivory and a protective fortress against what he saw as the vulgarity of the outside world, Knopf was at the same time very involved in the public, community-cultural life of Brussels, Belgium and all of Europe. It is interesting to note that Knopf supported the struggle of the suffragettes.
Knopf's inclination towards the occult, mysticism and spirituality brought him closer to the esoteric, eccentric and publicity-seeking author Josephine Felden, who had great success at the beginning of his career and was later abandoned. Most of the cover paintings for Felden's books were done by Knopf. Starting in 1892, Knopf participated in the first Salons of the "Rose Croix" (Rose Cross) organized by Josephine Felden in various halls in Paris. Knopf's pictures, "The Host" and "I Locked the Door on Myself", particularly stood out in the second Salon organized by Felden, a year later.
You can learn a little more about the second painting by watching the following video:
In 1892, Georges Rodenbach's famous symbolist novel "Bruges - Dead City" was published, and Knopf, who was very friendly with the author, decorated the book with a cover drawing and added 35 photographs of the melancholic city that plays a very central role in the plot. It is a novel about reflections and echoes (Ophelia and Narcissus, in a crossed metaphor, are present between the pages), and the canals of Bruges illustrate this theme wonderfully. Water bodies, smooth as mirrors, and twin heroes, reflected in each other, also appear in Knopf's works.
Link to Rodenbach's book with Knopf's photographs.
In 1898, Knopf caused a sensation and became a star when he exhibited his most famous painting, “Caresses, or Art, or Sphinx,” at the Vienna Exhibition of the Zeitgeist. Oedipus and the Sphinx, a tame and delighted cheetah, caress each other, cheek to cheek, resembling each other, while on the right side of the picture are the two pillars of the Temple, Yakin and Boaz, against the backdrop of the village of Fosse in the Ardennes.
The image celebrates art and its mysteries, the dream, mysticism and reality that take part in it in a clever combination as well as the theme of twins and doubles. In his free hand, Oedipus holds a thin, winged spear, like a pointed drawing pencil that scratches the canvas or a sculpting chisel that cuts out the material, while carrying it on the wings of the imagination.
Like the creator god who crossed the chaos – a beast of prey, with a double axe in order to tame and transform it into a pet – creation, so too the artist rises to the rank of creator-sage-magician. The sphinx, which appears in the myth as a predatory creature, becomes a peaceful cheetah immersed in pleasant hallucinations with closed eyes. And Oedipus himself looks with open eyes at a mysterious point.
Sensuality actively participates in the creative process. This is, therefore, a painting that illustrates Knopf's definition of art and contains the various elements that nourish it, but this is only one of the possible interpretations of the famous image, which is of course open to many other ideas.
Knopf's painting aroused great curiosity when it was exhibited at the Vienna Secession exhibition. And not only that. At this exhibition in 1898, Knopf had his own hall dedicated to him, where 21 of his paintings were exhibited. The Secession movement, in Hebrew, means withdrawal from academism and commercialism in order to focus on art for its own sake, was an artistic movement, close to Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, which was founded in 1892 in Munich, and subsequently in 1897 in Vienna. The movement operated until 1906 and presented a series of exhibitions. Its most famous representative was Gustav Klimt, who was very impressed, at the beginning of his career, by Knopf's paintings. These would have a very profound influence on his work.
From 1889 until the end of his life, Knopf maintained regular contacts with England and its artists and was a correspondent for the English newspaper “The Studio.” His close friends included William Holman Hunt, George Frederick Watts, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
In 1900, following the death of his father and inspired by the building of the Vienna Secession exhibition, Knopf began construction of his famous house in Ixelles, on the edge of the Camber Forest, which was unfortunately scheduled for demolition in the late XNUMXs following an inheritance dispute between his nephews. The mausoleum-museum-theater displays the works of the artist, a devoted lover of plays and operas, in a carefully planned order, while taking guests, who had made an appointment to visit, on a journey of initiation.
The experience begins with an entrance that features a stuffed white peacock, surrounded by other rare accessories, a Greek statue inviting silence and awe, a picture of a woman wrapped in a veil, next to a statue of the goddess of sleep. At the entrance to the workshop where the artist worked, above the door, was the motto: “Man has nothing but himself.”
A golden circle was carved into the white mosaic floor of the workshop, and in its center the artist would create his works. Another workshop houses works in progress. The other rooms, also in shades of blue, black, white and gold, display works of art, masks, pillows, vases and flowers.
A house that celebrates the interiority of its owner, where a melancholic and oppressive atmosphere prevailed, something of an ideal world, poetic, harmonious, precise, still, petrified, unlike a thousand differences from the outside world, beyond the windows, of vibrant Brussels. There is no doubt that its demolition deprived art lovers in Belgium, Europe and the entire world of a first-class cultural asset.
Link to a detailed description of the house, for those who know French.
In 1904, Knopf received an order to create the ceilings of the wedding hall in the Saint-Gilles municipality, and in the same year, the banker Adolf Stocklett asked him to decorate the music hall in the palace that bears his name: “Stocklett House” in Brussels, a palace designed by the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann, one of the founders of the Viennese Secession movement. Fernand Knopf achieved the status of a revered, respected and influential artist with extensive connections.
In 1906, Fernand Knopf's mother, who had been an object of love, respect, appreciation and admiration for him, died. With the mother's death, a world of sensual pleasures opened up to the son. The man's late apprenticeship was completed by his work at the "Mona Theater" in Brussels as a costume and set designer. At this theater, Knopf was exposed to the company of actresses and opera singers, who were ahead of their time in being liberated and independent women.
When he was fifty, Fernan caused a surprise when he married a thirty-four-year-old widow, the mother of two children, Mrs. Worms. Fernan forbade his wife from entering the temple, where he worked in his workshop and where his sister Marguerite had previously modeled for him in various costumes, and he housed her in another house, about a hundred meters away. This marriage lasted less than three years.
In 1910, Knopf joined the New Jerusalem Church, which taught the teachings of theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. After his death in 1921, he was somewhat forgotten, but from the XNUMXs onwards, there was renewed interest in him, and exhibitions held in his honor and featuring his works, such as the one at the Petit Palais in Paris, were very successful.
Characteristic lines in his work
Reflections
Knopf created his first works at the family estate in Fosse in the Ardennes. Fernan used to visit the place regularly to rest and take in the unchanging rural reality, but at the same time also to receive inspiration and dream. The artist sought in the lakes a starting point for his Symbolist doctrine and presented them as a mirror reflecting the layers of the soul. But Knopf did not work only under the open sky but also, as was his custom, from photographs and postcards of Fosse. There is a great similarity between his paintings and this documentation of the region.
In his famous painting, “The Fossa Bridge,” through the apparent realism, one can understand the symbolic meanings of the ancient bridge and lake. From the bridge, one can take a deep dive into the waters of the subconscious, cross the mirror, and move to the other shore.
Literature and painting
In 1889, even before his joint activity with Rodenbach, Knopf painted the cover of the collection of poems “My Heart Weeps for the Past” by the Belgian symbolist poet Gregoire Le Roi. There are about seven other versions of the same drawing, a common practice of Knopf.
The same bridge in Bruges that will grace Rodenbach's book is at the beginning of La Roie's book, except that here the protagonist is a young woman kissing her reflection in the mirror, a symbol of her soul. Narcissism, past and present, nostalgia for an ideal place and time, self-observation, immersion in memories and dreams, melancholy. The urge to live and the temptation to die are united in the poetic ambivalence that is so characteristic of the Symbolist artists.
His contribution to Georges Rodenbach's work, "Bruges - Dead City", led Knopf to other paintings of his childhood city, which he made from photographs. The most famous and original of these is "Abandoned City", in which the artist copied Memling Square, which is actually located in the city center, to the seashore.
Here, Knopf went in the opposite direction to the history of the city, which sank into the sands, starting in the 15th century, after the sea retreated, an event that severely damaged the commercial and cultural prosperity of the cosmopolitan port city. Sailors, merchants, artists, rulers, worldly people, all those who loved the rich city and nourished themselves by it, left it with sighs in favor of other shores.
In Knopf's surrealist painting, the sea comes, invading and washing away the only building in it as the statue by Hans Memling, a 15th-century Flemish painter who settled in Bruges, disappears from view. Just as the city exists only in the painter's memories and dreams, so too the statue, the work of Hendrik Picari (1828-1894), evaporates and disappears.
A mysterious ghost town, abandoned, empty, cut off from reality, where water and sky devour the space and impose a deathly silence on it. Isn't the secret of the city's abandonment hidden behind the closed doors and windows? Doesn't the artist invite the viewer to climb the stairs behind the statue's pedestal in order to decipher it?
The model of the ideal woman in Knopf's work
Knopf obsessively painted the same model of a woman, mysterious, noble, refined, androgynous, awe-inspiring, with a penetrating yet impenetrable gaze, in various poses. This woman is none other than Knopf's younger sister, Marguerite, who was born seven years after him. Most of his works glorify the enigmatic appearance of his main model, the one who embodied his ideal of feminine beauty.
This woman closely resembles the model of the young Englishwoman, angelic and devilish, ethereal and sensual, pious and promiscuous, who was the image of the eternal woman, split in two, in the eyes of Gabriele Dante Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites. Knopf was very attracted to English art and cultivated personal ties with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.
Marguerite was not Knopf's only muse. In 1891 he met three red-haired English sisters (like him), Elsie, Lily and Nancy Mackett, daughters of an architect, with whom he became friends and who for many years, after Marguerite's marriage (1890) who settled in Liège and started a family, modeled for him.
Marguerite's features blended with those of the young English women, and together with the Pre-Raphaelite figures as well as the Primitive Flemish figures (15th century), created in Fernand Knopf's imagination, with some blending of his own face, the typical, so recognizable feminine ideal that appears in his works. The square jaw that characterizes this model comes from the statue of the god of sleep Hypnos, which he saw in the British Museum and which deeply influenced him.
Photography and painting
Knopf used to paint from photographs or take photographs of his works and then make changes to them. Sometimes he painted them in different colors from the original, sometimes he made other changes. Knopf became friends with the photographer Albert Edouard Deren, who was known as “Alexander,” and entrusted him with the photography of some of his paintings.
Alexander would develop entire series of each of them using the platinum print method, and Knopf would color the photographs, sign them, and sell them as if they were engravings. Until the 1970s, these photographic paintings could be found at fairs and markets. The art of photography was still in its infancy, and Fernan Knopf was amazing at using and perfecting it. The artist did not like to impose a long and uncomfortable model on his models and preferred to work from photographs.
In the pastel painting, called “Memories,” Fernan’s sister, Marguerite, appears, cloned in seven versions, creating a group of modern girls returning from a tennis match. The painting’s origin is in photographs that Fernan took of his sister. She posed for him in various outfits and poses, and after photographing her, he made numerous sketches and only at the end of the process did he create the pastel painting.
Michel Darga explains in this context that photography allows us to anchor reality and fix it in a framework, but at the same time also casts doubt on it and challenges it.
Music and painting
Fernand Knopf's deep attachment to music is prominently expressed in the painting called "Listening to Schumann," in which he painted his mother, sitting in a bourgeois salon and concentrating on the sounds of a piano, with her hand hiding her face.
Listening to music, according to Knopf, allows one to escape from a gloomy reality and enter a world of aesthetic sensations where inner vision resolves conflicts and brings happiness. Music takes your soul in its hand and carries it from coast to coast, confronting you with yourself and your identity.
This picture is a hymn to the image of Fernan's mother, whom the son saw as a perfect woman. The mother's feelings are expressed in it without her face being visible. Michel Darga, the curator of the exhibition, explains that at the far left of the picture you can see the hand of his brother Georges playing the piano. Darga connects this picture with the picture "I locked the door on myself" when he suggests that the woman in it is resting her elbows on a piano.
In conclusion, I highly recommend a visit to the exhibition for anyone interested in the Symbolism movement, of which Pernan Knopf is one of its most prominent representatives. The metaphysical journey from realism to myth, from reality to a multifaceted poetic metaphor, will be experiential, fascinating, and impressive.
Several useful links
- Buying a ticket to the exhibition
- Michel Darga, director general of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, has written two books about Fernand Knopf, twenty-five years apart, and plans to write a third book in twenty-five years. The first book is called Knopff or the poetic ambiguity While the second book is simply called Fernand KhnopffThe book “Bruges: A Dead City” is also available. In Hebrew translation.
Dear Orna, you amaze me again and again with your fascinating and enriching in-depth articles, and for that I thank you again and again from the bottom of my heart. You have enriched me!
Einat Kerman Maor
Thank you very much, dear Einat. I am very glad that the article enriched you and that you liked it. It warms the heart to receive such a warm and even more inspiring response.
An enlightening article, Orna, as always. I admit that I did not know Fran Knopf before, but now I have a strong desire to visit the retrospective exhibition in his honor at the Petit Palais. A wonderful artist. Thanks for the interesting article!
rejuvenation
Thank you very much, Edna. Many people wrote to me saying they didn't know Knopf. I knew him because I learned a lot about the period and also researched it. The pictures are permanently in museums in Brussels.