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Frans de Geetere (Belgium
1895-1968)
Reclining woman
Charcoal (fusain) on paper.
Signed lower right
19" x 23”
Circa 1925 -1930
Paris
... divine roseate flower of
the woman.
Paradise of flesh where sobs the soul.
Sweeping long hair through
narcotic night airs.
An aroma's dark spells... black perfumes.
From Au
Jardin de L'Infante. 1893. Albert Samain
(1858 - 1900) French
Symbolist and Decadent poet.
Maternité
Charcoal (fusain) on paper.
Signed lower right
23" x 19"
Circa 1925 -1930
Paris
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The art of Frans de
Geetere is inextricably linked with his time and place (Paris in the
1920's) and that of his companions, most notably, American expatriate
writer Harry Crosby 1898-1929.
Geetere's artistic vision
was a fait accompli before he met the aspiring writer, but their intense
friendship based as it was on a mutual loathing of conformity and a taste
for the decadent and bizarre served to buttress his attitudes to life and
his art.
"…..Frans and Mai de Geetere were accomplices
in the liberated manners of the Powels and Crosbys. They had made their
way to Paris from their hometown on a barge, which they moored upstream
from the rue de Lille at the Pont Neuf. They were artists: she painted and
he did a bit of everything-woodcuts, watercolors, miniatures. He had run
away from home as a boy, painted murals on the walls of Dutch houses,
worked in a madhouse. He and his wife had saved the money for their
journey through canals to Paris by painting tulips on coal scuttles, which
they then sold along the streets of Amsterdam. …."
Excerpt from Black Sun. The Brief Transit And Violent
Eclipse Of Harry Crosby. Geoffrey Wolff. Vintage Books, Random House. New
York. 1977.
Frans de Geetere and his
wife Mai met Harry and Caresse Crosby in 1927 and their friendship
continued through the most productive years for both couples. When he met
Crosby, the artist had already contributed original illustration work to
editions of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine and in the autumn of the same
year Harry was inspired to write an essay on Frans's woodcut illustrations
of Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror, "an hallucinatory prose-poem,
remarkable for its cruelty and violence, which had had a measurable
influence upon Baudelaire and Rimbaud" :
"The
darkness of the forest where he was born, the sombre curriculum of the
monks together with the rich darkness of ecclesiastical music, the spark
of revolt kindled at the Academy of Brussels and whipped into a flame of
hatred by the frescoes his father compelled him to paint in the
neighboring churches, his first escape (if artists can be said to escape),
the year of hunger whitewashing the walls of houses (le soleil contre le
mur blanc) and, at nineteen, night duty as guardian in a maison de fous,
these were, for M. Frans de Geetere, the foundation stones of that strange
building men call the soul. In the madhouse he worked at his painting by
day, and by night snatched unsettled hours of sleep, and in this
environment developed those queer, abnormal faces that stare out at us
from the pages of Maldoror. ...And if "Lautreamont has liberated the
imagination and dispelled our fear to enter into darkness" as Mr.
Jolas so significantly
remarked, M. de Geetere with a smoldering rage and fearlessness of
creation followed the poet into darkness--"into the occult
beyond" to quote Mr. Jolas again, "where new and demonic
visions" (I am reminded of Beardsley and Redon and Alastair)
"people our solitude."
Excerpts from Black Sun. The Brief Transit And Violent
Eclipse Of Harry Crosby. Geoffrey Wolff. Vintage Books, Random House. New
York. 1977.
Both Crosby and De Geetere worked
prolifically through the latter half of the decade. The artist producing
illustrative work, original paintings, pastels, drawings and prints, most
notably a series of lithographs depicting the marathon six day bicycle
races at the Velodome D'Hiver in Paris.
If the artist's work tends toward the
disturbing and the macabre it is a reflection of both the works he choose
to illustrate and the schools that informed his art, namely the late 19th
century Symbolist and Aesthetic movements. Even the treatment of
relatively benign subject matter is shaped by these important literary and
artistic influences.
The original works
Reclining Woman and Maternité
are fine examples of the Symbolist
aesthetic, in that beyond it's seemingly straightforward figural
depiction, it aims to resonate with the viewer on a deeper level.
"Symbolist Art strove to represent
something other than self evident physical reality. It was Romantic up to
a point; it was often allegorical; it was dream-like or fantastic when it
wished and it occasionally reached into these remote areas delineated by
Freud in his explanation of the unconscious"
Symbolism. Michael Gibson. Benedikt Taschen. 1995. Koln.
It appears that de Geetere was
influenced to a great extent by the Belgian school of Symbolism and
perhaps by the great Belgian Symbolist, Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)
Tellingly, both artists' preferred motif was that of the female figure. In
Khnopff's case an idealized form of his sister on whom he projected his
own inner desires and fantasies.
Unlike his companion Harry Crosby whose
life and work reflected an increasingly manic, self destructive impulse,
De Gettere chronicled the dark facets of his own nature without actually
ceding to them.
If Harry Crosby is a totem for the
dangerous excess and frivolity of the decade then the creations of de
Gettere offer the perfect figurative backdrop. In poetic synchronicity, as
the Wall Street crash of 1929 signaled the beginning of the end for
expatriate life in the City of Lights, Harry Crosby acted on his self
destructive impulses, the bizarre circumstances of his death an
exclamation point to a short, sharp life.
As the milieu that so
richly informed his art was slowly removed de Geetere seemed to drift
inexorably into relative obscurity.
Black Sun. The Brief Transit And
Violent Eclipse Of Harry Crosby. Geoffrey Wolff. Vintage Books, Random
House. New York. 1977.
Modernism. A guide to European
Literature. 1890-1930 Pelican, Penguin. London. 1991
Symbolism. Michael Gibson. Benedikt
Taschen. 1995. Koln.
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