This is the unedited version of an article which was commissioned by, and appeared in, Flanders Today. I offer here the original text, which was cut for reasons of space and so on, but which left out several points I considered important in the writing. Posting it here also gives me the opportunity, not available to all newspaper articles, of showing all of the photos I had access to.
I heartily recommend the exhibition, needless to say.
The castle of Gaasbeek
in Flemish Brabant was originally a fortress of the dukes of Brabant,
but the building as we now know it is essentially the romantic
creation of a French marquise, Marie Peyrat, widow of Giammartino
Arconati-Visconti, whose family had owned the castle since the end of
the 18th century. Following damage caused in the Napoleonic period
Marie, explains the castle museum's director Luc Vanackere, employed
artists and designers from across Europe to convert the castle into
an idealised version of a medieval palace – a sort of theatre of
history, as he describes it. Marie donated the castle to the Belgian
state in 1921, and in 1980 it became a museum of the Flemish
community.
All of which explains
the background to the castle's current exhibition Sehnsucht: een
onstilbaar verlangen (Sehnsucht: An Insatiable Longing). The
exhibition, curated by the Dutch writer Oscar van den Boogaard, who
now lives in East Flanders, could not have wished for a better home:
a theme of yearning for what is lost, in a setting which represents
the very same sentiment. Gaasbeek Castle is, in fact, the embodiment
in stone and brick of the indistinct notion of Sehnsucht.
Sehnsucht is a German
word meaning something like “the sickness of painful longing,”
and it's probably most associated with the German Romantic poet and
author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose second novel, Wilhelm
Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96), contains two poems on the
theme, one titled simply Sehnsucht and the other Mignons
Sehnsucht.
The word is said to
have no exact translation in English, though “longing” and
“yearning” seem to fit the bill perfectly well, in context. For
Sehnsucht is not a longing for ice-cream or a yearning for the latest
iPad. Sehnsucht need have no object at all, or a non-existent or
impossible one – such as the universal longing, much exploited by
conservative politicians, for a Golden Age that never was.
Translation or no, the feeling is universal, and aside from the
visual representations shown here, it is the core of much poetry,
literature and music. For William Blake, the longing was for a New
Jerusalem; for William Wordsworth, the memory of a field of
daffodils. Elgar's Enigma Variations are an expression of
Sehnsucht, as are the Four Last Songs of Richard
Strauss, to name but a few examples.
For Mignon, a character
in Goethe's novel, the longing was for Italy – “that land where
lemon orchards bloom” – where Goethe spent two years from 1786 to
1788. In the poem titled Sehnsucht, however, the longing is
for something more diffuse:
Alone and separated
From all joy,
I look to the vast
horizon
On every side.
Not surprisingly, the
poem inspired musical settings by Schubert and Tchaikovsky, as well
as a composition by Robert Schumann.
Mignon features in the
Gaasbeek exhibition, in a small portrait
(photo) from 1850 by the Dutch artist Ary Scheffer in which
the (fictional) girl stares into the half-distance somewhere over the
viewer's right shoulder – a typical attitude of Sehnsucht. The same
distant, melancholy glance is seen in the first portrait in the
exhibition (photo), Xteriors VI, by the Dutch
photographer Desirée Dolron (whose name could itself be an
expression of Sehnsucht) in which an impossibly beautiful young woman
with a Victorian hairstyle and dress contemplates something beyond
us, both physically and imaginatively.
That sense of mystery –
we are rarely allowed to know what the object is of the yearning
expressed in any artwork – allows us to construct our own
narrative: is the woman in the painting by the Italian Risorgimento
artist Andrea Appiani (photo),
in which the young Ginevra gazes out of a window on a ship on the
water: her secret lover Ettore is aboard, but is he arriving or
departing? Only her servant Zoriade knows.
The act of gazing out
over the water is another common trope in depictions of Sehnsucht,
representing Mignon's exile from some imaginary promised land. That's
a characteristic it shares with other melancholy genres like Celtic
folk music and Portuguese fado, with its underlying sentiment
of saudade – a very close relation to Sehnsucht. It appears
in a painting by Osbert showing a figure who appears to be Orpheus staring
over a wine-dark sea, presumably mourning his separation from
Eurydice.
Orpheus also features in a work by the French academic
painter Pascal
Dagnan-Bouveret (photo). Towards the end of the exhibition,
there's a painting by the English artist Diane Rattray
(photo),
based on an old holiday snap, in which a young boy, his face
turned away from us, stares at an expanse of water; at what, or away
from what, we cannot tell.
The most emotionally
powerful work in the exhibition, in my view at least, is also a rear
view. In Eric Rondepierre's Champs-Elysées (photo)
a woman walking away from us in the gardens observes herself, walking
in the company of a man. The woman is the artist's mother, who used
to visit him on a Sunday when he was in an orphanage, and take him to
the cinema. The cinematic photo, in black and white, shows two levels
of longing: the boy longs for his mother, while she in turn longs for
something else: a lost love, or another life.
In the photograph by
Erwin Olaf, who featured in another recent exhibition at Gaasbeek,
the story is more enigmatic. Titled The Mother
(photo),
it shows a young woman sitting, eyes downcast, in a room done out
entirely in white, as indeed is she. In the background, a pram; at
the doorway, another boy, with riding-crop and -boots, is on his way
out, his face also unseen. We look in vain for some clue: is the
doorway the portal between life and death? Is the boy the baby grown
and departed? Olaf gives nothing away.
He's more overt in the other
work by him featured here: titled Grief
(photo),
it shows a young man in an attitude of some despair looking from a
window into what appears to be a graveyard.
While grief might be
seen to be the ultimate unquenchable longing, the notion of Sehnsucht
also extends to Paradise – the unattainable perfection represented
for Mignon by Italy. Two of the greatest epics of literature – John
Milton's Paradise Lost and Goethe's Faust –
concern themselves with the consequences of seeking to attain the
unattainable Paradise: for Faust, the essence of life; for Lucifer,
dominion over God.
It's not all doom and
gloom, however. The Chinese artist Yang Jiechang takes a satirical
look at Heaven in his work Stranger
than Paradise, in which the animals and
humans of the Ark, arrayed on a series of perspex cubes which could
be water or could be air (the artist says they represent human
cities) indulge in a riotous orgy of inter-species copulation. The
small terra cotta figures seem to have stepped right out of a work by
Hieronymous Bosch, whose most famous work, now known as The
Garden of Earthly Delights, contains
scenes of human-animal congress both in Heaven and in Hell.
There's also humour in
the work by Flemish artist Wim Delvoye (photo), a sculpture in wood
of a cement mixer, painted to look as if it were made of Wedgewood
china, as if harking back to an imaginary time when building-site
materials were of a nobler sort. And Physical Cosmology
(photo) by the German artist Carola Mücke,
an installation of light and sound, has to be seen (and especially
heard) to be appreciated.
Sehnsucht: een
onstilbaar verlangen runs at Gaasbeek Castle until 11 November,
daily except Mondays, from 10.00 to 18.00. www.kasteelvangaasbeek.be
