Most people are familiar with the abstract modernist and surrealist movements of the inter-war period. As a partner of Mons 2015, the Musée d'Ixelles has decided to take an innovative look at this period by rediscovering two groups that played an important role on the Belgian art scene: in the north of the country, the Laethem group with Gustave Van de Woestyne and Valérius De Saedeleer, among others, and, in the south, the Nervia group from Hainaut with Anto Carte and Léon Navez, among others.

The works of these artists are brought together for the first time, revealing the many points of convergence between two movements that are nevertheless quite distinct from one another. The exhibition "highlights a fully accomplished artistic movement offering, on the one hand, a coherent alternative to contemporary progressive experiments and, on the other, a body of work marked by serenity and a reassuring classicism", says Claire Leblanc, the museum's curator.

This spirit of harmony is reflected in the collaboration between the various partners in the project - the Ghent and Mons Museums of Fine Arts, which have worked together on the exhibition's curatorship and on the book published for the occasion by Racine/Lannoo. Among the artists featured this autumn at the Museum are Anto Carte, Louis Buisseret, Frans Depooter, Léon Devos, Léon Navez, Pierre Paulus, Rodolphe Strebelle, Taf Wallet, Jean Winance, Gustave Van de Woestijne, ValériusdeSaedeleerandEmileClaus.
Deep resonances
Whether or not you're a fan of these two movements, you have to admire the magnificent work accomplished by Michel De Reymaeker (Mons) and Catherine Verleysen (Ghent) at the initiative of Françoise Eeckman, president of the Léon Eeckman Fund (one of the instigators of the Nervia group with Anto Carte and Louis Buisseret). Working on the basis of elective affinities, they set themselves the task of allowing the subjectivity of their gaze to operate by bringing the works together in pairs.

Among the themes guiding their choice were the painters' interest in Bruegel and the Italian Primitives, in a return to the land and the ancestral values of the peasantry rather than urban modernity; a profound humanism and the use of themes derived from religious iconography but placed in the context of everyday life, like this Maternity or this Flight into Egypt in the snow by Anto Carte.
Children's faces, family intimacy: all these artists favoured a subdued palette, a peaceful atmosphere with, from time to time, an emphasis on the expressive force of the line to render a look or knotted hands - like those of the elderly women painted (ten years apart) by Navez and Van de Woestyne, whose astonishing pictorial complicity cannot fail to stand out, almost a century later. The same is true of the tables of children depicted by Van de Woestyne and Rodolphe Strebelle, and the young girls by Frans Depooter and Jean Winance.By Léon Navez, an intriguing chiaroscuro scene with a chequered floor: the contrast.As for landscapes, it's tempting to list almost all of them: The Orchard or Mont du P arc, Mons by Frans Depooter, Landscape by Léon Navez, an astonishing oil on canvas (Month of Mary) and a very biblical Summer Landscape by Anto Carte, not forgetting the sumptuous November in Auderghem with its shimmering hues by Pierre Paulus. "For these urban dwellers in voluntary exile in the countryside, everything speaks of time standing still in purity, solitude and peace," say the exhibition curators.
The spirit of the times
For both Nervia and Laethem, the term "school" is inappropriate: it is primarily the critics who identify affinities between them, as well as the geographical proximity that brings Flemish and Walloon artists together, grouping them under these two clearly defined labels. Although they came from different socio-economic and linguistic backgrounds, these artists nonetheless shared a number of disturbing tendencies, which can be read as a "spirit of the times" at the time.Once again, the themes addressed resonate particularly well with the challenges facing contemporary societies.The two artists also came into contact with each other when, in 1923, the organisers of the Salon d'Automne in Paris invited both Anto Carte and Gustave Van de Woestyne to exhibit.
"From the 1920s onwards, Flemish Expressionism (a synthesis of German Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism) began to distance itself from Laethem's early movement, while Nervia remained faithful to the references he had chosen for himself. Léon Navez's Jeune fille au bouquet (Young Girl with Bouquet), opposite Gustave De Smet's Femme à la fenêtre (Woman at Window), illustrates the widening gap, even if there remains a form of visual complicity between the two works.