2023-12-03 16:06:00
In Louvain, everything is Bouts! We watch Bouts, we eat Bouts style – spider crab, herring, shrimp. We drink Bouts, a delicious vintage of blond beer… But what is Bouts? This is the name of Dieric Bouts, born in 1410 (approximately) and died in 1475, official painter of Louvain, from the second generation of Flemish primitives, just after Jan Van Eyck or Hans Memling. The Louvanists have a little joke about him: they call him “the most famous unknown painter in Belgium”.
To honor its discreet master, the city created a festival, scheduled concerts and placed commissions with contemporary artists. On a building, a gigantic fresco, signed Leon Keer, comes to life on the screen of passers-by's smartphones, thanks to augmented reality. A mural (not very successful) marks the house where Bouts lived. Above all, Louvain presents an exhibition where, for the first time, 21 paintings by the master are brought together.
“Each painter supports the marketing of Belgian cities”
In order to make this famous figure from the shadows, eclipsed by the other Flemings, known, the museum asked itself a legitimate question: how to look at his paintings today, in a world which no longer has anything to do with the 15th century. ? First, put them in context. Today, few wooden panels by Bouts remain: Protestantism and the iconoclastic crises of the 16th century have long cast shame on this religious art.
Flemish painters have therefore not always been popular in Belgium. “In a movement to construct national identity, in the 19th century, we rediscovered the Flemish primitives,” explains Peter Carpreau, curator of the exhibition. Van Eyck, the technician, was associated with Ghent, Hans Memling and his soft romanticism with Bruges, and Van der Weyden with Brussels. Each painter gradually supports the marketing of Belgian cities.”
No matter, Louvain has Bouts and popularized his work with fanfare, emblem of the city since the 1960s. Its discreet destiny is perhaps explained by its proximity to Italy, continues Peter Carpreau: “At the 19th century, Bouts, too influenced by the Italian school, represented the decadence of the Flemish school…”
Intimate spirituality
Watching Bouts means immersing yourself in the 15th century, a prosperous period for Louvain. After plague epidemics, conflicts and economic crises in the 14th century, the city was reborn. She invested in luxury textiles and beer production, and founded her university in 1425, which still makes her reputation today. Dieric Bouts, born in Haarlem, in what is now the Netherlands, was attracted by the dynamism of Louvain. There he married “Catherine aux écus”, a rich heiress. The economic boom was accompanied by a renewal of spirituality, more intimate: the bourgeoisie ordered small-format effigies of the Virgin from the painter, the clergy placed large orders with him.
For the daring Peter Carpreau, who will stop at nothing to bring Bouts up to date, analogies with our times allow us to better understand him. “He is not an artist in the romantic sense of the term, he is a creator of images,” says the curator, who sees his workshop as a visual factory, like an advertising agency or a creative studio. In the exhibition, many works are attributed to the painter's entourage, his workshop, or even his sons. In the first room, a comic book character welcomes visitors, to show that Bouts was an illustrator like any other in his time. This anachronism still clashes with the very serene portrait of the young man in red, kept in London…
The Virgin alongside Rihanna and Lady Gaga
In an effort to update Bouts's work, the route multiplies the incursions into our time. Portraits or religious scenes are compared with photographs. Heads of Christ suffering under their crown of thorns are brought together with close-ups of athletes, sweating in the effort. “Madonna and Child” – Virgin of Cambrai (1300-1325), or the delicate Virgin and Child seated in a stone niche, by Bouts – are exhibited alongside photos of Rihanna and Audrey Hepburn, with their respective sons. In the 15th century, a new pop star appeared: Marie. This iconography persists until today, as seen in images of Beyoncé or Lady Gaga.
But Bouts is more of a landscaper than a portraitist. Its misty panoramas, where trees, rivers and mountains converge towards the horizon, are fascinating. In Ecce agnus dei, a blue-robed Christ levitates next to a sublime zigzag river. Another surprising connection: drawings from Star Wars, borrowed from the future George Lucas museum in Los Angeles, give an unexpected echo to Bouts' stylized lunar landscapes.
Paintings as if rolled with a rolling pin
The associations between the images of the 15th century and those of today in no way remove the painter's “congenital stiffness of the figures”, their “vertical immobility” which always gives them the air of “puppets”, like the noted the art historian Erwin Panofsky, in his work Flemish Primitives, in 1953. Despite the emerging perspective of certain paintings, they appear flattened, as if passed with a rolling pin. The characters are pensive and stony. This is particularly true in the Last Supper, which closes the exhibition, a polyptych designed for Saint-Pierre Cathedral. Christ facing a plate of broth is particularly detached in the middle of details that are curious to look at: an ornate copper chandelier, colorful blown tiles and glass, rolls, two intruders in a serving hatch…
Same feeling of indifference with the Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, where a slow evisceration disturbs neither the executioner, nor the spectators, nor the martyred, whose intestines are rolled up on a spit. However, some infernal creatures spice up the Boutsian universe. Bat dragons, red devil, in the Boschian Fall of the Damned, and funny horned creature at the foot of a monk, again in the Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus. Strangely, the characters' open mouths produce no sound. Despite the controversy surrounding his name, Bouts still remains the enigmatic “painter of silence”.
“Dieric Bouts, creator of images” at the M museum in Louvain (Belgium) until January 14.
#Louvain #exhibition #Bouts #Libération