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A Big Kid
The Work of Edgard Tytgat
Edgard Tytgat is standing at the window. His hands are playing with the horses on a miniature merry-go-round. The flag on top of it stands out stiffly, as if a strong wind is blowing. An intent, elderly man with spectacles and a cigarette between his fingers. Beyond the window-panes the city is advancing. For thirty years he has seen it creeping closer over the hills, like a relentless plodding monster. Soon the village of Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe will be swallowed up by the towers of Brussels.
Edgard Tytgat is standing in the doorway. A woman in white appears at the window. It is Maria de Mesmaeker, Maya, his muse and his model, and for the last ten years his wife. Beside his master a dog sniffs suspiciously at the threshold. Under the animal's nose yawns a three-metre drop overgrown with weeds. When he depicted his house Tytgat had taken account of the way in which the world outside would develop. Only four years after the snapshot one could enter the dwelling by the street-door. The artist is losing his hair in this snapshot, but not more so than in the portrait of thirty years later. Edgard Tytgat was a child who was born old and did not get any older. Time had a special relationship with him.
Tytgat wanted to become a clockmaker. Twice he had become ill while riding on a merry-go-round. Each time the illness had been long and serious. During the private lessons he had in those years he had fallen in love with the cuckoo-clock that hung in his schoolroom. He found it impossible to forget that clock, even when the family moved from Bruges to Brussels. When, at the age of fourteen, he had to decide what he wanted to be, to the absolute astonishment of his parents he took an apprenticeship with a clockmaker. He stayed with him for two years.
Later on Tytgat signed his work both as ‘Tytgat’, in the orthodox spelling, and as ‘Tijtgat’ with an ‘ij’, the sound for the first syllable of his name, as in the Dutch word ‘tijd’ (‘time’). When he was 57 he wrote to his friend Adolphe Aynaud: ‘The name Tytgat goes back to the time of the Franks, Tempus Dei, then Titgoth, finally Tytgat’, and with childlike delight he added: ‘this is really marvellous, isn't it?’ Tytgat, the time of God, God as time or vice versa. Time as an attribute of God. Tytgat read his name like a programme - what is more, an artistic programme. There are no clocks in
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his paintings. Yet he paints time over and over again, the moment between what is past and what is to come.
Tytgat is 37 and painting a nude. The woman is standing in the corner of a room, catching the light that comes through the window. The floor is a chess board, set on the diagonal, the woman is getting up from a chair. Or is she about to sit down? She is laughing at a joke. Has the joke just been told, or is she about to tell it? She is putting her underclothes on, or taking them off. Whoever looks at this painting feels like an intruder, a voyeur because the woman is not laughing at whoever is looking but at an invisible third person. Placing the corner in the centre makes even the room look as if it is moving. Through the composition, through the interaction of the triangular relationship of model, artist and person looking, and through the snapshot of the model in motion, Tytgat shows an interval of time captured in a way that clearly points to what has gone before and to what is to come. A mystery, the secret of which is known only to him. The model is laughing towards the artist alone.
‘Edgard Tytgat lets himself be carried away by far too much anecdote’, wrote André de Ridder, one of the most prominent critics of the inter-war period, and the first to defend the work of Tytgat. His paintings are ‘blown-up prints’, wrote De Ridder.
The critics did not really know what to make of Tytgat. At one and the same time he was called a Fauvist, an Impressionist and an Expressionist. Affinities with Nabis, Surrealism and Cubism were discovered in his works. He belonged to the Groupe des ix, the nine best painters in Belgium in the twenties, but in that company he was considered inferior. Paul Haesaerts, another important critic of that period, finally saw how hopeless it was to try to fit Tytgat into any category. When the painter was well over 60, Haesaerts
Edgard Tytgat (1879-1957) with miniature merry-go-round in his Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe workshop.
Edgard Tytgat and Maria de Mesmaeker in 1924. Only four years later their house could be entered by the street-door.
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Edgard Tytgat, Inspiration. 1926. Watercolour on paper, 50 × 70 cm. Private collection. © sabam Belgium 1999.
wrote: ‘ It is better to put it simply and to admit that Tytgat is first and foremost a narrator, that he is in all innocence an anachronism in terms of the prevailing intellectual fashion’. It will be noted that Haesaerts is non-committal. Tytgat is not an anachronism per se, he is only an anachronism in relation to contemporary taste. The ‘prevailing fashion’ placed a taboo on narrative. Tytgat was well aware of what the critics thought. In the twenties, when he was a new comet in the artistic firmament, he even attempted to express himself more tautly. But his paintings remained ‘anecdotal’.
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Paradise lost and regained
Two ‘tales’ dominate his work: that of the paradise lost of childhood, expressed in the many paintings of fairs, the circus, or festivities, and the tale of paradise regained, the erotic, personified in the nude young woman. But paradise is not a state, it is an event. The Model (1916), is suggestive but also enigmatic. Tytgat does not show the course of the event he is depicting, but chooses a single moment from it without betraying how it will end. He leaves interpretation and appreciation of what is going on to the imagination of the beholder.
Has the naked maiden who comes floating into the artist's studio on a cloud in Inspiration (1926) come on an aeroplane that is still suspended in the sky? What is the artist going to paint on the empty canvas that is on the easel? What is he going to do with the maiden? Is it a real girl? Or is it a symbol? Or both? The possible interpretations of this work are legion. Tytgat compels one to think over and over again. In every painting something is happening, but precisely what is never unequivocal. In Remorse (1923) an unfaithful young man comes to confess on his knees to his beloved. But how she will react to his confession is not completely clear.
In the same year as Inspiration Tytgat also painted Bourgeois Evening Party. Tytgat himself was certainly no bourgeois. He had once made a print
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with an appeal to vote for the socialists, and in the thirties his works were considered by the Nazis to be ‘degenerate’. In Bourgeois Evening Party a woman is singing the last notes of an English love-song. A cellist and a flautist are playing the last notes. Two male singers are silent. The invisible audience likewise. In a moment there will be polite applause. What will it sound like? How many people are present? What cries will ring out? What does the salon where the ensemble are appearing look like? Tytgat leaves that to the person looking at the picture to work out.
Still in that same miracle year of 1926 Tytgat captured Marc Chagall's visit to the entire Sélection group in the little village of Afsnee aan de Leie. Of the nineteen people in the scene, the central place is held not by Chagall, but by a man in white, more than likely Tytgat himself, who is helping a woman in a white dress out of a boat with a gesture that betrays more than chivalry or the pure desire to assist. What precisely is their relationship? Is she in love too? The couple's next few steps can provide the answer. But the person looking at the picture can only take the story further in his imagination. The Time of God. Tytgat illustrates the inestimable value of a fleeting second. By painting the moment he emphasises at the same time the importance of the minutes he leaves unpainted.
Moreover, this work, Memories of One Sunday, is also of importance for other reasons. Tytgat felt much more affinity for Marc Chagall and Raoul Dufy than for his Belgian contemporaries. Chagall especially was excep-
Edgard Tytgat, Bourgeois Evening Party. 1926. Canvas, 98 × 80 cm. Private collection. © sabam Belgium 1999.
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Edgard Tytgat, Memories of One Sunday. 1926. Canvas, 88 × 116 cm. Museum J. Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle. © sabam Belgium 1999.
tionally popular with the Flemish Expressionists in the twenties. He was the living proof that a kind of great art different from that of Paris was possible. As Chagall's fame grew so did the distancing from French art. From 1924 on people were also looking at Kandinsky, De Chirico and the German Expressionists, and art criticism was underlining the importance of national identity. André de Ridder, staff critic of Sélection, speaks of ‘ the genius of the North, the inspiration peculiar to our race, the furtherance of our Flemish tradition, not as a manifestation of regionalism but in order to reach as broad and profound a universality as possible’. That new climate also saw the beginning of appreciation for Tytgat who, from 1924, was included in the exclusive club of Sélection. The nationalistic turn in the mid-twenties had no political implications, though. Almost all the foremost Belgian artists of the years between the wars appeared on the Nazi black list.
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Futurism à la Tytgat
Four years prior to The Model Marcel Duchamp painted his renowned Nude Descending a Staircase, a portrayal, which caused an outrage, of a manoeuvre within a defined period of time, a nude man coming down the stairs. Nude was inspired by the first film images and when, in January 1912, at the first exhibition of the Italian Futurists in Paris he saw Balla's Dynamism of
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a Dog on a Lead, Duchamp had had a shock of recognition: ‘He showed successive static positions too!’
Tytgat had been aware of Futurism since the publication of Marinetti's first manifesto in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. Tytgat's neighbour and close friend in those years, the painter Rik Wouters, for whom he frequently posed, was fascinated by Futurism. The Galerie Giroux, which showed both Tytgat and Wouters in 1912, brought the first exhibition of Italian Futurists to Belgium in that same year. It is very unlikely that Tytgat missed that exhibition, and even more unlikely that he hadn't discussed the controversial Italian movement with Wouters. Yet in Tytgat's work there is nothing of the bombastic tumult of Marinetti, and it is also far removed from the futuristic glorification of the city, war and fast machines. However, Tytgat does offer an original solution to the most crucial problem of Futurism: the pictorial representation of movement. His solution can be compared to that of Duchamp in that he does not opt for a futuristic subject (train, car, aeroplane...). Like Duchamp he makes no use of the futuristic style. He differs from Duchamp in basing his work not on the analysis of locomotion, but on the popular print, the forerunner of the strip cartoon. Unlike Balla and Duchamp he solved the problem of movement not by showing the consecutive stages of the movement, but by defining the static painting as the key scene in a film, as the representation of a process that the beholder must reconstruct. This ‘anachronistic’ and ‘anecdotal’ solution came naturally to Tytgat. It is true he had wanted to be a clockmaker, but he had none the less grown up among lithos and copper plates in his father's studio - his father was an engraver and lithographer.
Tytgat turned back to the woodcut, which had fallen into disuse through the development of lithography at the end of the nineteenth century. In terms of style also he is close to crude popular woodcuts. What Muybridge was for Duchamp, the prints of Epinal and Turnhout were for Edgard Tytgat.
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Naïve images
When the woodcut underwent a revival with the Expressionist avant-garde, for a few years Tytgat produced prints in black and white, as ‘the prevailing fashion’ dictated. But his unique place, and his great mastery, were to be seen especially in the colour prints he made before and after the twenties on his own hand press, and which were also what he himself liked best. ‘Popular artist’, that was how Tytgat preferred to style himself. Throughout his entire career he confronted the sophisticated art public with his ‘popular prints’. The naïve manner in which they are produced came to be appreciated and emphasised their explicit lack of pretentiousness. But even in this discipline Tytgat was not considered as the equal of the so-called great five: Jozef and Jan-Frans Cantré, Joris Minne, Henri van Straten and Frans Masereel. This time, too, was he criticised not only for his highly individualistic style, but also for his themes. Tytgat was hurt by this. The man who wanted to replace the atrocities of war with ‘beautiful colours’ complains that he is thought to be childish ‘because in these times it is no longer permitted to make the soul of the child sing, and to make its fragile voice quiver by means of beautiful colours’. But in the same breath he adds that he will
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use even more beautiful wood for prints which are intended for children ‘because their upbringing is so important’. Anyway the ‘popular artist’ Tytgat preferred the modest drudgery of the woodcut-maker to the spectacle of painting. It ‘really upsets’ him to realise that, if he is to achieve anything in the art world, he will have to give up making woodcuts and once more take up the painter's palette ‘to paint farms with three lime trees or the ruins of Villers’. Tytgat was almost 30 when he wrote that. He did not want to be just a painter. He became an exceptional painter. That was certainly sensed in his time too, but then, as now, seldom understood.
De Ridder's criticism that his paintings are enlarged prints strikes home. But today that no longer sounds like a reproach. For Tytgat there was no hierarchical relationship between the two means of expression. On more than one occasion he produced the same representation as woodcut and as painting. It is also a mistake to conclude that because of his interest in the world of childhood he wanted to be a children's artist. He said himself: ‘I work for grown-up children’. He directed his efforts towards a public that looked critically and ironically at the ‘comédie humaine’ and he preferred subtlety and poetry to confrontation. Whereas Masereel continually parades his social commitment, the world of Tytgat is ambiguous, uncertain and tragi-comic. That he raises popular art to great art in this way makes him an innovator.
Despite his ‘anachronism’ Tytgat continued to follow his own artistic evolution with great vigilance until the end. In 1949, eight years before his death, he wrote to Aynaud: ‘I must make great efforts not to weaken in my art and to keep on until death’. This absence of complacency preserved him from the impasse. At the end of his life he began a new chapter. The naked young woman from the erotic idyll now becomes the object of torture by
Edgard Tytgat, Susannah's Toilette. Sketch in ink for a woodcut. © sabam Belgium 1999.
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Edgard Tytgat, The Embarkation of Iphigenia to the Isle of Sacrifice. 1950. Canvas, 97 × 130 cm. Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels. © sabam Belgium 1999.
men. She is henceforth the victim of bizarre sexual and sadistic fantasies. Tytgat presents these in wash drawings, a new medium that he mastered with the same ease as all others before. In the face of death paradise regained is an illusion. The old men in Susannah's Toilette (a woodcut from 1912) have come out of the bushes and are punishing the bathing maiden for her transient beauty and their bygone youth.
jef lambrecht
Translated by Sheila M. Dale.
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