Belgian artist's 'inner visions' put on display

CHESTNUT HILL -- The reaction of the American museum-going public to the new exhibition at the McMullen Museum at Boston College is likely to be: "Who?"

Its title is "Fernand Khnopff: Inner Visions and Landscapes," and it is the first major US retrospective for the Belgian Symbolist whose career straddled the 19th and 20th centuries. The works come from public and private collections all over Europe and America. They're unlikely to be gathered together again anytime soon, and since Boston College is the show's last venue and the only one in this country, it's your only chance to come to know an artist far less understood and appreciated than he should be, at least outside Belgium.

Perhaps the best-known of his "inner visions" is Khnopff's 1896 "The Caresses," an idiosyncratic interpretation of Oedipus and the Sphinx. In the Greek myth, the two are mortal enemies. In Khnopff's retelling, you sense that the only dispute they could possibly have is over where to retreat to escape our prying eyes. Here, Oedipus is an androgynous youth with nipples in the form of flower petals, and the Sphinx is a cheetah with the head of a woman. She is all but purring as, with eyes closed and expectant expression, she starts inserting one paw into the loosely draped sarong he wears around his waist. He looks directly out at us, with a gaze that says, "Go away."

Lush, languid, and exquisitely painted, "The Caresses" is Khnopff at his prime, an artist very much in tune with the Romantic groups of his time: the Pre-Raphaelites in England, the Vienna Secession, Symbolists both Belgian and French, and others. Walking through this show, however, you have to remind yourself that Cezanne was a generation earlier than Khnopff.

Art history isn't merely a matter of who gets where first, and seeing it as a series of successive movements outstripping their predecessors in radicalism is now pass. So we look at Khnopff for what he was rather than what he wasn't.

The timing of the show is perfect: His brand of academic romanticism is making a big comeback after decades of being considered skillful kitsch. (As it happens, one of BC's art history professors, Jeffery Howe, is considered the North American expert on Khnopff, which is how the college snagged the show after the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts pulled out of the exhibition for financial reasons.)

Khnopff painted legendary females: Sappho, Medusa, Isolde. The overwhelming majority of the figurative works in the BC show are of women, who sparked his imagination far more than men. His few male portraits can hardly be called flights of fancy. They're guys in suits. When, very rarely, a male isn't a mundane being, he's a study in androgyny: The face on that Oedipus could easily be a young woman's.

He also painted children: somber youngsters, whom he treated without a hint of condescension or smarminess. They're preternaturally poised and knowledgeable-looking, "trailing clouds of glory" brought from some other sphere, an effect he heightened by depicting them emerging from foggy, unidentifiable backgrounds. His skill allowed him to create apparitions and vaporous atmospheres that were crucial to the otherworldly, even occult nature of his subjects. Thanks to the advent of photography, he was also able to specialize in posthumous portraits, with a sub-specialty in pale maidens who died before their time.

There's nary a smile in the 80 works in the BC show. (In Brussels, the number was 280, but the streamlined version at the McMullen is enough, hitting the high points while not exhausting your mind or your eyes.)

Even in his 1889 "Memories (Lawn Tennis)," the seven young women in long dresses, holding square wooden racquets, seem dazed, locked in other worlds, perhaps about to head off in a frieze-like processional to some sacred rite. It's hard to imagine them gearing up for a game. (While the painting of "Memories" is too fragile to travel, there are quite complete studies for it at BC.)

The exhibition includes a small, judiciously selected number of paintings by Khnopff's contemporaries. One is "Rosa Triplex," a chalk drawing by the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It shows Mary Morris's head three times, all in sunburned hues that seem to emanate from the flame-red hair that was a favorite with both Rossetti and Khnopff.

Another, in the landscape section of the exhibition, is "The Enchanted Forest," by William Degouve de Nuncques. The painting shows a swamp overgrown with irradiated greenery, tentacle-like roots, and coiled serpents. It's far more outrageous than the Khnopff works in the same room: tiny, ethereal paintings of cottages settling into springtime hills, or skies heavy with the gloom of an impending storm.

While there is no painting by James Whistler in the show, his presence is keenly felt. In the style of a Whistler monochrome, one Khnopff portrait shows his sister, Marguerite, in a white-on-white setting. She stands before a closed door that seems to shut her in; she wears a white dress with tight bodice buttoned up the front and a high collar, a garment as confining as a straitjacket. Khnopff so loved the painting that he kept it in his studio, in a shrine-like setting, until his death.

The presence of a much earlier artist, Hans Memling, is also felt. The 15th-century master of Bruges painted with an almost surreal clarity and calm. Khnopff, who spent a chunk of his childhood in that medieval city, returned to draw and there. His images are as precise as Memling's, but with softer, hazier handling.

There is one artist, also a Belgian, whose influence Khnopff emphatically did not acknowledge: James Ensor, who accused him of plagiarism and became a bitter rival. Ensor painted "Russian Music" in 1881; two years later, Khnopff made his "Listening to Schumann." Both are at BC for the show, and the comparison is an interesting one. Ensor's work is more matter-of-fact: a pianist and a male listener in a suffocating Victorian parlor. Khnopff's work is more mysterious and engaging. We see only part of the piano at the left edge of the painting, with a hand reaching for the high notes. The focus on the picture is a seated woman in black, one hand hiding her face, the other clenched in her lap. We puzzle over the identity of the pianist, and wonder what emotions the woman is feeling.

Ensor eventually gave up his case, leaving it to posterity to decide. That the Khnopff is the more intriguing painting is obvious. And if you consider artists whose works are really almost identical -- like Picasso's and Braque's at a certain moment -- the plagiarism issue seems silly.

Khnopff was multitalented. He illustrated books on sympathetic subjects. He designed costumes for operas, including one on Arthurian legends. He made prints. His era coincided with the advent of the large color print and the breakdown of an art hierarchy that decreed painting on canvas superior to works on paper. His drawings are divine. Photography played a role in them, too. In his 1907 pencil and watercolor "Requiem," he almost certainly used a photograph of the interior of Santa Maria in Trastevere, in Rome, as backdrop for the figure of an archangel standing guard, an orb and scepter in his hands. The interior offers a wealth of detail, almost a pictorial summation of one strain of Catholicism. It's a tour de force. Khnopff made it in the year his adored mother died. Through this complex drawing, he may have been using his own hands to send her into God's.