Top Ten facts about the bizarre Belgian painter and sculptor Antoine Wiertz (1806- 1865)While his name is mostly unknown outside a small circle of aficionado’s of the gothic and horror and dark tourism and museums, some paintings of Antoine Wiertz continue to circulate, and can be found on the cover of books such as “Buried alive” and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, nearly his exact contemporary and with whom he shares his taste for the bizarre, the macabre and the downright horrible. It is not for nothing that three of Wiertz’ canvases seem a perfect illustration to three of Poe’s tales: “The beautiful Rosine”, staring at her own skeleton, seems the poor heroin of “The oval portrait”, the man on “Buried alive” seems like Poe crawling out of his own coffin in his tale with the same name, while Wiertz” “One second after death” seems to illustrate the exact moment of death that Poe describes so wonderfully in his philosophical tale “The power of words”. Antoine Wiertz’ legacy lives on in his museum in Brussels, Belgium, a nineteenth century house and studio with garden that the government built at its own costs for him, and still stands bang in the middle of the hypermodern neighbourhood of the European Community. Is its very existence in danger? True to the word “Brusselization” or the government and politicians not taking care of the cultural legacy of the city, some view it as obsolete, while with a bit of fantasy and new technology the studio of the painter could be transformed into a real palace of horror and the grandiose. Here are ten astonishing facts about this astonishing artist:  10. Wiertz inadvertently became the predecessor of artistic movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism, and eventually the Grand Guignol theatre and the slasher movie genre due to the gruesome and gratuitous violence in many of his canvases. After his death in 1865 his house and studio were transformed into a museum and attracted a lot of visitors during the next decades and up to WWI. Among them were the founder of the surrealist movement, André Breton, and Salvador Dalì, who saw Wiertz as a real genius who inspired his vision on what Art should be. In this century the interest for this bizarre and macabre artist is growing, and more and more internet sites study Wiertz’ oeuvre. Wiertz himself stated that the merits of an artist can only be judged at their real value two centuries after his death. Well, Antoine Wiertz, that will be for you in 2065, but in the meantime let’s take a look at the more bizarre aspects of your work and personality. 9. Antoine Wiertz was a feminist avant la lettre and made “charity paintings”. “The burnt child” tells the true story of a widow coming home from work and finding the cradle with her baby near the chimney on fire. Wiertz makes a painting of this gruesome scene, and organizes an exhibition to help the poor mother financially so she will be able to pay the doctor’s bills for her child. The lesson of the tableau is: “S’il y avait des crèches” (if there only were nurseries): Wiertz clearly states that the government must create nurseries for the children of mothers who have to go out to make a living. 8. Wiertz was one of the very first artists to give the Devil or Satan the appearances of a handsome and sexy young man. Traditionally the Devil, be his name Satan or Lucifer, was portrayed as a kind of Pan like satyr with the horns and hoofs of a ram. But Lucifer is after all a fallen angel, and Antoine Wiertz, not indifferent to the male beauty, paints him as a seductive and fatally attractive young man, especially on his triptych “The entombment of Christ” and his canvas “The suicide”. He paves the way for the Decadents and Satanists later in his century, his idea lives on in the song “Pleased to meet you” by the Rolling Stones, and the pale beauty of Satan in Mel Gibson’s “The passion of Christ”. 7. Belgium remains one of the countries with the highest tax rates, and that was already so in Wiertz’ time. The gap between rich and poor was also much wider due to the voting system and the industrialisation, which left many people on the brink of famine. In “Faim, Folie, Crime” (Hunger, Madness, Crime), Wiertz paints a mother gone mad in her slum. She has no milk in her breasts to feed her baby, on the floor an onion and a carrot. In total despair the woman has cut off the leg of her baby and thrown it into the cauldron to make a broth out of it. On the floor a letter: “Contributions” (Taxes), the State has deprived this mother and her child from the essentials to survive, with the murder of an innocent victim as a result. 6. As a leftwinger Wiertz was resolutely against the death penalty, which was in Belgium in his epoch by means of the guillotine. He believed a guillotined head kept on living for three to four horrible minutes after decapitated, a widespread opinion since the French Revolution To prove this Wiertz hides under the scaffold at the Porte de Halle in Brussels while a hypnotiser makes him enter into the brain of the to be decapitated criminal. Wiertz keeps on talking for three minutes after the head has fallen into the basket, and describes the enormous pain, angony and fright of the criminal man before he flies away to another world. He paints a triptych: “Thoughts and visions of a severed head”, his explanatory text of the experiment under the scaffold will become a play in 1924 in the “horror” theatre of the Grand Guignol in Paris. 5. Wiertz was one of those strange geniuses who ironically died of his own invention, in this case his “peinture mate” (mat paint). Trained in the Flemish tradition he liked oil painting because it permits to works slowly and meticulously, although the surface can be shiny. The Italian al fresco technique demands a much faster brush stroke, but it has the advantage of being mat and not reflecting light. Wiertz tried to combine the advantages of these two techniques by creating his own paint formula with a lot of chemicals in it. He tried also -in vain- to sell his invention for an enormous amount of money to the tsarina of Russia, Maria Alexandrovna. Wiertz’ invention proved to be a complete disaster: the canvases he painted with his new formula have slowly been eaten by the chemicals and suffer from various stages of damage. More tragic: the toxic gazes that emanated from Wiertz’ palette also slowly destroyed his lungs, and he died deliriously during a heavy thunderstorm in June 1865 in his home due to paint poisoning. 4. Due to the industrialisation, dehumanization and population growth in the cities epidemics like the cholera were very frequent in the nineteenth century. These facts also led to one of the biggest fears of that epoch: being buried alive. Special coffins with bells were sold, Poe wrote stories about living women being buried alive in a state of catalepsy, Wiertz painted maybe his most famous tableau around the theme, “The premature burial”, a manifesto against incompetent doctors. We see a man trying to crawl out of a coffin in a crypt, on this coffin the following words are painted: Cause of death: cholera, testified by doctor Without Any Doubt. To give the viewer the impression of being buried alive, Wiertz placed the canvas and some flickering candles behind a panel with a peephole in it. And by the way, in the German silent film of 1922 by Friedrich Murnau, “Nosferatu”, the vampire comes out of his coffin in exact the same way as the man buried alive on Wiertz’ canvas. 3. As most of the Romantic artists, Wiertz was not always a mentally stable man. He suffered from depressions, mood swings, and eventually suicidal tendencies. Considering his huge canvases as “The triumph of Christ” and “The light of Golgotha” he was a Christian, although of the anticlerical kind: in “Factions judged by Christ” he shows two potential popes fighting for the papal throne while Christ closes his eyes in despair. When in 1848 Karl Marx published his communist manifesto preaching materialism, Wiertz began to doubt about the existence of God. His doubts are illustrated by the gruesome tableau “The suicide”: a young man shoots a bullet in his brains, his Guardian Angel looks on in horror while the handsome Devil smiles maliciously for having dragged another soul into Hell. The reason of the young man’s suicide becomes obvious when we look at some details. One of the books has the title “materialism”, while the goodbye note of the young man states: “Il n’y a point d’âme, il n’y a point de Dieu” (There is no God, we have no souls). 2. Wiertz predicted in the first half of the nineteenth century that Brussels would become the capital of Europe in the future. After his demise at the Paris Salon of 1839 with his huge, heroic painting of “The Greeks and the Trojans fighting over the corpse of Patrocles”, he swore an eternal hate against France and the French, resulting in a bizarre drawing: Paris is annexed as a small suburb by the ever expanding and more important capital of Europe, Brussels, Belgium, Wiertz’ slogan is: “Paris province, Bruxelles capitale” (Paris province, Brussels capital city). 1. Besides being a painter Wiertz was also a rather gifted sculptor, and although he made some projects for larger scale monuments, his sculptures are all rather small, like saucy girls in various states of undress, and warriors killing each other with knifes. And then there is the sculpture of the allegory of Light, a woman holding a torch in her uphold arm and defeating barbarism. Wiertz created it in 1862, and his intention was to construct a gigantic version of it on top of the fortress of his native city, Dinant, in what is now Belgium. The resemblance with the Statue of Liberty is striking. After Wiertz died in 1865 his atelier in Brussels became an attraction for many people, including artists from nearby Paris, like Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor who with the aid of Gustave Eiffel was responsible for... the Statue of Liberty. The monument was France’s gift to the USA for the centennial of the American Revolution in 1876. In a certain way Wiertz’ Triumph of Light has thus become the symbol of that continent America he never had the chance to visit. ON ANTOINE WIERTZ Antoine Wiertz 1806-1865, met bijdragen van A. MOERMAN en F.-C. LEGRAND, Parijs-Brussel, (1974) CHARLEMAGNE, A Belgian national champion. A terrible lesson from a terrible painter, in The Economist, 9 juliy2009 H. COLLEYE, Antoine Wiertz, Brussels, 1957 M. DASH, Some experiments with severed heads, post on blog entitled Strange stories. But with sources, 25 January 2011 (http://allkindsofhistory.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/some-experiments- with-severed-heads/), 18 May 2013, 00.19 GMT L. LABARRE, Antoine Wiertz. Etude biographique avec les lettres de l’artiste et la Photographie du Patrocle, facsimile, Brussels, (1866) D. LAMY, Deux jeunes filles ou la belle Rosine, in Revue des archéologues et historiens d’art de Louvain, XVII, 1984, p. 264-271 Les relations de Monsieur Wiertz, cat. exhibition, 2 volumes, Namur, 2007 A. MOCKEL, Antoine Wiertz. Esquisse d’une étude sur l’homme et son oeuvre, Brussels, 1943-44 J. POTVIN, Antoine Wiertz, Brussels, 1924 B. STOELTIE, Het minst bezochte museum van Brussel: een monument van Weltschmerz, in Vrij Nederland, 4 juni 1988, p. 22-27 B. VERSCHAFFEL, “M. Wiertz se créa un musée’. Kunst en politiek in het “geval” Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865), in De witte raaf, editie 144 maart-april 2010 L. WATTEAU, Catalogue raisonnée du Musée Wiertz, (Brussels), 1865 A. J. WIERTZ, Oeuvres littéraires, facsimile, Brussels, 1869 further reading Jan Vander Laenen (° 1960) lives in Brussels, Belgium, where he works as an art historian and translator (Dutch, French, Italian, English). He is also the author of numerous collections of short stories, plays, and screenplays which have attracted keen interest abroad. A romantic comedy, "Oscar Divo", and a thriller, “The Card Game”, have been optioned in Hollywood, while his short fiction collections, "The Butler" and "Poète maudit", and his horror play "A Mother's Revenge" are eliciting the requisite accolades in Italy. His most recent publication are the tales “A Glass of Cognac” in “Bears: Gay Erotic Stories” (Cleis Press), “Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty” in the Bram Stoker Award winning “Unspeakable Horror” (Dark Scribe Press), “Fire at the Chelsea Hotel” in “Best Gay Love Stories 2009” (Alyson Press), “The Stuffed Turkey” in “Best Gay Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press),“The Corpse Washer” in Best S/M III (Logical Lust), “Lise” in “Strange Tales of Horror” (NorGus Press), the E-Books “Skilfully and Lovingly” (Sizzler Edition) and “The Centrefold and other Stories of working Men” (Silver Press), and the Dutch and French version of his novel “The housekeeper and other scabrous tales” (‘t Verschil, Antwerp (Belgium) - Textes gais, Paris (France)), the weird tale “The bat” in the anthology “A Darke Phantastique” (Cycatrix Press), “Petit papa Noël” in the anthology “Un cadeau de noël pour le refuge” (Textes gais, Paris), and the essay “The monstrous and the fantastic in the short stories of Poe and the paintings of Wiertz” (Weird Fiction Review). Jan is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the Poe Studies Association. He presented his paper "Hypotheses on Poe's homosexuality" at the Bicentennial Congress in Philadelphia in October 2009 and “Poe as a latent homosexual, as suggested by Marie Bonaparte” at the New York Conference in February 2015. He has also given lectures on Baudelaire, Wiertz, Andersen, Guy de Maupassant, Grand Guignol and the guillotine at the universities of Porto (Portugal), Ghent (Belgium), Louisville (Kentucky), Madrid (Spain), and the Paris Sorbonne and Diderot universities. Jan performed in the successful “Gala” by French choreographer Jérôme Bel in theatres in Brussels in May 2015 and December 2017, and he is taking acting classes to study as an author “the other side” of the written page. Jan is currently working on a play/screenplay around the life of the Romantic Belgian "horror" painter Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865), a novel called "The Psychomanteum" around the practice of mirror gazing, and a screenplay around the life of Lucida Mansi. In July 2020 he finished his scandalous trilogy "Paulo or the obscene life of a gay escort" (240.000 words). He has also written recently three 30 minutes episodes for a series "Horror without frontiers", ten others are in the make. TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITETHE HORROR OF MY LIFE ALARIC CABILING THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR FEATURES Comments are closed.
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