Strange, sinister and very Belgian: Léon Spilliaert at the Royal Academy reviewed

The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to those of many writers, Edgar Allan Poe among them. But as I walked round the Spilliaert exhibition at the Royal Academy, it was not any of these that came to my mind. It was the Father Brown detective stories by G.K. Chesterton.

I wasn’t thinking of the neatly paradoxical plots, but rather of Chesterton’s mastery of atmosphere. Consider The Absence of Mr Glass (1914), which takes place in a ‘desolate’ seaside resort. As Father Brown investigates, ‘…the afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously’.

This could be a description of a Spilliaert, the master — as it turns out — of haunted Edwardian seascapes. He spent his most productive years in Ostend, a sort of Belgian Brighton with royal connections and a cheery, seedy atmosphere. He was born there in 1881 and — on the evidence of this exhibition — did almost all his best work in the town.

Much of it belongs to a short period in Spilliaert’s twenties, during which he was lonely, ill and suffering from chronic insomnia. The RA show includes an array of self-portraits: haggard, wild-eyed and with an air of gloomy desperation. These were drawn by night in his studio, its windows opaque black.

Spilliaert, though an eccentric loner (or perhaps because of it), is nonetheless recognisably Belgian in mood. There are even moments, such as the way the ripples are a maze of crinkly, swirling lines when he brings to mind another great compatriot, Hergé, the creator of Tintin.