The Last Flemish Primitive: Jan Vercruysse’s Self-Fashioning of Artisthood and National Identity

Abstract

In 1989, the artist Jan Vercruysse (1948–2018) stated that he was “the last Flemish Primitive”. This comment, despite being only a fragment of a lengthy interview with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, became a trope in subsequent writings on Vercruysse. I argue that the statement was part of a deliberate strategy by Vercruysse in shaping his identity as a (Belgian) artist. First, I focus on Vercruysse’s Portraits of the Artist (1979–1984), a series of photographic works in which he uses the genre of the self-portrait—thereby implicitly referring to the Flemish Primitives—as a means to express the constructedness of artistic identity. Second, I explore Vercruysse’s construction of his identity and his relationship vis-à-vis the notion of Belgian art. Finally, the statement uttered in 1989 will be contextualized within the changing political and cultural context of Belgium and Flanders in the 1980s. I demonstrate how the statement can be read as invoking a radically different conception of Belgian art during this period.

1. Introduction

In September 2008, the artist Jan Vercruysse (1948–2018) tore out an article from the Belgian newspaper De Morgen for his personal archive. Entitled ‘Museum M starts a dialogue between old and contemporary art’, the short article announced an upcoming parallel exhibition of the 15th-century artist Rogier van der Weyden and a survey exhibition of Vercruysse in the newly refurbished museum M in the Belgian city of Leuven. In addition to penciling the date in blue in the lower left corner, the artist also highlighted, with a double line in red marker, a paragraph in the right column. The particular passage contains a quote by then museum director Veronique Vandeckerchove in which she bluntly explains the intention of this double retrospective:

“Vercruysse calls himself the last Flemish Primitive. We are therefore bringing a dead and a living Flemish Primitive into dialogue with each other. If Vercruysse wants to measure up to one of the greatest painters from our part of the world, he will have to prove it now.”1

(Vandeckerchove in van Beek 2008) (Figure 1)

The 5-centuries-spanning competition set up by Vandekerckhove between van der Weyden and Vercruysse is not so absurd as it may seem at first. In this exhibition, Vandekerckhove overtly refers to a statement the artist himself made nearly two decades earlier. In November 1989, Vercruysse declared in a lengthy interview with art critic and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in the Italian art magazine Flash Art International that he felt like being “the Last Flemish Primitive” (Figure 2)—a provocative statement that served as the title for the piece and later became a recurrent trope in subsequent exhibition reviews or articles on Jan Vercruysse (a.o. Brayer 1990; Kremer 1993; Parent 1990; Van Mulders 1990).

For Vercruysse, who did not have the habit of annotating texts, let alone highlighting passages in the many books or magazines he kept in his personal library and archives, this bold marking of a passage in a national newspaper article is striking.2 Even if it remains a guess as to whether it was out of irritation or approval, it must have meant much to the artist. This archival document offers an interesting starting point to investigate this inflammatory statement and to explore how it correlates with a deliberate strategy deployed by Vercruysse in order to shape his identity as a (Belgian) artist.

2. Constructing the Identity of the Artist

“The artist is an artist only on the condition that he is dual and does not ignore any phenomenon of his dual nature.”

(Baudelaire 1868, p. 378)3

“Even in a self-portrait, of course, we do not see its depicting author, but only the artist’s depiction. Strictly speaking, the author’s image is contradiction in adjecto.”

(Bakhtin 1986, p. 109)

Vercruysse’s career as an artist has to be considered as a self-chosen, artificial and rational construct (Verschaffel 1998). As he himself stated in an interview with the artist Bill Sullivan in 1996: “At one point in my life I guess I did decide that I had to leave this normal world and become an artist.” (Vercruysse in Sullivan 1996) For Vercruysse, being an artist was a fully conscious process of constructing his own legacy and he understood quite well that—to quote art critic and philosopher Bart Verschaffel—“being an artist, is also an art” (Verschaffel 2011).

A preliminary stage in his growing awareness were his activities in the field of visual poetry during the early 1970s, when he published several poems in the magazine De Tafelronde and participated in various poetry contests. In 1974, he decided to turn his back on poetry, a decision which he made public on May 10, in an ambiguously titled exhibition “Weg van de Pöezie”, a phrase which in Dutch can be translated both as “fond of poetry” and “away from poetry” (Brams 2012, p. 68). “Weg van de Pöezie” was his first one-man show at the Gallerij Katherine Bouckaert in Ghent. Subsequently, after a short experience as a gallery manager in the city of Ghent, Vercruysse formed a collective with Lili Dujourie and Guy Mees. On 5 March 1977, the collective held a one-day event entitled “Presentation of an (the) artist” (Figure 3): the artist Jan Vercruysse was born and introduced to the public.4

In 1997, twenty years after he introduced himself as an artist, Vercruysse composed a catalogue raisonnée of his photographic work—unique offset prints of photographs—produced between 1977 and 1984. This catalogue, entitled Portraits of the Artist, offers a unique insight in the self-construction of the artist. In 1986, Lynn Gumpert, curator at the New Museum in New York City, compared Vercruysse’s art to the Flemish Primitives in her essay for the exhibition A Distanced View: One Aspect of Recent Art from Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland:

“In a 1983 series of self-portraits, Jan Vercruysse photographed himself in the conventional poses of the Flemish primitive painters. With these works, he not only acknowledges a specific artistic heritage, but some of the conventions associated with the role and métier of the artist.”

(Gumpert 1986, p. 12)

One of the works included is an ‘untitled’ self-portrait of 1979: Zonder Titel (Zelfportretten) III (Figure 4). In this early work, Vercruysse creates a composition of four frames. Three of them depict typical painterly genres: the nude, the landscape, and the self-portrait. For this last genre, Vercruysse reproduces Albrecht Dürer’s Portrait of the Artist holding a Thistle of 1493. The fourth and largest frame is a blank canvas in the middle of which the artist enigmatically has reproduced a small empty frame, expressing “the inability or despair of the artist to portray himself” (De Dauw and Van Durme 1982, p. 509).

Due to its “unusually colorful attire and tasseled red cap”, as Chapman (2013, p. 196) affirms, Dürer’s first formal self-portrait “suggests both inventiveness and self-assurance.” In Western art history, the emergence of the self-portrait went hand in hand with the increasing self-awareness of the artist. Self-portraiture developed simultaneously both north and south of the Alps during the 15^th century (Chapman 2013). At the time, the social status of the artist shifted from a craftsman to a more intellectual personality. Whereas Italian scholars took the lead in raising a new awareness of the intellectual status of the artist by producing artist’s biographies, artists north of the Alps expressed their newly achieved status through the genre of the self-portrait (Edwards 1999, p. 92). The self-conscious artist regarded himself worthy of being portrayed (Chapman 2013, p. 191).

Although Albrecht Dürer is considered to be the first artist to devote special attention to self-portraits, it was Jan van Eyck who supposedly pioneered the genre with Portrait of a Man, in 1433 (Chapman 2013, p. 194). Vercruysse had a great admiration for this painting—it is mentioned in a sketch for an unrealized Self-Portrait—and as we also know from the obituary speech by John Murphy delivered during the ceremony at the Brussels Bozar in 2018:

“One of the first things we did after Jan had settled in [in Murphy’s apartment in London] was to go to the National Gallery to look at the paintings in the gallery containing the Flemish Masters. On our way out Jan bought the postcard reproduction of Jan van Eyck’s, ‘Portrait of a Man’ and on returning to the house pinned it to the wall above his desk in his room.”

(Murphy 2018)

The small panel-painting, often referred to as Man with the Red Turban, features a seated man—believed5 to be Jan van Eyck himself—who looks directly at the viewer. An inscription at the bottom of the frame tells us that ‘Jan van Eyck made me on 21 October 1433’, thereby confirming the painter’s self-awareness as an artist. Moreover, as Erwin Panofsky has noted, Jan van Eyck was not only the “first Early Flemish master to sign his works,” but also, “so far as we know the only one to imitate the nobles in adopting a personal motto, the famous Als ich chan, “As best I can”.” (Panofsky 1953, p. 179) As Jenny Graham, in her scholarly work on the modern reception of Jan van Eyck, puts it:

“The Portrait of a Man with a Red Turban has been taken to denote Jan’s status as an artist of the proto-modern kind, rather than an artisan, fully aware of the construct involved in imaging himself and others.”

(Graham 2007, p. 4)

In a series of 111 works, grouped under the catalogue’s eponymous title Portraits of the Artist, Vercruysse sets off to explore how the identity of the artist is given shape.6 The works are unique offset prints of original photos made by himself, resulting in a loss of quality and thus “anti-photographic” (Vercruysse quoted in Decan 2007, p. 70). In an unpublished note, Jan Vercruysse explains how this process gave him the opportunity to emphasize the artificial construction of the image as well as to demonstrate his own agency as a “builder” of images:

“The fact that the work uses a photographic image as a material source is then less important as I stress the mise-en-scène—character of artworks and as I think that there is a complete misconception about photography in that all theories profess that all photography always captures “something which has really been there”—trying to make the reality-bound essence of photography: The “Images” I show are as “fictious” as those of a painter—being a “metteur-en-scène”.”

(Vercruysse 1984)

The result is, indeed, highly staged. The series represents two protagonists: the artist (Jan Vercruysse himself) and a female—often nude—model, staged in a setting with various props such as a music stand, brushes, shells, masks, flowers, clocks, a chess set and mirrors. In these works, Vercruysse explicitly quotes or appropriates compositions and iconographical motifs by Lorenzo Lotto, Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte or Marcel Broodthaers, among others (Decan 2016). Although the art of Jan Vercruysse has been linked to appropriation artists such as Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger, Vercruysse deliberately distances himself from a politically and socially framed conception of art, adopting instead what he calls an “ontological approach” (Vercruysse in Christov-Bakargiev 1989, p. 107).7 Vercruysse borrows his visual language from art only to refer back to it, as he explains in an interview in 1979:

“It [my work] is art because it is at least a reflection on art, because it is formulated in such a way that it can ground itself within the cultural field that calls itself art. […] It is also from this intention that you situate yourself as an artist, that you take up a specific position towards art. It is to the extent that you can make a reflection about the way in which your work criticizes—or commemorates—previous art that you situate yourself.”

(Vercruysse in Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst 1979)8

The main concern of Vercruysse in Portraits of the Artist is the search for the identity of the artist, which he explores through the means of metaphor, allegory and association (Vercruysse 1983).9 Each work in the series carries a title in either Dutch, French or English, all of them variations of the same theme: Zonder Titel (Zelfportretten), Zelfportret, Autoportrait, Portrait de l’artiste, Self-Portrait, Portrait of the Artist, Portrait de l’Artiste par lui-même, Portrait of the Artist by Himself, and Portret van de Kunstenaar door hemzelf. Although the titles suggest that all are self-portraits, the works barely provide information on the person of Jan Vercruysse, who in some of them is not even represented (Dompierre 1992). Portraits of the Artist are to be understood as allegorical portraits of the artist as an archetype, if Jan Vercruysse is the subject of the portraits, he is not their content. These works are—to adopt an expression by Baudelaire—“portaits de l’artiste, en général,” and not self-portraits of Jan Vercruysse in a strict sense (Lacoue-Labarthe [1976] 2014; Chevrier and Sagne 1984). In an interview with art critic Anna Tilroe for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad in 1997, Jan Vercruysse explains this ambiguity:

“You expect a portrait to reveal the identity of the person being portrayed. I am not doing that. These works are a game full of false traces, winks and symbols, for the sake of the game, not for the sake of the content. They are composed of elements that are shifted time and again and that could indicate an identity—but do not.”

(Vercruysse in Tilroe 1997)10

The decoupling of the person depicted and the artist becomes most explicit in the last series of the catalogue, Portraits of the Artist by Himself (1984), in which Vercruysse portrays himself dressed in a black suit and holding up a mask against his face. As Louise Dompierre (1992, p. 12) describes these works in her essay for Vercruysse’s exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto in 1992: “The work acknowledges that portraiture exists within certain codes that result in sets of controlled expectations. Vercruysse de-stabilizes these conventions, simultaneously releasing other possibilities of meaning.” According to Bart Verschaffel (1998), Vercruysse’s self-portraits are not “psychological portraits” as they do not yield any information on the inner person, turning the portrayed into a constructed ‘persona’.

Eenwaar verhaal [A true story] (1974) one of Vercruysse’s earliest works consists of a sequence of eight sheets of paper which thematizes the (in)capacity of language as a means to communicate truth. Each sheet consists of a white page, measuring 29.5 by 22.5 cm, with one of the following sentences printed on it in Dutch: A true story, A non-true story, A real story, A non-real story, A fictitious story, A non-fictitious story, A real story, A non-real story.11 The same concern underlies the Portraits of the Artist. The work Sans Titre (La Feinte) (Figure 5) from 1982 is a case in point. In the background, the work shows a framed self-portrait as a reconstituted collage of a torn picture. The composition meets some classical characteristics of the genre: neutral background, one arm resting on a table, with, in the background, part of an empty frame. On the foreground, on a table lies a small piece of paper carrying the word “La Feinte” (“The feint”). The identity of the artist, so Vercruysse seems to suggest, is an artificial—feinted—construction. Strikingly, the Italian term fingere, “to pretend, to feign”, is intimately connected to the history of early Renaissance self-portraiture (Woods-Marsen 1998, pp. 16–17). Whereas during the Middle Ages the term was mainly used to describe the activity of poets (inventing or creating myths and fables), it acquired a new meaning during the Renaissance, namely the idea that a person’s identity can be self-consciously shaped (Woods-Marsen 1998, p. 17; Greenblatt 2005).

3. Constructing a Belgian Identity

“As for my anonymous biographer, what do you want me to send you in order to please him? I have no biography. Send him whatever you think will please you. [...] I think that the writer should leave only his works. His life matters little. Get rid of the rags!”

(Flaubert 1859)12

An early example of Vercruysse’s self-fashioning as an artist took place in 1979, on the occasion of the exhibition Contemporary Art in Belgium. Insight/Survey–Survey/Insight at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent. For this exhibition, the museum published a special newspaper entitled 19 portretten (19 portraits) in which all participating artists are portrayed with their photograph, their work as well as a short interview. The only exception is Jan Vercruysse. In a disclaimer, the editors summarized the stance of the artist with regards to biographical data:

“Jan Vercruysse does not want a portrait photo in this newspaper, no detailed biography, no interview that has been transcribed completely, no explanatory and/or descriptive text for the work he makes (unless he writes the text himself). “Jan Vercruysse, born 1948, lives and works in Belgium” may suffice as a marginal reference to his work.”13

(Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst 1979)

Equally exemplary regarding the artist’s self-fashioning, are the answers to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Flash Art interview in 1989 when Vercruysse claims to “have forgotten” his own biography, thereby casting a veil over his life:

CCB: How did you begin to be involved in art?

JV: What kind of a question is that?

CCB: I know that you studied law at University, that you were a poet, that you did not go to an art academy and that, later, you opened an art gallery in Belgium.

JV: I have forgotten.

(Vercruysse in Christov-Bakargiev 1989, p. 105)

Although Jan Vercruysse clearly shows an aversion to communicate his own biography, his personal library contains numerous biographical works on writers, artists, philosophers and musicians.14 Among them is a short biography on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, written by the Mexican essayist Octavio Paz.15 Paz starts his biography by stating that it is useless to try to write a biography of poets, since “their work is their biography.” (Paz 2012, p. 18)16 Jan Vercruysse would certainly agree with this assertion. Vercruysse deliberately fashioned his self-image by designing his own exhibition catalogues—working almost exclusively with the same authors (Alain Cueff, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Denys Zacharopoulos and Marianne Brouwer)17—turning down several group exhibitions, or by taking control of the curating process (Gielen 2008, p. 200). Additionally, every time Vercruysse is invited to participate in a group show, he explicitly refuses to provide a biography. Instead, he prefers to offer a personally selected bibliography, suggesting that only through publications—catalogues, articles, and exhibition reviews—a genuine image, or portrait, of the artist Jan Vercruysse can be revealed. Vercruysse’s archive contains an intriguing artefact that makes this thought explicit: On the cover of a copy of the catalogue which he designed for his one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent in 1982, the artist wrote the word “Biografie” (Biography) with a blue fountain pen (Figure 6), suggesting that the artist’s bibliography—of which this exhibition catalogue is a part—replaces his biography.

An exemplary work in this respect is Je (1990) (Figure 7), in which the artist prints the sentence “Je est un autre” followed by “et vous aussi” on a large sheet of paper, alluding to the famous sentence by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud in his letter to Paul Demeny in 1871 (Rimbaud 2015, p. 67). For Arthur Rimbaud, the person of the poet is not important: he is merely the spokesman of the genius who is absorbed in him. The author and the self cannot be equated (Burke 1995, p. 303). In the same fashion, Portraits of the artist do not ‘portray’ the author Jan Vercruysse, but the portrait of the artist in general, making visible the two “I’s”. The person Jan Vercruysse is decoupled from the artist Jan Vercruysse, thereby echoing the statement of the French novelist Marcel Proust who, in his critique on 19th century literary critic Sainte-Beuve who used to focus on biographical data of the author, wrote: “a book is the product of a different self [un autre moi] from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.” (Proust 2019, p. 127)18 [original italics]

His aversion to be pinpointed as an artist, according to biographic data, leads him to emancipate himself from their supposed capacity to transmit an objective ‘truth’. In various exhibition catalogues, Jan Vercruysse plays with different fictitious birthplaces. Although born in Waregem, West-Flanders, in 1948, the catalogue raisonnée of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, for example, mentions no less than five different birthplaces: Ghent, Marke, Oostende, Waregem and Elisabethville (De Baere et al. 1988). On several occasions, throughout the 1980s, Jan Vercruysse named this latter city of the former Belgian Congo—today Lubumbashi—as his birthplace, a statement with clear political overtones to remind the public that the Belgian state owed its wealth to a former colony (Trio and Vercruysse 2006).

The deliberate manipulation of biographic data sheds a light on how Vercruysse positions himself vis-à-vis “Belgian Art”. As he explained in a 2006 radio interview, the swapping of birthplaces was a deliberate strategy to question the definition of a “Belgian artist” (Trio and Vercruysse 2006). For the group exhibition Initiatief 86 at the Saint-Peter’s Abbey in Ghent—a joint-effort of Ghent-based art galleries and independent art initiatives to promote the Belgian artists in an international context—Vercruysse mentions as his birthplace the historical harbor town Sluis, located in The Netherlands next to the Flemish or Belgian border.19 Vercruysse was the only artist in the catalogue to include a place (and not only the year) of birth. By identifying himself as born across the border in a project on Belgian artists, Vercruysse made clear that he distanced himself from the commonplace definition of “Belgian art”.

However, in spite of his artistic attitude of breaking down, blurring or expanding boundaries, Jan Vercruysse was repeatedly put forward as a typical Belgian artist (Figure 8), who should not be missing from the major retrospectives of Belgian art.20 Undoubtedly, the many cross-references to Marcel Broodthaers or René Margritte in the work of Vercruysse have enhanced this assertion as it was erroneously seen as being a “continuation” of their work:

“Vercruysse’s work is the result of deliberate thinking, of a questioning and scanning of art on the whole, the ways of approaching it, its function in society, and its conditions. This results in complex compositions, not always relevant to the spectator. The artist eliminates certain relations and creates in this manner a refined detachment. In this sense he continues the tradition of the Belgian artists Magritte and Broodthaers.”

(De Dauw and Van Durme 1982, p. 509)

Even more so, according to the Italian art critic Pier Luigi Tazzi, Vercruysse not only emulates, but even surpasses his famous ‘predecessors’ Magritte and Broodthaers, as stated in an Artforum article published in 1987:

“Its elaboration of enigma, illusion, and deception is both more extreme and more ancient than those of Vercruysse’s Belgian compatriots and predecessors René Magritte and Broodthaers.”

(Tazzi 1987, p. 93)

Indeed, in several self-portraits Jan Vercruysse explicitly refers to compositions of René Magritte (most directly in Autoportrait, 1982; Personnages, 1982). The reference to Marcel Broodthaers becomes most clear in L’Art de Voir, Les Choses (1976–1979), a series with which the book Portraits of the Artist opens. The series consists of twelve screen prints on paper, each measuring 70 by 100 cm. The first eleven works each contain two reproductions of late 18th or 19th century paintings.21 Many of the paintings reproduced in this series are also to be found in the postcard collection of Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne Section XIXe Siècle: Courbet’s Le Sommeil (1866), Girodet’s Le Sommeil d’Endymion (1791), Gérôme’s Phyrné devant l’aréopage (1861), Giraud’s Un marchand d’esclaves (1867), and Delacroix’ La mort de Sardanapale (1827). The major difference, however, is that while Broodthaers worked on the idea of art, Vercruysse—who is aware of Broodthaers’ legacy—focuses on the idea of the artist and his gaze (Verschaffel 1998). In a radio interview of 2006, Vercruysse explains that the comparison with Magritte and Broodthaers is based on a misunderstanding of his own work:

“Yes, but the misunderstanding is, or would be, that those references to Magritte and twice to Broodthaers, but several times to De Chirico and many times to certain Renaissance paintings, that those would determine the meaning of the content of the work. And that is therefore the risk I took. Which created the misunderstanding that the content of my work would be that reference. Or that historical reference, which is not the case.”

(Trio and Vercruysse 2006)22

Also, Vercruysse condemned the way Broodthaers contributed to the stereotypical creation of Belgianness in contemporary art. Instead of putting forward rather negative values as “typical Belgian”, Vercruysse advocated for the creation of a positive myth of Belgianness:

“Broodthaers was certainly the first artist who created a consciousness of the “Belgianness of Belgian Art”—in and through his work. But he did this in a negative way, confirming the international image of the Belgian artist as The Underdog. I always thought that this Belgianness should be turned into a positive force, a positive myth: I have seen too many interesting Belgian artists in the seventies nearly disappear, mainly because they believed themselves that they were the unhappy underdogs.”

(Vercruysse in Christov-Bakargiev 1989, p. 105)23

In 1982, Jan Vercruysse fostered the plan to launch a “Belgian Magazine for Art” oriented towards an international audience, which can be read as an attempt of creating a ‘positive myth’ of Belgian art.24 Although the plan would never be implemented, Vercruysse’s personal archive contains a handwritten draft of the summary of the first issue. (Figure 9). A noteworthy detail is the fact that on the front cover Vercruysse planned to place a reproduction of Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man, thus linking the probably most internationally renowned Flemish Primitive to a Belgian artistic project. But how Belgian are the Flemish Primitives?

4. (De)Constructing the Belgianness of Flemish Primitives

“What is traditionally called ‘Flemish painting’ is ‘Belgian painting’.”

(Poirier (1949) quoted in (Deam 1998, p. 13 (n41))25

The concept of “Flemish Primitives” first appeared in France around 1850 (Sulzberger 1959, p. 14). The 19th century was the age of nationalism and the creation of the nation state in Western Europe. So, it comes as no surprise that not only France but also Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany were keen to appropriate the Flemish Primitives as part of their own national heritage. Although present day scholars prefer the term “Northern Renaissance” to label the innovations that took place in the arts north of the Alps in the 15th century, previous generations debated whether van Eyck and his contemporaries should be entitled as “Flemish” or “Netherlandish” (Deam 1998, p. 2). As art historian Wessel Krul (2005, p. 253) points out, in the late 19th century the Flemish Primitives have been claimed by the Dutch, French and Belgians to demonstrate that the Renaissance was not an exclusive Italian affair and that their respective nations also contributed to the renewal in Western art, thereby deliberately ignoring the fact that the political situation had changed considerably:

“But, of course, the political situation of the fifteenth-century did not correspond to the present borders: the realm of the Burgundian dukes had been divided among the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, which allowed patriotic souls in all three countries to claim the glory of early Netherlandish painting for their own. This debate accentuated not only the differences with Italy, but also those among the three northern nations.”

(Krul 2005, p. 253)

The North versus South debate as applied to Renaissance painting has been echoed in the national Belgian debate. As an independent nation state, Belgium had been artificially created in 1830 on the crossroads of two European cultural areas, the Germanic on the one hand and Roman or Latin on the other. This duality of Belgian national identity soon became a trope of Belgianness as can be traced in nationalistic historiography such as the work of Henri Pirenne (1902) for whom the unity of the Belgian people resulted from a fusion of Latin and Germanic cultures. The projection of this national trope on the Flemish Primitives led art historian Hyppolite Fierens-Gevaert (a contemporary of Pirenne) to conclude that Hubert and Jan van Eyck were prototypical Belgian artists since they had adopted the Latin influence without neglecting their Germanic identity:

“[…] these masters who so loudly proclaim the Flemish glory were Belgians avant la lettre, Belgians according to the modern formula, faithful to their native aspirations and freely associated with the radiance of the ancient Latin splendor.”

(Fierens-Gevaert 1928, p. 78)26

In 1902, an exhibition of the Flemish Primitives organized in Bruges in order to promote Belgian nationalism and cultural identity, the ‘Flemish Primitives’ were explicitly staged as Belgian artists (Krul 2005, p. 275). Very soon it became clear that the Belgian communitarian debate would permeate the art historical interpretation of the Flemish Primitives, opposing a Flemish and a Belgian appropriation.

Additionally, the period in which Jan Vercruysse defined himself as the “Last Flemish Primitive” is quite significant, as it was profoundly marked by this typically Belgian communitarian context. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Belgian art scene was in the international spotlight. Many exhibitions focusing on “Belgian Art” were organized both in Belgium and abroad, and many art critics and curators were eager to define what made up Belgian Art (Brams and Pültau 2005). Ironically, however, while exhibition organizers and art critics were trying to define the notion of “Belgian Art”, the Belgian nation-state was involved in a process of federalization with far-reaching autonomous competences for Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia, making the notion of “Belgian Art” almost obsolete (Brams and Pültau 2005). By claiming the Flemish Primitives as his artistic precursors, Jan Vercruysse takes a stand in that debate.

During the early 1970s, the Dutch speaking community gained cultural autonomy, as a result of the first State reform. This was an important leverage to develop a self-confident cultural identity as stated in the 1982 declaration of principles by the first autonomous government:

“The Flemish Community is now facing a major challenge. This challenge consists of confirming, promoting and publicizing the identity of our Flemish people. [...] The announcement of our identity implies that the Flemish people become recognizable and recognized beyond our borders, in Belgium, in Europe and in the world.”

(Geens quoted in Brams and Pültau 2005)27

In subsequent State reforms, the Belgian unitary State was progressively dismantled. This process went along with the economic growth of Flanders, a region that increasingly distanced itself from a Belgian national sense of identity. At the end of this process, in 1993, the Belgian unitary State ceased to exist.28

It was in this Belgian political context, with a shifted cultural landscape increasingly drawn by regional boundaries, that Vercruysse made the claim as being the last Flemish Primitive. The historical Flemish Primitives lived “In an era of such great itineracy, in which artists were often called to different location by courtly or economic considerations, identity may not have been categorically equated with birthplace.” (Deam 1998, p. 25) In the same way, Vercruysse deliberately challenges the value that is attached to the birthplace in order to define the identity of the artist, by systematically mentioning different birthplaces. Also, the linguistic diversity is one of the characteristics of Vercruysse’s work, recalling a sense of fluidity of cultural boundaries in the cosmopolitan environment in which the Flemish primitives, regardless of their place of birth, lived and worked. As an early 20th century art critic pointed out:

“The van Eyck brothers were both born in the small town of Maes-yck-sur-Meuse, “on the borders of German, Flemish and French,—remarks the Count of Laborde—to better show that genius speaks all languages and that art alone is the universal language.””

(Fierens-Gevaert 1928, p. 51)29

In 1988, on the eve of the definitive demise of the Belgian unitary state, the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts organized a survey-exhibition on Jan Vercruysse. Curiously enough, up until today the Palais des Beaux-Arts is the only institution of contemporary art that has not been federalized (i.e., split up according to the linguistic communities), and thus the only surviving bulwark of what can be considered “Belgian Art”.30 This was a stepstone in Vercruysse’s career as it was the very first survey-exhibition dedicated to his work. As usual, Vercruysse himself compiled the exhibition catalogue. On a blank page preceding the title page of the book appears the word Brussels written in Persian alphabet (بروکسل). This enigmatic opening epigraph should be read as part of a sequence in which the artist reveals his positioning vis-à-vis Belgian politically created cultural boundaries. On the next title page, appears the artist’s name followed by a bilingual text (Dutch and French) mentioning the organizing institution, place and year. The third page mirrors the first page with the Brussels inscription. This time, on top of the blank paper, the epigraph reads “à la mémoire de ce qui n’a jamais existé” (to the memory of what never has been). Combined with the previous two pages, and in relation to his ambiguous relationship with the notion of Belgian art, this poetic sentence can be interpreted as a suggestion of the end of the inexistent myth of a Belgian identity, including “Belgian Art”. After this opening sequence, without any further transition or introduction, the artist “presents himself” in ten self-portraits. In the first one (Zelfportret 1981) (Figure 10), the face of the artist is blurred. In an unpublished note, Vercruysse explains this particular self-portrait by associating it with the notion of displacement:

“The mechanism is one of displacement. If the aim is to define the identity of the artist, his face has become illegible and the identity-definition is displaced […]”

(Vercruysse 1984)

Displacement has to do with the denial of Vercruysse to be pinpointed on one fixed cultural or national identity. As in the 1980s, Flanders defined more and more its own political borders based on cultural and linguistic homogeneity, the artist Vercruysse claimed his freedom to create an identity based on shifting boundaries by contesting the political appropriation of art for a nationalistic agenda.31 In this sense, when Vercruysse labels himself as the Last Flemish Primitive, this has little to do with a self-identification with Flanders as a contemporary political entity. Instead, the Flemish Primitives, particularly the van Eyck brothers, stand as the metaphor of the freedom of the artist to create his own fluid identity. This cultural agency to define, blur or redraw boundaries is, in Vercruysse’s view also the quintessence of Belgianness:

“The only ones who have remained mentally Belgian are the artists. They share the same histories up to and including the most recent ones. They also live in the same art history. You can safely say that I am a Belgian artist. I know Van Eyck. It is mine, in a manner of speaking. Magritte: idem. This separation of image and language in the work of Magritte; a Frenchman would never think that his language does not correspond to the image that he sees. We also live with two cultures, with two languages. Magritte is Belgian; his work can never have been created by a Frenchman. The same for Broodthaers.”

(Vercruysse in Decan 2007, p. 73)32

5. Conclusions

In order to conclude, I would like to draw attention to a unique filmed interview that Vercruysse gave in 1990 for Flemish television. As an object of study, this interview is remarkable in two ways. First of all, the interviewer—the television producer Jef Cornelis—was a close friend of Vercruysse, resulting in an intimate portrait of the artist. Secondly, the notion of a portrait is enhanced by the very composition of the film—the artist seated at a table against a neutral background, directly facing the camera—which resembles the many self-portraits from the series Portraits of the Artist.

Since this interview took place less than one year after the Flash Art interview with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in which the artist declared that he considered himself to be he felt to be “The Last Flemish Primitive,” it comes as no surprise that Cornelis asks about this provocative declaration. As Vercruysse explains:

“Something everyone always wants to know about every artist is who influenced him, who were his predecessors, his forefathers. And every artist gets a list balanced forcibly on his shoulders. Without argumentation, without justification. To give short shrift to that I said I’m the last Flemish Primitive.”

(Vercruysse in Cornelis 2020 [1990])

Indeed, as we have seen, this assertion can be related to the ambiguous relationship of Vercruysse with his inclusion in the canon of Belgian art dominated by figures such as Magritte and Broodthaers. This ambiguity was even sharpened by the national context of regionalization and the claim put on artists to serve a political agenda. Instead of accepting the common idea of being an heir of his two compatriots, Vercruysse self-consciously constructs his artistic identity by taking control of his public image as cast in exhibitions and catalogues. Following his self-proclaimed artisthood in 1977, the self-portrait became his genre of choice to shape his self-image as an artist. However, in none of these works the person Jan Vercruysse becomes fully knowable. This elusiveness is related to his conception of art and artisthood, as he explains in the above-mentioned television interview:

“What the true artist would certainly do... is circle around, skirt around the truth. Point to it but certainly never formulate it and never divulge it. Because then... if the truth is revealed, then life is at an end. Truth is fatal. And... One of the strengths of art is that art circles it and, as a result, is able to carry on. It is a fire you can burn yourself on, so you have to stay away from it. And you stop everything. If you reveal the truth, you stop everything.”

(Vercruysse in Cornelis 2020 [1990])

The artist, in order to survive, to continue his artistic journey may not give away his true identity. As Vercruysse states later on: “Self-analysis is the end of being an artist, full stop.” (Vercruysse in Cornelis 2020 [1990]) (Figure 11).