The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Exhibition

The National Museum of Western Art traces 400 years of Belgian painting

Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracles of Saint Benoit, date unknown Courtesy of The Royal Museum of Fine Arts ©KMSKB-MRBAB

Several tall ships with sails billowing in the wind cover the shimmering afternoon surface of water in an expansive view of an idyllic harbor. In the distance stand several ghostly blue mountains alight with a brightness reflected from the nearby setting sun. In the foreground a shepherd looks away from his flock and up to the sky as a farmer digs his plow into a twisting plot of land that trails down the side of a cliff.

It is a perfectly pastoral scene except for one darkened corner filled with a plume of falling white feathers. Below them in the water we see a pair of flailing limbs sinking into the rough water.
The limbs are those of Icarus and the scene is from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s magnificent Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558). It is a curious and absorbing painting exemplary of the best of Belgian art, and it is the most impressive addition to this exhibition of collected works from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

While Tokyo has certainly seen its fair share of shows highlighting individual Belgian artists like Peter Paul Rubens or James Ensor, this current exhibition at the National Museum of Western Art is one of, if not the first, to look at the history of Belgian art as a whole. Through more than 100 paintings and drawings gathered here, the curators weave together a single story of Belgium’s contribution to the arts.

Fernand Khnopff, While Listening to Schumann, 1883 Courtesy of The Royal Museum of Fine Arts ©KMSKB-MRBAB

After Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, however, the rest of the exhibition follows a somewhat drab, chronologically staccato flow through the past four centuries. There are more paintings by Bruegel (both the Elder and his son), such as the lewdly Bacchanalian scene in Wedding Dance in the Open Air (1607), as well as pieces by masters like Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck. The Miracles of Saint Benoit is a characteristically dramatic display of Rubens’ masterful control of color and sense of the theatrical, while Silenus Drunk is Van Dyck’s far more reserved vision of a languorous and fragile Dionysian disciple.

Although the show has many high points, there are several bland stretches as well. Despite the obvious technical and compositional virtuosity of the art on display, the viewer does tend to tire of row upon row of seriously serious portraits of 16th-century dignitaries and carefully concocted still lifes with illuminated flowers, fruit and dead animals.

Pieter Bruegel (the Younger), Wedding Dance in the Open Air, 1607 Courtesy of The Royal Museum of Fine Arts ©KMSKB-MRBAB

But those sections are soon passed, and we come instead to more cerebral and captivating offerings by James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff and René Magritte. Among the more interesting are two small sketches by Ensor, My Aunt Asleep and Dreaming of Monsters (1888) and The Battle of the Gold Spurs (1891), that show his delicately fine line and over-the-top caricaturist sensibility.

Amid the typically crowded galleries of the National Museum, this exhibition plays out as most such large-scale endeavors do: there are few surprises and a number of works that are quickly passed over and forgotten. Yet there are also a handful of truly fantastic paintings that fascinate and pull in visitors with the seductive delicacy of their craftsmanship and historical presence..

The National Museum of Western Art, until December 10. See exhibition listings (Ueno) for details.

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