Art in Exile: Flanders, Wales and the First World War

Apollo, April, 2003 by David Fraser Jenkins

Belgium was invaded by Germany in August 1914. Six weeks later, a party of two gentlemen from mid Wales, a lawyer and a leading civil servant, rushed around the country for two weeks in the company of the professor of Philology from Ghent University, who had previously been staying in Cardiff. They gathered a group of artists and writers, offering them hospitality in Wales if they decided to flee. This was during an interlude while the front line was south towards France, and before the German army returned to occupy the whole of Belgium. Although there was a national outcry in Britain for the defence of Belgian refugees, it seems extraordinary that this leap should have been made into the danger zone, and that the party from Wales should have been got together to talent-spot artists. It was both admirable in its generosity, something not repeated in recent wars in Europe, but at the same time divisive in its selectivity. It was thought possible in about 1914 that Wales was on the brink of an artistic naissance. Several large exhibitions of modern art had been shown in Cardiff, largely thanks to the youthful and rich Davies siblings of Llandinam, a brother who owned Barry docks and two sisters who were at the height of their interest in collecting French art. It was the Davieses who had organised the foray into Belgium. Through various contacts, some musicians, the sculptor George Minne and three painters--Valerius de Saedeleer, Edgar Gevaert and Gustave van de Woestyne--stayed in rural Wales through the War. This exhibition collects their work of this period, shows it alongside a context group of Welsh and Belgian artists, and the attractive and hefty catalogue publishes for the first time detailed research into this curious episode (preceded only by the pioneering essay of 1981 by Moira Vincentelli, who was able to interview some of the survivors). (1)

In retrospect, the effort seems undoubtedly well-meaning (as well as complex and so swiftly moving that it is difficult to grasp what happened across the whole movement of masses of people), but ineffective in its aim of cultural enrichment. The artists individually had no connections with Wales, and it is likely that the Davieses had heard of only a few of them beforehand. The catalogue essay by Carolyn Stewart details how the sisters, who while children had lost both their parents, began buying paintings in their late twenties in 1908 and continued through the war. Their collecting was not of contemporary art, but had centred since 1910 on Daumier and Millet, by 1912 getting as far as the seventy-two year-old Monet. Their taste had been formed in the interval between Impressionism and modern art proper; their furthest reaches were into Symbolism, and Belgium Symbolism was well known and admired in Britain through Studio Magazine. There was talk of the Belgian refugee artists encouraging art in Wales, and de Saedeleer showed his work in Aberystwyth in 1916 and 1919, but these three were not included in the grand gathering of modern art in Belgium held in Cardiff in 1915. There was an approximate but celebrated precedent in the flight of Monet and Pissarro to London in 1870-71, where they too had known few people and left little mark, unlike Rodin who had a group of admirers.

George Minne was installed in isolation first in Aberystwyth and then at Llanidloes, at the expense of the Davieses, and although he enjoyed the time and got on well with friendly neighbours, he had no contact with artists and he could not make sculpture; this period simply represented a Welsh episode during his early fifties when he was able only to draw. He left eventually a group of some four hundred mostly large drawings. A selection of these visions of voluptuous and agonised young mothers with children is in the exhibition, and Caterina Verdickt in her essay on the Belgians quotes the artist's fascinatingly ambiguous account of their meaning.

Minne had been an inspiring figure to the three Symbolist painters who moved to Wales, all four of them previously having lived near Ghent at Sint-Martens-Latem. Their Welsh paintings reveal an aching loneliness (which is however not unusual in Symbolist painting). To see the pictures together, in the knowledge of art in Wales of the time and of the appearance of mid Wales, reveals an outsider's original reconstruction of experience, like listening to a Martian describing one of one's friends. A meandering, convoluted line was noticed, binding the Welsh landscape into an ascetic, Sienese primitivism. Gustave van de Woestyne (1881-1947) moved from Wales to London several times, but his large pacificist allegory The sleepers (Fig. 2), of 1917-18, was at least begun in Wales according to his text added to his signature. It transforms shepherds and sheep into the most moving vision of a peasant Gethsemane, maybe in homage to the two paintings of the Agony in the Garden by Mantegna and Bellini at the National Gallery; it is possibly as great a painting as Gertler's Merry-go-round, and a memorial to this period of exile and anxiety.