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

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.

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The war years were for these artists a desperate interruption, but at least they kept going. The Davieses' motives in scooping them up for Wales are not really known, and it may be that they achieved exactly what they wanted in preserving the artists from the conflict and enabling them to work in quiet. They had hardly any influence in Wales, but de Saedeleer's landscapes point to a secret attraction of the lower Ystwyth valley (Fig. 1). The casting of the exhibition is slightly less effective than it might have been, as although the catalogue research reveals an extensive history of the Belgians and their reception, rather than having on display a token view of modern art in Wales, not all of which is particularly Welsh, it might have been more interesting to have borrowed more works by the Sint Latem group, who are little known outside Belgium, in spite of a group show held in Ghent in 2001. And a key linking artist may have been Brangwyn, who could have been a larger presence.

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There are hints in the catalogue of further interests, especially the numerous other Belgian artists in Britain. The critic Verhaeren was encouraged to Wales. He was to publish in his collection of poems, Les Villes Tentaculaires (1919), an account of the aesthetic attractions of heavy industry. In a train getting into Swansea under a heavy smog one evening in 1914, he leapt about the carriage from window to window shouting 'Que c'est beau! Que c'est beau' (2) Such a bizarre reaction to a scene with perhaps a certain grandeur but above all extreme ugliness of various kinds puts a severe distance between the visitor and the local situation. It is fascinating that he had also admired the Barry docks that belonged to his patrons, and it is possible to read into the art interests of the Davieses a strain of ameliorating care, from their optimism in placing foreign artists in the Welsh landscape, to their innovative enthusiasm for the labour heroism of Daumier and Millet, to their admiration for the foggy beauty of Impressionism (admittedly of Venice, and not Swansea), to the selfless labour of the sisters working in a military canteen in France during the War, and to the final bequest of the collection to the National Museum in Cardiff.

(1) See now also Eric Rowan and Carolyn Stewart, An Elusive Tradition: Art and Society in Wales, 1870-1950, Cardiff, 2002, Chapter 4, 'Belgian artists exiled in Wales', pp. 91-124.

(2) Carolyn Stewart, 'An experiment in cultural engineering: Gwendolen and Margaret Davies's Patronage of Belgian refugee artists in Wales', in Oliver Fairclough (ed.), Art in Exile: Flanders, Wales and the First World War, exh. cat., Ghent, Heino-Wijhe, Cardiff, 2002, p. 44.

'Art in Exile: Flanders, Wales and the First World War' was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, from 12 January until 17 March, Hannema-de Stuers Foundation, Heino-Wijhe, from 30 March until 2 June and the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff, from 22 June until 15 September, 2002. The catalogue, edited by Oliver Fairclough, Robert Hoozee and Caterina Verdickt, with essays by Robert Hoozee, Eric Rowan, Carolyn Stewart and Caterina Verdickt was published by Pandora, Antwerp, ISBN 90 5325 174 X, 18.95 [pounds sterling] (paperback)

David Fraser Jenkins is Curator of the Tate Collections.

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