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Feeling green …
Léon Spilliaert was a fan of the fabled absinthe drinker Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. But if ever an artwork could put you off the green fairy, this is it.
It’s a scream …
That the woman conjures death and sex with her widow’s weeds-cum-party girl finery is a small part of this 1907 painting’s shock. Like other works by the Belgian artist, her face, with its horrified wide eyes, recalls Edvard Munch’s The Scream. She seems lost in her own mind, and it is not a place of imaginative freedom.
The waiting game …
Waiting women were a lifelong subject for this painter of night-time dread, as were the lonely beaches of the North Sea resort of Ostend, where he was born and lived much of his life. Often his works depict fishermen’s wives scanning the sea, while bourgeois Edwardians, for whom the town was a holiday destination, are posed in sparse interiors.
All the lonely people …
A supporter of women’s emancipation, Spilliaert depicted his female subjects as cut off from the wider flow of life, isolated and in limbo.
Léon Spilliaert’s work is at the Royal Academy of Arts, W1, to 25 May
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