The Paintings of Henry de Groux

A Note on a Remarkable Belgian Master of the Macabre

ARTHUR SYMONS

HENRY DE GROUX is a Belgian of Breton origin, the son of a painter, Charles de Groux, whose work is to be seen in many of the picture-galleries of Belgium. In 1892, at about the age of twenty-five, he had a considerable success in Paris, when his immense picture, Le Christ aux Outrages, was sent from Brussels at the expense of King Leopold II, and exhibited, first in a sort of shed in the rue Alain-Charticr, and afterwards in the Salon des Art-Liberaux. Other pictures followed, and were seen under better conditions; a new painter, of disconcerting originality, seemed to have appeared; in 1899 a special number of La Plume was devoted to " L'Oiitvre de Henry de Groux", containing articles by Camille Lemonnier, Charles Morice, Léon Bloy, Octave Mirbeau, and many others, and nearly a hundred reproductions of pictures, drawings and lithographs. Then, gradually, the interest died down, the new painter was succeeded by other new painters, and in France and Belgium Henry de Groux is now hardly more than a name; his pictures are buried in the depths of I know not what vague and unfriendly garde-meuhles, and he himself is living obscurely in Florence, where I saw him dragging vast canvases about a bare studio in which there was nothing but vast canvases and a grand piano.

De Groux's Studio

IMAGINE a large and naked face, with long and scanty blond hair straggling across a high forehead; a profile devoured by an exorbitant nose, from which the chin retreats; the mouth of an orator, the cheeks of an actor, the eyes of a stealthy dreamer; a manner of ecclesiastical unction, broken through by abrupt nerves and an irony whose ferocity seems to turn inward upon itself; and imagine this paradoxical being, enveloped to the heels in a red plush dressing-gown, cut after some feminine fashion, staggering at one side of a picture twice his height, while the beautiful woman whose face he has so often painted, never making it quite as beautiful as it is, staggered at the other side of the picture, in a perilous, continual shifting from end to end of the studio.

And imagine all the while a flood of talk, a torrent of ideas, sensations, confessions; vehement and sensitive criticism of pictures, books and music, a sane intellectual wit, together with a feverish and irrational comment of personal impulses. Outside the pages of Balzac, I have never met so complete an incarnation of a type which only Balzac could create: the type of the eager, inflexible, pitiless, exultant and defeated man of genius, sacrificing everything for an idea, drunk with the desire of creation, with the desire of glory; a somnabulist in life, through which he passes with an unconsciousness only rarely struck awake by some obstacle, over which he falls with angry helplessness.

The whole work of de Groux is an attempt to render hallucinations, and lie is haunted at once by colors, by gestures, by sounds and by ideas. He has himself described fantastically his "demoniacal" love of color. "The mere sight", he tells us, "of a freshly prepared palette troubles me and contracts my throat, as it happens with hysterical patients whom the hallucination or the attraction of some misdeed, of some monstrous sacrilege, literally intoxicates!" Form he sees rather as gesture than as outline; he sees the energy of movement long before he has distinguished the contours of the thing which moves. But color is like a literal possession of the devil; he sees it as flame, as flood, as a storm let loose on the world, or a deluge overwhelming it. There is a kind of cruelty in his lust for color, and he can never bring it to the point at which he would have it burn, or freeze, or become splendor in destruction. But, above all, he would have it cry aloud, he would hear it in a visible rhythm, as some hear music; and in the spirals and waves and curved onset of his pointing hands and leaping flames and multitudinous carnages and processions in defeat, I seem to discern a rhythm like that of Wagner's music, or a rhythm which would do in painting what Wagner has done in music. And, lastly, he is haunted by ideas, ideas of a queer subtlety, a fanatical casuistry.

De Groux's Martyrs

HE has painted many martyrdoms, exalting many heroes; he sees the same surging crowd of the world, an ocean of abysmal filth, churned up against the same rock. Now it is Christ, His human body shapeless with suffering, like a torn rag in the wind of the world's fury; now it is Savonarola, who has burnt the vanities in Florence, that are to be fuel about his own stake; now it is Napoleon, who turns his horse backward in retreat, over snow and blood and his last ambition; now, on a scarcely less apocalyptic canvas, it is Zola hooted by the crowd as he comes out of the Palais de Justice. He has seen "The Bad Shepherds", the evil "Vintages", "The Grave-digger of the Living"; he has followed death on obscure ways, where men hang themselves from trees or die under bloody knives; of him, as of Delacroix, Baudelaire might have said:

Delacroix, lac de sang, haute des mauvais anges,

Ombrage par un bois de sapins toujours vert.

Above all, he has painted fire, the devastation, whether it burns Savonarola or the vanities; and it is in the painting of fire that he has brought his color to its highest point of intensity. There is always some suggestion of flame in his pictures, flame turned to rubies and sapphires, as in The Vision of Beatrice, or glowing in hair and glittering in jewels, as in the somewhat Rossetti-like portrait of the woman seated in the chair, with the book in her hand. Only Blake has put a more joyous and vehement and poisonous life into flame, and there is something in his painting of flame that actually reminds me of Blake, whose painted work he has never seen.

Orestes and the Furies

IT is of Blake, naturally, that one thinks before certain canvases and before certain lithographs of de Groux; and one thinks, also, of El Greco and of his groups of lean and tortured figures, consumed by flames of the soul. De Groux sees in less definite form than either, and with a more cerebral excitement. He paints with a kind of rage, in which his brush seems at times to go headlong, making hieroglyphics of form and s-pots and stains of color. He would suggest in paint without the limitation, as it seems to him, of statement; and when the powerful suggestion, as in Orestes Pursued by the Furies, concentrates into a statement so definite as the figure of Athena, the form itself is not always convincing. Yet, in that picture, with its hot and venomous color, its swirl of evil things that hesitate to be human, its horror as of a nightmare, its almost insane energy, is there not a translation into color ancl gesture, into pictorial rhythm, of an imagined mood, a mood of unearthly hatred?

It is moods, the witchcraft of the brain, that de Groux paints in these strange, impressive pictures; in a King Lear, for instance, where all the rhetoric of nature itself, winds, rains, and lightnings, is seen and heard clamoring over a "foolish, fond old man", alone, and "not in his perfect mind". He does not find sufficient interest in the painting of merely what might happen, literally: take, for example, his Neron an Bestiaire, where the lions which surge up against the barrier are mixed with flames, and have the devouring fury but not the precise lineaments of beasts, and where the cruel faces and threatening hands which rise up behind the emperor are mixed with the claws of harpies and the beaks and eyes of furies. lie has painted nothing but visions, and if he paints portraits, Zola, or Baudelaire, some mood of his own mind enters into the portrait and turns the likeness into a symbol.

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Continued from page 120

The Abyss

"QUEL visionnaire aime de Dieu que man grand et pauvre Henry de Groux!" writes Leon Bloy, in that amazing book Le Mendiant Ingrat, of the painter in whom his own somber and angry genius seems to be reflected or reechoed. " "L'humilité et la magnificence", he says also, "voila ce que je trouve en lui". Is de Groux really and in any deep inner sense a mystic? Has he any share in the splendid and consoling convictions of the apocalyptic pamphleteer? I do not know. I doubt if what may seem in him like the vision of the mystic is not rather the attraction of the gulf, a formidable and furtive curiosity, drawing him to the edge of many precipices, over which he bends dizzily. He is the watcher of obscure agonies, and finds a dark, pleasure in spectacular disasters. Is it pity for humanity which sets his imagination, as with the wings of birds of prey, flying towards battle-fields and conflagrations? Some obsession, certainly, has always an irresistible hand upon him, and, in his work done at that bidding, lays on the spectator, who is able really to see it, the same irresistible hand.