Flemishness, the unsolvable enigma

« Flemish painting, slowly answered [Michelangelo], will satisfy, generally, Signora, a devout person more than any painting from Italy, which will never cause him to shed a tear, whereas that of Flanders will cause him to shed many; and that not through the vigor and merit of the painting but due to the goodness of the devout person. It will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true harmony. In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as may cheer you and which you cannot disparage, as for example saints and prophets. They paint clothes, masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees and landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all of this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without selective choice or boldness and finally without substance or vigor ». (1)

— (Michelangelo in conversation with Vittoria Colonna, from Francisco de Holanda’s Da pintura antigua (ca. 1541–48).

When Jan Vercruysse declared in Flash Art International in 1989 that he felt like “the last Flemish Primitive,” he not only made a provocative statement, but also consciously placed himself in an art-historical genealogy dating back to the fifteenth century (2). This assertion resonates with the loaded nature of the term ‘Flemish Primitives’ (also known as ‘Early Netherlandish painting’), which came into use in the nineteenth century when the Romantic movement began to appreciate this artistic tradition again. Previously, works by artists such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling were often classified as Gothic paintings. Initially used to describe early Italian art, such as that of Fra Angelico, in terms of ‘primitive purity’, the term ‘primitive’ had a positive rather than negative connotation at the time. (3)

The term only really became established thanks to the success of the monumental exhibition Les Primitifs flamands et l’Art ancien in Bruges in 1902, which brought together over four hundred paintings, including masterpieces by the most important fifteenth-century painters from the Burgundian Netherlands. Attracting more than thirty-five thousand visitors, the exhibition stimulated research, restoration and collecting throughout Europe and became a model for similar events. In the following years, major exhibitions of ‘primitives’ were held almost simultaneously in Siena, Paris and Düsseldorf, each focusing on the earliest phases of regional art production. (4) These exhibitions arose from an international exchange of culture that accompanied the increasing nationalization of European societies.  While collections and ideas increasingly circulated across borders, events of this kind were also used to claim cultural heritage as national. (5)

Nevertheless, the use of geographical terms such as ‘Flemish’ or ‘Netherlandish’ remains problematic because they do not fully correspond to historical reality. After all, the borders of that time no longer coincide with the current borders of Flanders and the Netherlands. Furthermore, Netherlandish art production covered a wider territory than its Flemish counterpart, which in turn extended beyond the borders of present-day Flanders. While art historians continue to debate the precise stylistic starting and ending points, the term ‘Flemish Primitives’ is now generally understood to refer to fifteenth-century painting at the Burgundian court, which was located in the Low Countries (present-day Belgium and the Netherlands, and, more broadly, Luxembourg and northern France). (6)

For Jan Vercruysse, the Flemish Primitives symbolised the freedom of the artist to constantly recreate their identity; an idea proposed by researcher Anton Pereira Rodriguez. While Flanders was increasingly drawing political boundaries based on cultural and linguistic homogeneity in the 1980s, Vercruysse consciously adopted an open and flexible stance. By stating that he was the last Flemish Primitive, he avoided defining himself by a single fixed cultural or national identity, thus distancing himself from contemporary political entities. At the same time, this statement reflected his ambiguous relationship with the Belgian art canon, dominated by figures such as Magritte and Broodthaers, which was often exploited for political gain in a national context. Rather than allowing himself to be inscribed in that common idea of inheritance, Vercruysse consciously constructed his own artistic identity, taking control of his public image in exhibitions and catalogues. In an interview with filmmaker Jef Cornelis in 1990, he emphasised that this notable statement was a means of distancing himself from the compelling expectations surrounding influences and predecessors. For Vercruysse, art had to continue circling around the truth without ever fully revealing it because revealing the truth, in his view, meant the end of art. (7)

From Vercruysse’s paradoxical position, simultaneously part of Belgian art history and detached from it through his self-mythology, “Flemishness” opens a dialogue between different art-historical moments in the Low Countries. This geographical framework connects the Flemish Primitives, who flourished in the fifteenth century with their refined oil painting techniques, meticulous realism and religious expressiveness, with the conceptual art of the second half of the twentieth century, which artists such as Vercruysse and Jef Geys bombard the viewer with confusion and wonder. At the same time, the exhibition looks to the present day with paintings by Melle van Herwaarden and W. Rossen, who carry forward the conceptual heritage, in which a similar ‘Flemish’ sensitivity to subject matter reappears.

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Jan Vercruysse’s Les Paroles is a series of works that bring the tension between language and silence tangible. Although they take the form of sculptures, they function in the Baudelairean sense of the word as forms in which beauty and moral meaning are inextricably linked. The central motif is a chair shape, vertical and anthropomorphic, referring to the ‘cathedra’ as a symbol of speech and authority, but in this series it is empty and only present in its absence. This motif appears in an installation in (Title X), in which a white chair is placed on the right within a white rectangular grid. The squares of this grid are partly empty and partly filled with marbles. Due to their material properties, the marbles evoke ever-changing nuances as they are simultaneously transparent and opaque, hard and fragile. This creates an image that eludes direct symbolism, opening up a poetic space that precedes language. Within this space, the intersection of silence, memory and words is constantly shifting through minimal changes in form and composition.

In Camera Obscura (2001), Vercruysse created a series in response to the photographic technique of projecting an upside-down image onto a glass plate. Playfully using this camera obscura effect, the work depicts an ‘infanta’ in a long dress on the left and standing on her head with her skirt fluttering over her face and revealing her white panties on the right. This technique dates back to the medieval mathematician Alhazen and was later employed by Jan Van Eyck using concave mirrors. It highlights Vercruysse’s ongoing exploration of ambiguity in perception and imagery within photography.W. Rossen’s work is based on the mirror motif in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, 

visible in Camera Landscape (2025), where the camera lens reflects another space, evoking a play of doubling and reflection. Rossen then uses a landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael as his starting point. By copying this landscape, he questions the concept of the romantic scene or the representation of the sublime through repetition and imitation. The camera itself is overexposed, creating the impression that it could have been photographed from the opposite side. In this way, Rossen brings together different layers of representation, reflection, and reproduction in a single concentrated image.

In The Newspaper (2025), he further explores the relationship between reproduction and painting, but focuses primarily on the newspaper as an object. He is fascinated by the fact that newspapers have no fixed form, only taking on a temporary shape when picked up or propped against something. This changeable form corresponds to the medium’s transitory content and reveals how objects refer to their own appearance and meaning in a circular manner. This creates a loop in which form and content are in a constant state of flux.

In Black Painting (2011), Jef Geys emphasises a woman and her parasol with a concentrated viewpoint, where the round opening in the black-painted canvas coincides with the circle itself. This method is characteristic of the entire series, in which Geys uses circular cut-outs to shift the focus from the original painting to one constructed by him. Geys began the tradition of the Black Paintings in 1959 when he first painted over a painting from the Douven studio. Based in Geys’ birthplace of Leopoldsburg, the Douven family was known for their standardised paintings, which were produced in a serial style. After the Second World War, they became one of the largest producers of paintings in Europe. By appropriating and partially covering these works, Geys juxtaposes the idyllic imagery of the Douven paintings with his own formal interventions, creating constant tension between emphasis and concealment.

Viola Alpina (2010) is part of Geys’s long-running Seed Bag series, which he produced annually from 1963 until his death. For this series, he enlarged commercial seed bags into monumental panels, which are always accompanied by a smaller version and two frames bearing the name of the plant and the year. In this way, the everyday seed bags, with their idealised promise of natural beauty which is rarely realised in reality, were elevated and placed in an artistic context. Geys did not consider the series to be a parody, but rather a critical observation of the tension between image and reality, consumption and experience, and the ongoing possibility that old or ‘obsolete’ media might regain artistic value.

In his recent work, Melle van Herwaarden focuses on his brother, Gijs. The paintings depict Gijs at work in the Rietveld Academy, where Melle van Herwaarden previously studied. The building’s bare, functional architecture provides a platform in which students move around. The grid and its interplay of lines create a rigid structure that offers both space and boundaries. His paintings combine intuitive simplicity with a keen sense of form. The clean lines and restrained compositions bring to mind Mondrian and De Stijl, while the spatial construction evokes echoes of Vercruysse’s Paroles. In Gijs (2025), this formal clarity is combined with a cinematic perspective and an empathetic approach to portraiture.

Within this framework, Van Herwaarden examines his brother’s posture and concentration, recognising the intensity that also characterises his own painting process in them. At the same time, the works unfold as a carefully balanced play of contrasts and subdued colours, in which calm tonalities are punctuated by sharper accents. Van Herwaarden deliberately seeks out sharpness in the figures, enhancing their presence within the otherwise measured atmosphere of the composition.

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1) Laura Camille Agoston, “Male/Female, Italy/Flanders, Michelangelo/VittoriaColonna.” Renaissance Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2005): 1175.
2) Jan Vercruysse in conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Flash Art International, no. 148 (October 1989).
3) Vanessa Paumen, “The Flemish primitives: What’s in a name?” De Vlaamse Primitieven, accessed on: https://vlaamseprimitieven.vlaamsekunstcollectie.be/en/research/webpublications/the-flemish-primitives-whats-in-a-name/.
4) Andrée Hayum, “The 1902 Exhibition, Les Primitifs flamands: Scholarly Fallout and Art Historical Reflections” Journal of Art Historiography, no 11 (December 2014): 1-20.
5) Michela Passini, “Pour une histoire transnationale des expositions d’art ancien : les Primitifs exposés à Bruges, Sienne, Paris et Düsseldorf (1902-1904)” Intermédialités / Intermediality, no. 15 (2010) : 15–32.
6) Vanessa Paumen, “The Flemish primitives: What’s in a name?” De Vlaamse Primitieven, accessed on: https://vlaamseprimitieven.vlaamsekunstcollectie.be/en/research/webpublications/the-flemish-primitives-whats-in-a-name/
7) Anton Pereira Rodriguez, “The Last Flemish Primitive: Jan Vercruysse’s Self-Fashioning of Artisthood and National Identity” Arts 11, no. 1 (2022), accessed on: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/11/1/13

October 13, 2025