Brussels 4: Art Nouveau & the Horta House
"Seeing beauty is not obvious." A visit to the scrappy neighborhood of Saint Gilles in Brussels to visit crumbling art nouveau homes, then to the restored Horta house and studio.
It makes sense to me now, thinking of the exuberant rococo details decorating the Grand-Place, that art nouveau should have taken root in Brussels and spawned so many buildings that nobody even bothers to preserve most of them. On Vanderschrick Street in the Saint Gilles neighborhood, we found a dozen or so by the architect Ernest Blerot.
The ornamental tiles were hidden under several decades of grime. A woman leaned out her window and shook out a towel. A girl closed her blinds which were actually a sheet hung across a string—a typical student solution. At least the bones were there, the arched windows, curves. I dearly wanted a bucket, some gentle dish soap, a ladder and sponge.
Is that something you can volunteer for? A weekend washing some stranger’s building because it might be beautiful underneath?
It was cold and grey. A grubby stubbled man stared at us, snickering a little behind his beer can, as we stared for a long time at the buildings.
Seeing beauty is not obvious. The first time I was taken to the formal gardens of Paris I wanted to return with a chainsaw and put those truncated trees out of their misery. Poor fuckers, their branches amputated to stumps, like clenched fists that strange, spindly fingers were growing out of. It was an affront to the trees I knew growing up where we had maples, dogwoods, redbuds in our own yard—which we never pruned—and a vacation meant a trip to the woods around Natural Bridge, Cumberland Falls. Bernheim forest was a half-hour drive and I thought of it the first time that I read Macbeth.
What does it mean to shape the world? Our own apartment is minimalist. Terrifyingly empty for some. Is it because we refuse the choices, to impose ourselves?
Once, before it got gentrified, Ana and I walked along the canal from le bassin de la Villette in Paris to the nearby suburb of Pantin. There were no bike paths. No cafés or fancy apartment buildings, just broken concrete, empty lots, warehouses—some used, some abandoned. Along the way—weeds, dog shit, condoms, needles probably. It inspired me. There was a beauty to it. The wildness of forests in which we are small and largely irrelevant. I listened to it with my heart. With its still, small voice, it sounded like God.
The Luxembourg Gardens with its trimmed trees and manicured lawns screams human, an attempt to pretend we have control over the uncontrollable, which is nature. Impose symmetry, structure. Civilization. The nature-inspired Art Nouveau is its logical conclusion. Removing nature entirely from nature, re-embodying it in mud and iron, stone and wood, plus glass and the light that streams through it.
One of the leading art nouveau architects was Belgium-born Victor Horta. We climbed an endless hill to the house he built between 1898 and 1901, which was carefully restored and is now a museum. I should have taken notes about what I saw and thought. But I didn’t, because I didn’t have a paper or pen and they insist everyone enter phoneless, photoless and practically nude into the space.
What struck me, though, even five seconds in, was that every single element was designed, was chosen—the hinge on the door, the door handle, the door, the dishes, the forks, the beds. Not to mention the walls, the windows, the glass in them. Literally everything your eyes could alight on. (See some images here.) The inspiration of course was the tastefully abundant nature of Europe, twining vines, insects, birds. I wondered if it was homage or hubris, the idea you could replace nature with something better, a vine that would never wither, a mosquito without a sting, something nearly permanent.
It was more than that, though, the continual murmur of Horta’s voice proclaiming, Beauty! Beauty! It exposed itself, its own materials. Iron was very irony. Wood as woody as it could be. You could see the bones, the metal beams and rivets which are beautiful, too. The interior organized around a central octagonal stair-hall resting on obviously iron pillars and topped by a stained glass skylight.
I learn that his father was a shoemaker. He believed materials should be honored like the people who shaped them.
The Horta Museum website proclaims:
Art Nouveau aimed to embellish life's setting for both aesthetic and moral reasons. The competition to furnish workers' homes as part of the Liège Exhibition in 1905 demonstrates the wish felt at the time to give the worker a home worth coming back to. Commenting on the interior by Serrurier-Bovy, Jules Destrée evoked an 'impression of freshness, of health, joy and energy', Art Nouveau being seen as an antidote to the temptations of the 'bar'. Ten years earlier, Horta's construction of the Maison du Peuple also had a philanthropic aim: to open up an airy, light-filled space to people living in the slums. The choice of the Workers' Party also had its origins in the quest for a style that would deter the conservative middle classes.
Perhaps it did. In the basement of the house, now used as a studio for children, there was a video about how the once iconic art nouveau building, commissioned by the Belgian Workers' Party (POB/BWP), and opening in 1899, was thoroughly destroyed a generation later in 1965 to build a skyscraper.
Art nouveau itself was largely ended by World War I with its tanks and razor wire and mustard gas and screams. Giving way to the geometrical Art Deco, and the Bauhaus style, which dispensed with the flourishes, and, I suspect, aspired not to eternity, but silence.
That’s it for this time.
Stay tuned for more episodes.
Tot ziens! See you later,
K