Belgium

About

Long before the Belgian state was founded in 1830, its cities led European painting. In 15th-century Bruges, Ghent and Tournai, Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden used layered oil glazes to render fabric, metal and skin with new precision; the Ghent Altarpiece was completed in 1432. Antwerp later became the base of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck.

The young country found a strong modern voice. James Ensor filled Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888) with masked crowds, and the sculptor George Minne gave Symbolism its gaunt, kneeling youths. In Brussels, Victor Horta's Hôtel Tassel (1893) set Art Nouveau's whiplash lines into ironwork and stairs. René Magritte questioned pictures themselves in The Treachery of Images (1929). After the war, Marcel Broodthaers made poems into objects, and Luc Tuymans paints pale, faded-looking scenes drawn from photographs and film.