Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part III

Author(s): Debora L. Silverman

Source: West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Vol. 20,
No. 1 (Spring-Summer 2013), pp. 3-61
Published by: University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bard Graduate Center
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670975
Accessed: 30-01-2016 12:08 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Chicago Press and Bard Graduate Center are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Art Nouveau,
Art of Darkness:
African Lineages
of Belgian
Modernism,
Part III
Debora L. Silverman
University of California, Los Angeles

This article is the last of a three-part study that identifies Belgian art nouveau as “imperial
modernism” and its interlocking history with the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Part III
opens by discovering the sixth and final element of a distinctively Congo lexicon of modern
design in the “steamer style” of Henry van de Velde, who began and ended his career in Ter-
vuren. The body of the article provides a critical account of the Royal Museum’s history, the
tepid revisionism of its 2005 Memory of the Congo exhibition, and the challenges of the
museum’s on-going renovation. This analysis is framed by new research that brings back to
the interpretive field a surprisingly unexamined history of the foundational role of violence
in Belgian national identity and collective self-definition after 1830, suggesting how the
creation of a cultural system as a nation of victims and avengers may have interacted with
patterns of violence in the Congo.

Introduction: Yachting Style, Steamer Style

Henry van de Velde may be best remembered for his Paris debut in Siegfried
Bing’s art nouveau gallery and his years in Weimar and the Werkbund, but his
career was bookended in Belgium, with Tervuren and the Congo. In 1928 Van de
Velde completed work on the last of the four homes he built for himself and his
family. He called it “La Nouvelle Maison” and composed it as an open-plan brick
structure along the avenue Albert I in Tervuren. The dwelling’s cubic shapes and
rounded corners propelled at the south facade to create an open-air deck with
wraparound iron railings, like the prow of a ship moving forward (fig. 1).1

The ship-shaped elements resemble, in part, the streamline modernism,

inspired by ocean liners, of the 1920s international style. But Van de Velde’s

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   3

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 1
Henry van de
Velde, La Nouvelle
Maison, 1927–28.
Tervuren, Belgium.
© 2012 Artists
Rights Society
(ARS), New York /
SABAM, Brussels.

nautical themes and vocabulary of forms had long-term roots and emerged
independently of the Corbusian movement and moment. In Parts I and II we
identified five elements of a Congo lexicon in Van de Velde’s arts: the whip-
lash, the rubber vine, the elephantine, the curved sword, and the skin scar. His
lifelong engagement with Antwerp harbor, with fantasies of Belgium’s African
empire, and with the Tervuren Royal Congo Museum also contributed to a sixth
and last element: the continuity and coherence of what Van de Velde came to
call his distinctively Belgian “steamer style.”

Van de Velde spent his formative years in Antwerp, where his line, set free
from realism, took the form of a ship bursting through the boundary frame
as it moved toward open waters (see Part II, fig. 10). In Antwerp, Van de Velde
watched the dockers unloading massive cargoes as the harbor surged with
activity from the new traffic overseas. The entire harbor was indeed undergoing
expansion and renovation from 1877 to 1885, the very years when Van de Velde
spent many of his after-school hours captivated by the commotion there. Some
of Van de Velde’s uncles had been sea captains, and he was himself an avid and
competent sailor. His early time at the Antwerp port sparked a lifelong fascina-
tion with the structure and forms of ships and shipbuilding.

Every type of vessel vied for space in the crush of the river ways along the harbor
at this momentous and transitional period. Van de Velde was able to observe
and study the full range, from the still-vital sailing ships dominant earlier in the
century to the small-scale steamer tugboats and the rowboats filled with men,
some standing, in business suits and top hats, that set out to welcome the most
impressive of the new armada of technology: the transatlantic ocean liners. A
Belgian hub of the Red Star Line Company operated an Antwerp–New York
passenger line. In 1887 a new “Afrikadok” was built, not far from Van de Velde’s
parents’ home, for the circuit of steamers for the Congo Free State. By 1890
Antwerp had become an official port for a bimonthly Antwerp–Matadi line.
The wonders of large-scale iron plating and engineering force were celebrated

4  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 features of the Cockerill shipyards south of Antwerp, where the largest and fast-
est of the Africa fleet, the SS Léopoldville and the SS Albertville, were constructed
in Van de Velde’s world between 1894 and 1897.

The imperial origins and impact of Van de Velde’s steamer style and its particu-
larly Belgian context are a significant and missing part of the story of his cre-
ative development. Tied to two kings of Belgium and to the Tervuren museum
early and late in his career, Van de Velde defined the steamer style himself
when he recollected the event that launched him in Paris as an international
design reformer.

In December 1895 he contributed a dining room and a smoking room in Congo

wood for a pioneering hub of modernist design, the Paris Maison de l’Art Nou-
veau, conceived by Siegfried Bing (fig. 2). On visiting the exhibition and seeing
the installations, an enraged Edmond de Goncourt hurried to the exit, sputter-
ing. A collector of rococo crafts and an admirer of the Old Regime aristocratic
women for whom they were originally made, de Goncourt condemned what he
called a “delirium of ugliness” and the “denationalizing” corruption of French
taste. Where, he asked, were the legacies of the delicate, “coquettish” curves of
the furniture of “eighteenth-century indolence”? In their place, de Goncourt
lamented, he found dark, bending wood alcoves and bow windows that looked
“like ships’ portholes.” Other ghastly pieces reminded him of the slippery, molded
plasticity of “sinks” in a tawdry “dentist’s office.” De Goncourt’s comparison to the
portholes of a ship later expanded into the enduring epithet that came to define
art nouveau as an international style—it was to be known as the “yachting style.”2

Fig. 2
Henry van de Velde,
smoking room for
Siegfried Bing’s
Maison de l’Art
Nouveau, 1895.
© 2012 Artists
Rights Society
(ARS), New York /
SABAM, Brussels.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   5

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Van de Velde acknowledged and even welcomed de Goncourt’s characterization
of his work. But what the aesthete Frenchman ridiculed and derided, Van de
Velde embraced as a point of pride. Responding in his memoirs to de Gon-
court’s comments, Van de Velde asserted that his was indeed a style inspired by
sailing ships and their smooth, functional, and sturdy structures, flexible and
responsive to the water’s course. He suggested an important distinction, though,
in identifying nautical sources for his art nouveau: his was closer to a steamer
style than a yachting style.3 A student of the old and new ships at Antwerp’s bus-
tling docks, Van de Velde selected the architecture and design of the modern
transatlantic steamer as his ideal. Yachts, diminutive and elegant, he associated
with an indolent world of aristocratic dalliance. Steamers, with their churning
engines, fitted furnishings, hefty keels, and blasting smokestacks, he celebrated
for dominating the seas with technological prowess.

At the very time that Van de Velde produced for Bing the 1895 dining room and
smoking room, Belgian newspapers and journals followed the progress of the
two leading ocean liners for Congo travelers and cargo hauls. In 1897 the SS
Léopoldville was featured in a notice in La Belgique coloniale. At the ready in Ant-
werp harbor, the imposing vessel matched engine power and speed to modern
comfort and convenience, what the writer called an advanced “new style.” After
describing the equipment and iron piping, the writer singled out two rooms
for discussion: the dining room and the smoking room. Here passengers could
enjoy their time in well-lit, well-ventilated spaces with furnishings snugly set
into walls or floors.4 Van de Velde’s art nouveau Bing smoking room is simi-
larly nested in the wall, with cushioned banquettes fitted along it and sculpted
wood around windows that indeed look like sizable portholes. Just as his design
echoed elements of advances in Belgian shipboard architecture spurred by over-
seas expansion, Van de Velde’s dark wood room was actually composed of the
raw materials that steamers like the Léopoldville brought back in huge loads from
Africa: the colored hardwoods of the Congo forests.

Van de Velde’s contrast between the yacht and the steamer as an essence of his
style and consciousness corresponds strikingly to an incident with the SS Albert-
ville. In 1898 a front-page article in La Belgique coloniale covered the festivities
surrounding the departure of the new ocean liner for the Congo. The enor-
mous steamer set off with cheers on shore; a dedicated escort of smaller vessels
was assigned to accompany it to the open seas. The article went on to describe
how the elegant yachts were no match for the surge of the Albertville’s scale and
engine power. Cleaving speedily through the waves with linear force, the impe-
rial colossus quickly left the yachts a great distance behind. 5

Van de Velde pursued his early fascination with the steamer ship and the spatial
forms it inspired throughout his career. His iconic “recliner chair” (1903), with
its slatted adjustable wood notches along the sturdy frame, resembles closely the
deck chairs on the early cruise ships known to Van de Velde. At the Hohenhof
house in Hagen (1908), he built in a tight spiraling stairway in the exact shape
of a ship’s. In 1903 the German director of the Hamburg–America steamer line,
Alfred Ballin, invited Van de Velde to be his guest on a two-month transatlantic

6  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 3 (left) journey to the Orient that culminated in Egypt, a prelude to a commission for
Henry van de Velde, the design of such a ship, which was one of Van de Velde’s greatest hopes. The
smoking room on the ship
Prince Baudouin, 1934. © German kaiser dashed his dream, rejecting the proposal.6 But some years later,
2012 Artists Rights Society when he returned to Belgium after 1925, Van de Velde’s own government gave
(ARS), New York / SABAM, him that most prized project: to construct a steamer, inside and out.
Brussels.

Fig. 4 (right) In 1926, while he was building his own Tervuren home, La Nouvelle Maison,
Henry van de Velde, office which resembled a ship’s deck and prow, Van de Velde was called to submit
designed for Leopold III,
1935. © 2012 Artists Rights his own 1927 designs to redevelop part of the Antwerp harbor anew, to plan
Society (ARS), New York / shoreline buildings and warehouses for the left embankment.7 In 1930–34 the
SABAM, Brussels. architect was hired to create new interior fittings and seating for the national
railway system, both first- and second-class cars.8 Van de Velde fulfilled his nauti-
cal dream when he received a state commission in 1931 to build a transatlantic
ocean liner, to be named Prince Baudouin, after the Belgian king’s young son.
The same company shipyards, Cockerill, near Antwerp, that had constructed
the African steamers and others of his youth now worked with Van de Velde on
the new ship’s structure and interiors. Two sets of rooms—first- and second-class
smoking rooms and dining rooms—formed the design hubs of the boat. All
used the African hardwoods that Van de Velde employed in his very first smok-
ing room for Bing in 1895. In the first-class rooms on the ship, polished bubinga
wood composed the walls and furniture; in the second-class ones, limba wood
with polished chrome edging filled the interiors. The smoking room of the
Prince Baudouin (fig. 3) shows island groups of nested furniture and chairs, with
rows of portholes surrounding the room. Here Van de Velde no longer simu-
lated through integral line and bowing wood the shape of shipboard portholes,
as he had, to de Goncourt’s displeasure, in his early Paris art nouveau; rather,
he created them in earnest. Now his sleek and modern interlocking furnishings
were all aboard, encircled by the porthole windows that sealed off and looked
out onto the open seas.9

Throughout the later 1930s, Van de Velde acted as architectural adviser to the
naval administration and for Belgium’s national railways. In 1935 he designed
the capacious office for King Leopold III, which featured a splendid desk with

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   7

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ivory inlay and detailing (fig. 4). To the right of the desk, on a large wall, Van de
Velde set in spaces to hold a pair of pendant maps: one of Belgium and next to
it, the Belgian Congo.10 Van de Velde had begun his career creating a bilanga
wood cabinet to hold the ivory Mysterious Sphinx in King Leopold II’s Tervu-
ren palace, and now his last decade of work concretized a steamer style that
launched a boat across the seas, inlaid ivory in the office of another king, and
memorialized a setting where the Flemish lion ruled an African empire.

Belgian Style in Tervuren: Vandeveldische Linie

Van de Velde’s decade serving the state naval and railway system in the 1930s
reconnected him to his first official commission, which publicized art nouveau
and led to its inauguration in Belgium as the “Style Congo”: the 1897 Tervuren
Congo exhibition and King Leopold II’s Tervuren Royal Congo Museum that
followed it. Railways and river ways, steamers and locomotives, were central
components of the 1897 “Export Room” that Van de Velde had been chosen to
build to promote the benefits and opportunities for investment in the king’s
Congo Free State. Along with his discovery by Siegfried Bing, Van de Velde
had been patronized early on by Edmond van Eetvelde, secretary of state of
the Congo. Van Eetvelde coaxed the king to commission the practitioners of Fig. 5 (left)
the new design style to showcase the products, promise, and artifacts of the Gustave Serrurier-Bovy,
Congo for the 1897 Brussels World’s Fair. This meant that a Hall of Honor Import Room from the 1897
Tervuren/Congo exhibition.
for chryselephantine sculptures by artists in Belgium welcomed visitors on Collection of the Royal
entering the Tervuren palace, as we discussed in Part I. Galleries that followed Museum for Central Africa,
displayed, in succession, Congo ethnography, imports, exports, and crop Tervuren, Belgium. Photo:
Alexandre, 1897.
cultivation, all created by the modernists of art nouveau using the raw materi-
als from the Congo: Paul Hankar, Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, Henry van de Velde, Fig. 6 (right)
and Georges Hobé.11 Gustave Serrurier-Bovy,
Import Room from the 1897
Tervuren/Congo exhibition.
A giant curved mural marked the elevated boundary that set off Van de Velde’s View from the rubbery
Export Room from the Import Room that flowed directly into it from next door. portal. Collection of the
Royal Museum for Central
In that room Serrurier-Bovy exhibited the wondrous “imports” to Belgium of Africa, Tervuren, Belgium.
caoutchouc (rubber) in manifold shapes, sizes, and object types (fig. 5). Sacks Photo: Alexandre, 1897.

8  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 7
Henry van de Velde, Export
Room from the 1897
Tervuren/Congo exhibition.
© 2012 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / SABAM,
Brussels. Collection of the
Royal Museum for Central
Africa, Tervuren, Belgium.
Photo: Alexandre, 1897.

of rubber formed a neat semicircular frame around one doorway, while open
counters showed latex disks, cables, balls, and cords, along with photographs
and price boards listing the various grades collected in the Congo forests. Dra-
matic large-scale wooden arcs animated the middle of the Import Room, deftly
carved to end in a bench under each side and topped with wire-mesh netting
stuffed with lumps of latex, exposed to view. Here visitors could stop for a rest,
sitting as if under the arc of a rainbow. In this case, the rainbow bore its pot of
gold in the form of the caged rubber chunks suspended above, transposing into
physical form the widespread adage of the first decade of the king’s Congo: that
the vast treasures contained in the lianes (the wild forest vines) rained down on
lucky Belgium “like manna from heaven.”12 Serrurier-Bovy composed the gate-
way to the Import Room as a bouncy swerve of wood that both simulated the
ramping bulk of the rubber vines and took on some of the qualities of elasticity
heralded in the products displayed (fig. 6).

Van de Velde’s Export Room announced at its entryway the twin engines of
Belgian technological power that sustained the in- and outflow of Congo prod-
ucts: steamer ships and railroads. The elevated mural depicted along a map the
twists and turns of the Congo River from Boma to Stanley Pool (fig. 7). On the
upper left a transatlantic ocean liner resembling the SS Léopoldville was shown
advancing to Africa’s shore. On the mural’s lower right side a smaller steamer
appeared, puffing smoke, while a native stood in a dugout canoe alongside it.
The mural’s legend and linear marks presented the route of the vaunted Congo
Railway—“from Matadi to Stanley Pool”—the efficient modern rail system that
was expected to negate the dangers and contortions of the Congo River. By
1897, seven years of work on the rails had yielded only partial completion of
the line, under conditions widely known as murderous and Sisyphean.13 Van de

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   9

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 8
Henry van de Velde, Export
Room from the 1897
Tervuren/Congo exhibition,
featuring fabric stalls and
costume jewelry. © 2012
Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / SABAM, Brussels.
Collection of the Royal
Museum for Central Africa,
Tervuren, Belgium. Photo:
Alexandre, 1897.

Velde’s Export Room’s giant signpost neutrally presented the railway progress
by marking the map with dark ink, inscribing the portions still to be built with
dotted rather than unbroken lines. King Leopold II celebrated what he called
the interlinking network of “chemins de fer” and “chemins de la mer” (rail-
roads and river ways) as the transformative agents of progress that would turn
the Congo, like Belgium, into a circuit of international transport and trade.14
Van de Velde’s Export Room mural showed the component parts of this circuit
to the Belgian public in 1897 as it was operating in Africa.

Just beneath the elevated mural, Van de Velde created an expansive wood portal
shaped into the sinuous forms of two snake heads meeting at the center. The
steamer and the railway appeared again inside the Export Room. One wall dis-
played an oversize drawing of a locomotive; a glass case in front of it contained a
model of a paddle steamer, much like the one in the mural (see fig. 7). But the
main purpose of the room was to present the profusion of products that were
now considered necessary for the Congo and the opportunities for companies in
Belgium to manufacture and supply them. Primary among these were the com-
modities for the reputedly more than ten million natives waiting to be civilized.

Filling the airy hall, Van de Velde designed and installed furnishings and
fittings of many kinds—armoires, display cases, tiered tables, counters, and
booths—to showcase the exports. There was a musée commercial that included
equipment for the Belgian pioneers as well as merchandise for the Congolese.
Van de Velde’s wide, glassed-in wood cabinet contained a number of white pith
helmets, while tailor’s mannequins draped dress uniforms for station com-
manders and agents. Suspended nearby on the walls were rubberized imperme-
ables, or rain ponchos, coverings required for the tropical seasons, made out of
the latex materials in the Import Room next door. Van de Velde also crafted

10  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 lighter-weight and springy Congo wood display tables with elegant curves to
house on their open shelves innumerable supplies manufactured for overseas
recruits, from pitchers, crockery, and cutlery to toiletries and medicine jars.
Along the floor could be seen stacks of trunks, crates, and tool kits, many with
the names of their manufacturers visible.

The multitude of products intended for the natives fell into two categories:
costume jewelry, especially thick strands of pearls and glass beads, and clothing
fabric (fig. 8). Through the middle of the hall Van de Velde constructed stylish
cabinets and interlocking counters where Belgian companies, their names vis-
ible, pinned rows of necklaces and bracelets created for Congo markets. More
prominent were the booths and rows of fabric stalls that lined an entire wall and
spilled over into the midsection of the large Export Room. Van de Velde found
an ingenious and streamlined method to display double-decker bolts of fabric
that advertised the wares of the diverse Belgian textile manufacturers buoyed by
the prospects of millions of Congo customers.15 He also mounted sturdy packing
wraps to form the base of these textile booths, reminding the viewer inspecting
each type of cloth of the mode by which it was to be transported and stacked in
the steamer ships so conspicuous in his Export Room.

While industrial jewelry and textiles thrived from the stimulus of the Congo
Free State demand, the main impact on the export segment of the Belgian
economy for Africa grew out of armaments and weapons manufactures, head-
quartered in Liège. The empire of magnate John Cockerill extended in the
1890s both to the shipyards of Van de Velde’s Antwerp where transatlantic
steamers were built and to the Cockerill Seraing steel- and ironworks in Liège;
here cartridges for the rifles sent to the Congo Free State were made.16 Van
de Velde’s Export Room contained no displays for these most profitable and
continually demanded items. But one art nouveau colleague of his in Liège did
devote a modernist facade on a new building to that most important export to
the Congo—weapons (fig. 9). The entryway with the words “Fabrique d’Armes”

Fig. 9
Sgraffito panel of the former
arms factory of Lambert/
Sevart, 1897. Liège, Belgium.
Photo: Rebexho. Creative
Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
License.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   11

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 showed below it a sgraffito panel with a scene of a pith-helmeted official on
shore, his ocean liner visible on the seas behind him in the distance. He is
engaged in instructing a local on how to lock and load a rifle, and he is pointing
to the trigger mechanism. Beside him is a box with the rest of the rifles marked
“Exportation” on the side and bearing on top the name of the manufacturer:
“Lambert/Sevart, Fabrique d’Armes.”17

Although he created no displays for the weapons industry, Van de Velde’s art
nouveau Export Room did include one key dimension of the export trade dem-
onstrating the militarization that sustained the king’s Free State. In a section
of the hall following the musée commercial, Van de Velde furnished an exhibit
area for the manufacturers of army uniforms for the Congo native troops, the
Force publique.18 Already 18,000 strong by 1889, the native security forces were
provided an indigo blue uniform much like the one for the army infantrymen
in Belgium. Belgium’s nonconscription army and its status of perpetual neutral-
ity meant that demand for uniforms at home was relatively flat, and the whole
enterprise was radically underfunded until 1909. Indeed, recruits and even
officers in Belgium’s army were ridiculed in the 1880s and 1890s for having to
darn their own socks and repair their own fraying uniforms—that is, for sewing
like women and not engaging in fighting.19

Natives formed the shock troops of King Leopold’s Congo Free State—ini-
tially Zanzibaris but soon Congolese, who were pressed into years of service by
promises of meager pay or by force. Back in Belgium, pride and incuriosity com-
mingled in public reactions to the news about the recruitment and operations
of the Free State’s Force publique. But the boom in the uniform business was
spectacular, and the companies on show in Van de Velde’s 1897 Export Room
were also suppliers to the Belgian army. For the Congo troops’ uniforms, they
used the same color and fabric—blue serge—to create tunics and short pants,
with variations as well of the Belgian army kepi cap. The outfits were comple-
mented by leather overstraps and ammunition pouches around the waist. These
military accoutrements for export to Africa were also manufactured for and
used by the army in Belgium.

When he died in 1957, Van de Velde was buried next to his wife, Maria, in
Tervuren near his private residence there, the nautical Nouvelle Maison. The
furniture he had made for the Export Room remained for some time in the
Tervuren Royal Congo Museum but was eventually dispersed. Some of it was
lost or possibly burned as firewood by the Germans in one of the two world wars
when Belgium was invaded.20 The expansive armoire from the 1897 fair that
Van de Velde designed to showcase exports of pith helmets and officer uniforms
was transferred to the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, where it
remains in the storeroom.21

The Tervuren Congo exhibition, and the museum that issued from it, however,
had other significant roles to play in sustaining Van de Velde’s reputation for
pioneering modernism and for promoting its distinctively Belgian qualities. In
1959 the official journal of the museum, Congo-Tervuren, published an article
entitled “De ‘Belgische stijl’ te Tervuren” (The “Belgian Style” in Tervuren).

12  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 By that time art nouveau had entered the canon of art and architectural history
as a pan-European and international style. The article’s author, Jean van de
Voort, sought to reclaim art nouveau for Tervuren, for King Leopold II, and
for Belgium. The article discussed the prominence of the “new style” in 1897,
republishing archival photos of the chryselephantine Hall of Honor as well as
Van de Velde’s Export Room; the images captured the dynamic curving furni-
ture wrapping around those booths and counters for the costume jewelry and
fabrics discussed above (see fig. 8).

Van de Voort emphasized two key points in 1959. First, he maintained that Bel-
gian art nouveau was inextricably linked to what he called the “Leopold II style.”
This he defined as a wide-ranging architectural initiative by the forward-looking
king, who had built modern Belgium in such monuments as the iron and glass
Laeken greenhouses, the Antwerp Central Railway Station, and the Tervuren
palace itself. Second, he celebrated the divergence of Van de Velde as designer
and theorist from other variants of art nouveau. With its thickly sinuous wood
and directional rhythm, the 1897 Export Room typified a Belgian origin and a
Belgian modern style. The indulgent excesses of what was known as the “maca-
roni style” and the frivolity of the so-called “yachting style,” the author contin-
ued, differed greatly from the essence of Van de Velde’s innovative work: the
“Vandeveldische Linie,” the structuring “line of force” or “line as a force.” 22 Thus,
just a few months before Belgium was caught by surprise by an uprising for inde-
pendence in its African colony, the Congo-Tervuren magazine, with King Leopold
II on horseback on its cover, proudly reasserted the integral connection between
Belgian art nouveau and the Style Congo generated by the vaunted king’s impe-
rial and architectural vision.

The Tervuren Museum and Cultural Histories of Violence,

1897–2011: Past and Present, Larger Issues

By focusing on the interaction of past and present, avant-garde and society, in

the Tervuren Royal Congo Museum, three larger issues for reinterpreting the
material cultures of empire emerge. The first is the challenge and possibilities
of a cultural history of imperial violence and, in the Belgian case, the particular
dynamic of violence at a distance. In this concluding part of my study, I bring
back to the interpretive field a critically missing part of the story of Leopoldian
society by recovering the foundational role of violence in Belgian national
identity and collective self-definition after 1830 and examining how the creation
of a cultural system as a nation of victims and avengers may have interacted with
patterns of violence in the Congo.

Two other distinctive features of the Belgian case arise which have some striking
contemporary resonance. The first is the form of the nonsettler colony, and
the cultural dynamic set off by distance, uninflected by direct experience. In
this research, I have found that the arts played an unusually constitutive role in
filling the gap of physical distance and cultural difference, arrayed as dramatic
abstractions that echoed the king’s redemptive antinomies for his Congo mis-
sion: from barbarism to civilization, from slavery to freedom.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   13

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
To be sure, all European colonizers in the nineteenth century employed this
general pairing and the ideology propelling and legitimizing it—to bring civili-
zation to backward people. But the power of this dualistic category tended to be
leavened by the complexities and interactions of settlement in the colonies. The
British and the French, for example, rallied state and society to official policies
of expansionism as a “civilizing mission” (mission civilisatrice): adding colonies
inhered with the promise of, and the investments necessary for, transforming
subject peoples into citizens of the nation. In the case of Belgium, however, the
appeal to “civilization and barbarism” defined and sustained a very different
overseas enterprise in the period of the Congo Free State (1885–1908), and the
abstract category shaped more than two decades of empire at a distance, shorn
of nationalizing imperatives—a matter of products, not people. King Leopold
was given permission to administer the Congo as a “personal union.”

14  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 He galvanized others to join him as private citizens, not in the name of a
national, and costly, civilizing mission but as votaries of what he called a grand
“mouvement civilisateur”—a civilizing movement to extirpate the slave trade and
provoke liberty and economic benefit for all through the penetration of laissez-
faire markets.23

The nonsettler empire of extraction in a “free state” ruled by the King of the
Belgians sent only a small number of personnel to operate the vast domain on
the ground—338 in 1890, 691 in 1895, and 1700 in 1908.24 As a project that
explicitly rejected national mobilization, the fanfare and publicity of official
honors were denied to “pioneers” in the Congo, and no state burial rites were
accorded to them; if the remains of the dead did indeed return home (and
many did not), Belgian heroes from the Congo Free State were celebrated as
morts pour la civilization, not for la patrie.25

The reduced ranks and ambiguous status of Belgian imperial officers in the
Congo activated correspondingly thin imaginative resources to describe what
one contemporary in 1894 called Belgium’s “quasi colonie.” 26 As a representa-
tion of a representation, the antimony of civilization and barbarism may have
persisted in more uninflected ways, and extended its reach for longer, in the
case of Belgium and the Congo than it did for other European colonial regimes.
Twelve years into the Leopoldian administration, for example, the dualism of
civilization and barbarism not only shaped the Wolfers ivory tribute sculpture
for Edmond van Eetvelde (see Part I, fig. 6) but also formed the robust proto-
type for exhibiting the Congo to the Belgian public. The 1897 Tervuren Congo
section of the Brussels World’s Fair displayed the chryselephantine group in its
Fig. 10 (left)
Hélène de Rudder, entry Hall of Honor surrounded by a series of enormous embroidered tapestry
Barbarism (one of a series panels by the artists Hélène and Isidore de Rudder, including Barbarism and Civi-
of eight monumental lization at the center. On one side of the paired set, the barbares were depicted in
embroideries for the
Tervuren exposition), 1897. the process of killing one another, with bodies writhing and daggers plunging
Colored silk on linen. Height: into flesh (fig. 10); on the other, a kneeling native was shown chiseling the word
232 cm (915⁄16 in.); width: “LEX” onto stone tablets, overseen by a splendidly dressed European woman
122 cm (48 in.). Collection
of the Royal Museums of shown seated and reading an open book—“Civilization” (fig. 11). These panels
Art and History, Brussels, remained prominently displayed in the Tervuren Royal Congo Museum and in
Belgium. Photo: Alexandre, its collection until 1967.27
1897, collection of the Royal
Museum for Central Africa,
Tervuren, Belgium. A second, related issue is the interaction of national leader and the institutions,
networks, and mentalities that facilitated and sustained the imperial enterprise.
Fig. 11 (right)
Hélène de Rudder, In the Belgian case, a constellation of factors—including, I argue, a highly
Civilization (one of a series decentralized state, new nation status, laissez-faire excess, the frustrations of
of eight monumental imposed neutrality, and an invented tradition of a lost warrior culture—con-
embroideries for the
Tervuren exposition), 1897. verged to grant the King of the Belgians free reign to claim and own another
Colored silk on linen. Height: country and become its sovereign and absolutist ruler. Historians’ fascination
232 cm (915⁄16 in.); width: with the character of Leopold II has deflected attention from the deep entangle-
122 cm (48 in.). Collection
of the Royal Museums of ment of all sectors of Belgian government and society with the king’s Congo and
Art and History, Brussels, the variety of motives and interests that surfaced to protect it despite years of
Belgium. Photo: Alexandre, crushing evidence of corruption and atrocities and intense internal and interna-
1897, collection of the Royal
Museum for Central Africa, tional criticism; these ranged from credulousness, cupidity, and complaisance,
Tervuren, Belgium. to craving for national grandeur.28

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness  15

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Finally, in considering the ways the Tervuren museum and the broader publics
in Belgium today approach colonial denial and revision, we enter a force field
of both conscious and unconscious elements, and we need to attend to both
conscious and unconscious patterns, to cognitive styles of argument as well as
to the expressive forms, pressures, and persistence of long-term cultural habits,
two examples of which appear at the end of this article.

The Royal Congo Museum, 1904–2005

Personally founded and funded by King Leopold II in 1904 and opened in 1910,
the Tervuren Royal Congo Museum remained largely untouched for nearly a
century, a virtual petrified forest of imperial triumphalism and a gargantuan
container of the booty and bounty that resulted from its distinctive policy of
extraction (fig. 12). When King Leopold hired Frenchman Charles Girault to
build a Congo museum as a larger version of the Petit Palais and the Versailles
Trianon that inspired it, the external structure was completed quickly (fig. 13).
But for five years Girault wrestled with a representational impasse; he discov-
ered few visual options for symbolic expression in the interior spaces. In Paris,
Girault’s Petit Palais’s halls and ceilings configured allegories and historical
episodes in urban and national life, such as Alfred Roll’s Marianne, the symbol
of the French Third Republic, flying across the gallery skies. In Girault’s Royal
Museum in Tervuren, in the end, the vaulted ceilings remained blank, and
unbroken sheets of patterned marble formed the bulk of the cavernous cor-
ridors inside (fig. 14).29

Interspersed among them, giant maps filled the room walls with various aspects
of the Congo—product locations, political districts, and explorers’ expedition

Fig. 12
Tervuren gallery, ca. 1898.
Collection of the Royal
Museum for Central Africa,
Tervuren, Belgium.

16  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 13
Charles Girault, Royal
Museum for Central Africa,
1904–10. Tervuren, Belgium.
Collection of the Royal
Museum for Central Africa,
Tervuren, Belgium.
Photo J. Van de Vyver,
© RMCA Tervuren.

routes of discovery and conquest (see fig. 19). The wall maps gave permanent
and monumental forms to a Belgian imperial culture marked by exhilaration that
a small, new, and neutral nation had “acquired” one-thirteenth of the African
continent, outwitting and outmaneuvering the Great Powers; it also sealed in
the palace walls the thrill of successful mapmaking on a grand scale, a glorious
reversal of Belgium’s own national destiny as an artificial country shaped, con-
strained, and cobbled together by European diplomats in 1830. One sign of this
exhilaration is a genre of maps from 1885 to 1920 called “comparative grandeur,”
which show Belgium to scale in the lower left of a Congo map; some even include
a printed text on the map to make the point with a favorite statistic: “The Congo
is eighty times larger than Belgium.”30 A more excessive but repeated pattern in
this Belgian colonial imaginary emerged with the fantasy of the Congo superim-
posed over the map of Europe, which covered not one but two continents. These

Fig. 14
Ethnographic Hall. Collection
of the Royal Museum
for Central Africa, 1910.
Tervuren, Belgium.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   17

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 15 (left)
Arsène Matton, Slavery, 1929.
Collection of the Royal Museum
for Central Africa, Tervuren,
Belgium. Photo: V. Everarts,
© RMCA Tervuren.

Fig. 16 (bottom)
Herbert Ward, Le
dessinateur, 1910. Plaster.
Height: 85 cm (33½ in.),
width: 150 cm (591⁄16 in.).
Collection of the Royal
Museum for Central Africa,
Tervuren, Belgium. Photo:
J. Van de Vyver, © RMCA
Tervuren.

are some elements of the cultural register underlying the iconography of giant
cartography set as the permanent walls of the Royal Museum.31

Despite evidence compiled by generations of writers and critics within and

outside Belgium, the Royal Congo Museum remained frozen in time and locked
in silence, the most visible and provocative embodiment of what has been called
“the great forgetting” in Belgian official culture and education. This collective
forgetting encompassed burying the record of a history that had forced the
nation to annex King Leopold’s colony in 1908, finally acknowledging the dev-
astation wrought by a Belgian “red rubber” regime.32

Until 2005, no trace or mention of destroyed Congolese cultures and communi-

ties appeared in the Tervuren museum, though it did contain a “Hall of Memory”
dedicated to 1,508 Belgian colonial pioneers. Visitors enter the museum to a

18  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 grand marble rotunda ringed by elevated niche statues, large-scale gilded allego-
ries including Belgium Bringing Security to the Congo, Belgium Bringing Well-Being to
the Congo, and Slavery, representing the fearsome Arab slaver that Belgian libera-
tors were summoned to destroy (fig. 15).33 Positioned below the statues are the
lowly recipients of Belgian benevolence, a series of seated and blackened bronze
figures by Herbert Ward including a hunched-up “chief” holding his spear
and an “artist” pushing his finger along the ground to sketch between splayed
legs (fig. 16). Other instances of Congolese natives in Tervuren are Samba, the
portly pygmy in colonial uniform who greets visitors at the café (fig. 17), and the
ten-foot painted plaster figure who still draws most of the crowds in the central
marble gallery—the hooded Leopard Man, the Aniota of 1913 (fig. 18). Part of
a Congo “secret society,” according to the appended text, the Aniota, equipped
with lethal iron claws and spotted-skin costume, uses the cover of animal disguise
to commit murder. One Belgian fascinated by the Aniota display at Tervuren,
Georges Rémi, known as Hergé, adapted the figure as a character in his 1931
Tintin au Congo. Like the Aniota artist, Paul Wissaert, and King Leopold II before
him, Hergé had never set foot in the Congo. Thus, for almost a century, a wall of
silence reigned regarding the millions of natives who died under Belgian rule,
while millions of museum visitors beheld a dramatic embodiment of a Congo
tribesman caught in the act of killing one of his own people.

Fig. 18
Paul Wissaert,
L’homme-léopard,
Fig. 17 1913. Collection of
Samba, pygmy the Royal Museum
dressed in colonial for Central Africa,
garb, standing Tervuren, Belgium.
outside the © 2012 Artists
museum cafeteria, Rights Society
Tervuren, Belgium. (ARS), New York /
Collection of SABAM, Brussels.
Pierre Hofman.
Photo: Author.
Reproduced with
the permission of
Pierre Hofman.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness  19

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
In 2002 the museum’s role as a carrier of the “great forgetting” finally began
to give way. The Belgian government announced that year that the Tervuren
museum would be reorganized under a new director, Guido Gryseels. The plan
was for the museum to remain open to the public during a long renovation
process, which was to be completed in 2010, coinciding with the hundredth
anniversary of the opening of the first Royal Congo Museum. The first phase
of the museum’s renewal unfolded in a major exhibition designed to take a
comprehensive historical look at the colonial past, entitled Memory of the Congo:
The Colonial Era (La mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial), which ran from April to
September 2005.

According to reports, it was the combined impact of two books that finally
compelled the government to accommodate new realities in the Royal Museum.
Belgian writer Ludo De Witte’s book documented official involvement in
Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, prompting a government apology.34 But most
disturbing was the 1998 book by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story
of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, a celebrated and best-selling work
by an American writer, published in Belgium in 1999. Hochschild marshaled
extensive evidence to chronicle the systemic and unprecedented brutality of the
Leopoldian regime, the voracity that infected its national and international ben-
eficiaries as well as the king, and its formidable capacities to resist an army of
powerful critics. Hochschild’s riveting story uncovered some new sources while
also highlighting published accounts, especially the multivolume works of the
1990s by former Belgian diplomat Jules Marchal. Marchal spent years research-
ing and ferreting out previously inaccessible government archives in order to
document the wretched history of Leopold’s Congo Free State and the conti-
nuity of forced labor in the Belgian Congo from 1910 to 1945. While largely
ignored by professional historians and official circles, Marchal’s work has been
read by many in Belgium, and Hochschild’s renowned and brilliant narrative
catapulted the Congo to the center of public debate.

King Leopold’s Ghost generated a polarized reception in Belgium, divided

between reverent admiration and vigorous denunciation. One of the scholarly
leaders of Congo history, Jean Stengers, whose many works provided some of
the evidentiary basis for Hochschild’s book, derided the author by suggesting he
was motivated by the desire to attract the attention of the public—especially the
African American public.35

The Royal Museum’s new director admitted in interviews that he was “shocked”
when he read Hochschild’s book, which was full of what he called “revelations”
that “are pretty hard hitting.” Gryseels, then age forty-nine, confirmed the
power of the great forgetting when he explained that while educated in the
1960s and 1970s, he had never “heard a critical word about our colonial past,”
that “no one really talked about it,” and that “my generation was brought up
with the view that Belgium brought civilization to Congo, that we did noth-
ing but good out there.” Gryseels went on to acknowledge that visitors to the
museum do not “find any information about the allegations made” in Hoch-
schild’s or other books. In planning the first Memory of the Congo exhibition, Gry-
seels explained, the museum would begin the process of renewal by providing a

20  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 broad, balanced, and inclusive view with multiple historians’ perspectives, thus
affording the visitor the “scientific” materials to “make up his own mind.”36

La mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial, 2005

The Memory of the Congo exhibition unfolded in broad thematic groupings of

vague chronology. The show relied on what brochures called a “multidisci-
plinary” and “multimedia” method and emphasized multiple viewpoints. In the
words of one video playing in the show, experience varies, and “there are as
many interpretations as there are witnesses.” This approach meant a welter of
varied forms of display, including, in the same rooms, videos, music, computer
stations, laminate cards, poster boards, wall texts, and glass cases, awkwardly
juxtaposed with the permanent structures, such as the giant map walls of the
explorer and conquest routes of 1910 (fig. 19). The additive array and scatter-
shot arrangement, squeezed into the existing framework and core collections
of the palace, gave spatial expression to the daunting challenge to collective
memory caught between long-term structures and a barrage of new materials
released from suppression.

The appeal to capacious objectivity and plural points of view inhered with its
own patterns of selection, and the show took shape as an exercise in tepid and
reluctant revisionism. Visual and textual displays in the exhibition expressed
a number of consistent strategies. Among them were relativization (seeing
events and practices in the context of their time and the long view of history);
equivocation (everyone else did it, and others profited as well; for example, a
1908 cartoon presented King Leopold reminding America’s Uncle Sam to ask
no questions and keep his conscience “elastic” while reaping the US share of
rubber dividends, and comparison with the Peruvian Amazon rubber trade
showed worse treatment of native forced laborers and more casualties); the
rationalization of violence (Central Africa had a preexisting violent history, and
brutalities, including “the mutilations,” were “widespread” before the arrival
of the Belgians); and deflection (impugning the critic rather than facing the
criticism). Each of these strategies recapitulated the language, habits of mind,
and styles of argument that typified those employed by King Leopold and his
supporters in responding to the first waves of atrocity charges in the 1890s and

Fig. 19
Galleries from
the exhibition
La memoire du
Congo: Le temps
colonial, 2005.
Royal Museum
for Central Africa,
Tervuren, Belgium.
Photo: Author.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   21

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
after, especially in the reliance on the antinomy of barbarism and civilization
to implicate the natives in their own victimization. The 2005 show returned
to the Leopoldian conception that the centuries-long traditions of barbarism
and “sanguinary customs” indigenous to the Congo made the region unusually
prone to violence, which would only gradually recede and might, in some cases,
infect Western agents.

In emphasizing the role of long-term legacies in the museum’s contemporary

commemoration, both architectural and mental frameworks interacted to
assemble the materials of history, so long disregarded, along specifically Belgian
lines of colonial justification. The Tervuren exhibition suggested there may be
spatial and cultural limits built into the recovery of colonial memory in the cen-
ter of a national monument designed to suppress it. But Memory of the Congo also
unwittingly directs us to some avenues beyond these limits by exploring nation-
ally specific forms, patterns, and contexts of a cultural history of violence.

Toward a Cultural History of Violence

In its summary statement on colonial brutalities, the Memory show cautioned

visitors to move beyond “sentiment” to dispassionate study of “a history of the
Congo basin” in “its own right” in the fifty years between 1870 and 1920. Rather
than reducing the story to a “theater of horrors” and “the balefulness of one
man” (a reference to Hochschild’s portrayal of King Leopold), a sober approach
to the Congo context was needed, which would include the precolonial and
preexisting patterns of African violence; plausible historical explanation, the
exhibition booklet stated, would arise only with this full “social and cultural
analysis of the Congo of that era.”37

But what if we take this charge back to Belgium and take account of the precolo-
nial and preexisting patterns within Belgium in its own right, which is unmen-
tioned in the show and has never been studied? If we raise this question and
move beyond “the balefulness of one man” here, we discover another context
of an unusual, “widespread,” and graphic violence at the center of an emergent
national history and collective identity. This internal cultural history and its
distinctive patterns have never been taken into account in the interpretation of
the Leopoldian regime.

Foundational Violence and Invented

Traditions in Belgium, 1830–1909

During the years from its independence in 1830 through King Leopold’s reign
(1865–1909), a new national history was being written in Belgium: a history of
invasion, resistance, and revenge against successive waves of foreign conquerors,
alternating humiliating subjugation with exalted liberation. The decades pre-
ceding the Congo regime engaged Belgians—both Flemish and Walloons—in
the process of consolidating an invented tradition that glorified intrepid and
murderous warriors as unifying figures for their new national history. In town

22  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 squares and popular novels, across a range of literary, historical, and visual
culture, the courageous warrior appeared, composing a lineage of quintessen-
tial Belgian-ness, what was called belgitude. This pantheon of heroes, culled from
varied episodes of the prenational past, embodied the qualities of a nation of
victims, martyrs, and avengers, a nation, in the words of the 1880 jubilee poem,
“forged in blood” and “fertilized by blood.”38

The invented militants who sprang up across Belgium included the ancient
Eburon insurgent Ambiorix, who defied Caesar, composed as a large statue in
Tongres/Tongeren in 1866. In 1887 a new monument was erected in the central
square of Brugge/Bruges to commemorate the citizens Breydal and Conick, a
weaver and a butcher who in 1302 led Flemish commoners in the Battle of the
Golden Spurs, annihilating a greatly superior force of French noblemen knights
Fig. 20 and carrying off some seven hundred pieces of the enemies’ gilded footwear as
James Ensor, Battle of the war trophies.39
Golden Spurs, 1895. Etching
on paper; sheet: 9 7⁄8 × 12¾ in.;
image: 7 × 9½ in. Literary and visual depictions of the Battle of the Golden Spurs abounded in
Smith College Museum the decades after Belgium’s independence. The first best seller and popular
of Art, Northampton,
Massachusetts. Purchased. novel of the new nation, Hendrik Conscience’s 1838 The Lion of Flanders (De
SC 1949:23. © VAGA. Leeuw van Vlaanderen), was devoted entirely to this event, dramatizing with

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   23

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 vivid detail the ferocious encounter between the Flemish foot soldiers and
the French noblemen cavalry, known by their banners as the Lion’s Claws
(or “men of the talons”) and the Lilies. Conscience described what he called
the “fierce delight” of the commoner fighters as they lured the knight horse-
men and struck them with rudimentary poleaxes, butcher’s cleavers, boar
spears, halberds, and weapons that came to be known as the Goedendags—the
“Good Days”—long staffs with iron points. “With grim humor,” Conscience
recounted, in a narrative repeated in history books from midcentury on, the
Flemish tradesmen soldiers met the fallen French knights, who opened their
visors to surrender, with a lethal greeting—a “Good Day” in the form of a
blade to the face.40

Conscience had been galvanized to write his book, in part, by a painting of the
Battle of the Golden Spurs created in 1836 by the prominent artist Nicaise de
Keyser. The monumental painting (sixteen by twenty feet), which re-created the
frenzy and brutality of the fourteenth-century battle, was shown in the Brussels
Salon before it was permanently set into the Kortrijk Cloth Hall in 1841.41 Later
in the century, the artist James Ensor extended the theme of “grim humor” in
his 1891 drawing and 1895 hand-colored etching of the Battle of the Golden
Spurs, with visible Goedendags at the ready amid a melee on the swampy
battlefield (fig. 20). The critic and poet Émile Verhaeren discussed this image
as a fusion of the carnival and the slaughterhouse (abattoir), a form of “ludic
violence” where “grotesque gaiety” accompanies the slicing of bodies. Ensor’s
image is for Verhaeren a cartoon-like kermesse (carnival) of overfill and overkill
in a sprawling pictorial space showing detached legs, heads, and arms littering
the ground, still covered in their armored casings.42

Til Ulenspiegel, the “Avenger of Flanders,”

and Charles de Coster at the École militaire

The members of the new Belgian warrior cult were celebrated for their display
of unflinching courage, appearing either jubilant in welcoming death without
surrender or merciless in a victory that unleashed ferocious violence commen-
surate with the suffering experienced, a cycle of violence endured and violence
avenged. A key figure concentrating both qualities of the intrepid warrior is Til
Ulenspiegel, the hero of the 1867 book by Charles de Coster celebrated in 1894
as the “bible of the nation” and still read by schoolchildren in Belgium.43 Setting
the story in the midst of the Dutch revolt of 1570s and 1580s, de Coster trans-
formed a folk comic trickster into a rebel insurgent. His Til Ulenspiegel is the
“avenger of Flanders” against Spanish oppression and its waves of atrocities. Til’s
course is set when his father is burned at the stake and both he and his mother
are tortured as heretics; banished from his town, his ensuing “heroical adven-
tures” alternate between amorous conquests and murderous furies against the
Duke of Alba’s mercenary troops. Til wears a small pouch of his father’s ashes
around his neck to “keep the fires of vengeance burning”; aroused to battle, he
chants in readiness his incantatory vow repeated throughout the book: “The
ashes beat upon my heart.” Wrath and combat follow as Til exhorts his com-
rades to “Kill! Kill! . . . Kill without mercy!” He imagines nailing the Spanish

24  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 “king’s bloody heart above the gate of Brussels.” Til’s companion Lamme
Goedzak responds that if he “caught” Alba, “that duke of blood,” he would make
him “drink the blood he has shed” and “tear out his heart from his breast and
make him eat it raw and poisoned.”44

Charles de Coster’s sprawling epic of truculence, valor, and vengeance has criti-
cal importance and long-term legacies for both nationalism and imperialism in
Belgium between 1870 and 1905.45 The book left significant traces in the world
of the art nouveau and the avant-garde: Henry van de Velde was so enamored of
Ulenspiegel, for example, that he named two of his children after the book’s main
characters, Thyl and Nele, and one of his very first efforts in the applied arts
was to create an embossed leather book cover for La légende d’Ulenspiegel.46 Victor
Horta’s library included the 1914 large-format lavish edition of de Coster’s work
with color illustrations by Amédée Lynen.47 And de Coster’s militant hero made
his way to the galleries in Tervuren: among the prized core collections of the
first Congo museum was an ivory statuette of Til Ulenspiegel and his lover, Nele,
by one of King Leopold II’s favorite sculptors, Charles Samuel.48

Three broader features of de Coster and his work need to be emphasized as

well, as they highlight the forms and force of a collective culture of violence
taking shape in Belgium in the five decades after its independence. First, de
Coster developed the Til story from his activities as a Brussels archivist, where
he joined a circle of liberal historians, professors, and writers determined to
install the period of the Spanish occupation at the center of the new national
narrative. Led by Jacques Altmeyer, this group recovered and republished
scores of sixteenth-century atrocity documents—pamphlets, prints, diaries,
trial records, torture sessions, execution lists, and massacre sites among
them—and collected them under a rubric, from 1853, called the “Tribunals de
sang” (Councils of Blood).49 De Coster incorporated some of this newly recon-
stituted history of the “Spanish Fury” directly into his 1867 epic novel, invest-
ing it with vivid specificity and often excruciatingly detailed graphic violence
that cast the suffering of the sixteenth-century Flemish victims as if they were
reliving it. 50

Second, de Coster immersed himself in the folklore, legends, and popular

religious culture of the early modern Low Countries. He laced Ulenspiegel with
episodes of sorcery, werewolves, magic, and animism drawn from dense research
into the past as well as from the continuing vibrancy of these popular prac-
tices in his contemporary Belgium. 51 In two instances, for example, de Coster
describes Til looking for a “main de gloire” (glory hand)—a hand cut off from
the body of a dead criminal, punished by hanging, that was deemed to have
magical properties. 52 A special issue of the journal Le folklore Brabançon devoted
to identifying de Coster’s popular sources for Ulenspiegel explained that the main
de gloire was a prized object that cast a spell, rendering the person carrying it
invisible; in some cases, the talismanic hand could act to freeze and “stupefy” all
of those in its purview.53 This Le folklore entry on de Coster and the main de gloire
was published in 1927. It went on to detail a customary recipe for preserving
such a severed hand, which called for marinating the hand in particular herbs,
salt, and pepper, then roasting, smoking, and drying it.54

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   25

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Third, a startling and rarely mentioned fact is that de Coster spent almost a
decade, 1870–79, as a professor of history and literature at two institutions of
the new Belgium, the École militaire and the École de guerre. Here he would
have taught many of the young officer recruits who volunteered for service in
the formative period of the Congo. 55 De Coster’s employer and friend Gen-
eral Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Liagre, director of the military schools, was an avid
geographer, astronomer, and Freemason and a fervent early supporter of King
Leopold’s expansion into Africa. Liagre served on the 1877 Commission for
the International African Association (AIA) that sponsored the first expedi-
tions to Tanganyika. As a member of that commission, he was one of those who
chose the flag for the new territory—a gold star on a deep blue background,
closely resembling the colors and emblem of his Freemasonry society. Liagre
participated in banquets and lectures organized to attract student military
trainees, demoralized by the meager opportunities for promotion in a neutral
army, to serve as explorers and state officers in the Congo, which had their
intended effect. 56

Imperial Antwerp and Brabo the Avenger

with the Severed Hand, 1887

Perhaps the most dramatic instance of an expressive culture of violence that

coursed through Leopoldian Belgium was the ancestor claimed and refash-
ioned in Antwerp in 1887 with provocative salience for Belgian brutality in the
Congo Free State: the avenger with the severed hand. Explanations for the
grisly uniqueness of Belgian imperialism—the practice of hand-severing as
proof that bullets had not been wasted—are incomplete and usually attributed,
if at all, to Belgians’ excessive thrift and punctiliousness. My evidence suggests
that it was not only a pathology of accounting but an element of cultural frame-
work that Belgians brought with them.

In 1887 a monumental fountain was unveiled in the center of Antwerp by art

nouveau sculptor Jef Lambeaux (fig. 21). 57 Antwerp had just completed the
modernization and dramatic redevelopment of its harbor to accommodate the
rapid expansion of international trade. Steamers loaded with supplies departed
for Matadi and returned filled with Congo cargo of timber, latex, palm oil, and
ivory tusks; by 1887, the surge of activity yielded a special site, the “Afrikadok,”
for the Congo Free State traffic. Antwerp now rivaled Liverpool and London as
a hub of global commerce. 58

In the sixteenth century, at the height of Antwerp’s glory days as a center of

trade, Mercury, fleet of foot with pouch of gold, stood as the governing symbol
of its prosperity. 59 Lambeaux reached back to the legends of the city’s origins
to create a symbol of the new vitality of Antwerp in the imperial age, casting
a colossal statue not of a messenger of the gods but of a soldier of vengeance.
Mercury points up to divine wisdom as the source of worldly gold; Brabo fixes
his gaze intently forward, taking aim, and concentrates his full bodily force
moments before flinging a giant severed hand into the river Scheldt.

26  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 21
Jef Lambeaux, detail
of Silvius Brabo
flinging the giant
Druon Antigoon’s
hand into the river
Scheldt from the
Brabo fountain,
1887. Antwerp,
Belgium. Photo:
© Jan Kranendonk/
123RF.COM.

Ancient urban chronicles identified Silvius Brabo, a captain in Caesar’s army,

as the founder of Antwerp, who liberated the city from a terrorizing giant. The
giant, Druon Antigoon, guarded the shores and demanded payment of tolls
from incoming ships; if refused, he would cut off the hand of the skipper. Brabo,
small but intrepid, challenged the giant, killed him, and hacked off his hand,
hurling it into the sea and thereby giving the city its name, Antwerp, from the
Dutch Hand Werpen—the throwing of the hand. The city’s coat of arms bears
this act of liberation and retaliation as its defining image: from the twelfth
century on, a pair of severed hands and a castle form the symbol of Antwerp.
Maps, prints, bells, and chronicles from the early modern period exhibit this
ubiquitous city emblem.60 The new Antwerp city hall of 1889 was dominated
by it, as was the lavish train station completed in 1904 (fig. 22).61 Henry van de
Velde’s 1893 poster for the local independent art group he helped to organize,
L’association pour l’art, shows an erect right hand planted in the roots of a large
stalk and flower, which acts as both a barrier and trademark of Antwerp’s urban
identity. Examples of the continuity of this distinctive symbol can be seen in a
recent sculpture of a giant hand and in the cookies and chocolates in the shape
of a hand you can buy today in the central square (fig. 23). Popular culture

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   27

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
memorialized Antwerp’s foundational violence in parades of Druon Antigoon’s Fig. 22 (left)
truncated body, shown to Dürer when he visited the city in 1520.62 Nineteenth- Antwerp coat of arms at
Centraal Station, Antwerp,
century folk festivals continued these traditions in the carnivalesque “Parade of Belgium, 1904. Photo:
the Giants” still held today.63 Mark Ahsmann, Creative
Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
Lambeaux’s 1887 monument (see figs. 21 and 24) departs from playful or License.
symbolic evocation to focus on the act of the avenger himself and the murder-
ous wreckage of Brabo’s furious assault. Built up from a ground resembling a Fig. 23 (right)
Henri de Miller, The Hand,
rocky shore, the base of the statue is wrapped with the writhing body of the 1993, on the Meir, Antwerp’s
headless giant, splayed out with grisly physicality to present the viewer with the main shopping street. Photo:
stump of his severed arm (fig. 24). More traditional fountain figures appear Mark Ahsmann, Creative
Commons Attribution-
above as full-breasted sea maidens hold a ship with the Antwerp symbol set ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
inside; two small severed hands appear on castle turrets. Lambeaux completes License.
the story with Brabo brandishing the giant trophy hand at the summit, poised
with the athletic prowess of a discus thrower to propel it forward. Moving
from base to crest, Lambeaux thus configures a composite narrative, assem-
bling with startling and gruesome immediacy all stages of Brabo’s activity as
redeemer of Antwerp.64

A final technique deepened the vivacity of the 1887 re-creation of Brabo the
warrior avenger. Rather than confining the statue group to a framing basin, in
the tradition of fountain sculpture, sprays of water fall directly on the cobble-
stones below. While not visible in some photographs, the statue group actually
gushes water all around the monument, from every bodily spout. In the case of
Druon Antigoon, water shoots out from the giant’s body below and hand above:
it substitutes for blood. The animating force of the water allows Lambeaux to
dramatize the act of dismemberment the statue commemorates; his Brabo her-
alds a severed and bleeding hand, and the giant’s trunk is still quivering.

Activating the central square with dynamic force, Lambeaux’s figure was situ-
ated just in front of the Antwerp town hall, forming a striking counterpoint
to the architecture and niche sculptures nestled nearby. Before 1575, a small

28  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 figure of Silvius Brabo had occupied the top shelf of the town hall of the flour-
ishing city, just above a pair of statues of Wisdom and Justice. The Spanish Fury
of 1576 burned the building and killed thousands of Antwerp’s citizens; this
record of atrocities and occupation was the object of meticulous scholarship
and literary imagination in Belgium after 1840. In the subsequent rebuilding
of Antwerp, Counter-Reformation Jesuits set a statue of the Virgin, awkwardly
too big for its perch, to replace the militant giant slayer of the original town hall.
With Lambeaux’s colossal Brabo, Vengeance now dominated the city square,
overshadowing Prudence, Wisdom, and the merciful Mother of God in public
statuary and civic symbolism.65

Glorifying a legendary warrior who liberated the city from tyranny and
restored freedom of trade, the Brabo statue offered a powerful monument to
the emerging Belgian imperium. And its location in the heart of the horrors
of the Spanish Fury intensified its resonant pairing of violence endured and
violence avenged. When the fountain was inaugurated in 1887, a bustling
Antwerp harbor, with its new Afrikadok, was the point of embarkation for
steamer ships departing twice a month on the Matadi Congo line. As volun-
teer recruits boarded ship, one of the last things they saw in the distance was
the soaring figure of Brabo, lithe and mighty, raising a severed hand toward
the seas.

Nineteenth-century historians considered Silvius Brabo the founding ancestor

of the dukes of Brabant and kings of Belgium.66 As he summoned his fellow
citizens to embrace the call to Africa, King Leopold II described the lofty
goals of bringing civilization to backward people, abolishing the slave trade,
and ending the savagery of sanguinary customs. Leopold cautioned patience,
and fortitude, anticipating a long process of weaning the natives away from

Fig. 24
Jef Lambeaux, detail of the
giant Druon Antigoon with
severed head and hand
from the Brabo fountain,
1887. Antwerp, Belgium.
Photo: Author.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   29

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
barbarous practices, especially the cult of victory as annihilation of the enemy,
and the boast of the human trophy.67 Yet during the decades preceding the
Congo regime, Belgians were themselves consolidating a cultural system and
invented tradition glorifying intrepid and murderous warriors as unifying
figures for their new national history. In the figure of Brabo, unflinching valor
and audacity gave way to the ferocity of the avenger, glorifying in a permanent
monument of a civic hero precisely those thanatal habits Belgian agents were
called to eliminate in Africa. Denied martial expression of their own in Europe,
Belgian officers and explorers, energized by their king, discovered an outlet for
unbridled aggression in Africa, where conquest of land and people was attain-
able by sheer will, “energy, initiative, and audacity.”68

The Art and Politics of Colonial Memory in Belgium, 2005

Three art objects, one contained in the Tervuren Memory show and two outside
it, exemplify the continuing conflicts within Belgium over national culpability
and the Congo legacy, and the way the visual arts act as displaced forms of repa-
ration or reenactment of colonial violence.

Memory of the Congo displayed a treasure of the museum’s permanent collections

toward the end of the exhibition, a Baluba buffalo mask (fig. 25). Dramati-
cally installed and brightly lit, the mask turned on a pivot, allowing the visitor
full view of all its aspects. Early museum guides discussed the mask’s use as a
headdress worn during dances for secret society initiation rites in the Katanga
region.69 The mask was featured at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, the “Atomium
fair,” where another resource of the Katanga region, uranium, was celebrated as
a wonder of the Belgian Congo. Posters for the fair formed a colorful backdrop
to the 2005 case.

The mask’s display label described the rotating mask, drawing the viewer’s
attention to a recent restoration. Just before the 2005 exhibition, the mask
underwent a medical procedure, X-ray scanning, directed by a doctor, Marc
Ghysels. The precision of the clinical imaging technique facilitated a dramatic
and long-needed repair of the mask. A sculpted bird had originally protruded
from the back of the mask head, set between the folds of the arcing horns. The
bird had broken off and was damaged: its head and part of its feet were miss-
ing. Because of the disfigurement, the label continued, it had been difficult for
experts to know how and where to reposition the remaining parts, but the medi-
cal scanning provided the solution. The imaging rays passed through the mask
as well as the bird and revealed the pattern of wood rings coursing through the
material; by matching the pattern, experts were able to put the bird back in its
original perch. But there was a visible difference from the original, which the
display label did not describe: the replacement of the severed feet and head
necessitated not only an intricate repositioning but also artificial extenders to
link the parts to the mount. As the new mask was turned around, viewers could
see the clear plastic joints forming a bridge from one wood piece to another,
with the lower area showing diminutive prosthetic feet.

30  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 25
Baluba buffalo mask.
Collection of the Royal
Museum for Central Africa,
Tervuren, Belgium. Photo:
J. Van de Vyver, © RMCA
Tervuren.

The museum took pride in the way medical technology and curatorial preci-
sion enabled the Baluba mask, with its buffalo head and companion bird,
to be restored to its original integrity, while the repair also formalized the
gaps, tears, and artificial appendages. While the galleries preceding it in the
Memory exhibition equivocated on colonial violence as both a global and a
preexisting condition, the display of the ritual mask, with its emphasis on the
scrupulous care for its proper handling, formed a displaced, and impaired,
artistic reparation.70

Displaced reparation through art contrasted sharply with the use of art to
reenact the suppressed brutalities of the great forgetting. Before and during
the Tervuren exhibition, Flemish groups in Ostend and Diksmuide organized
to combat colonial amnesia and the long shadow of Leopoldian denial through
what they called “artistic mutilations” of public statuary. In Ostend the target
was a large equestrian tribute sculpture of Leopold II placed along the beach-
front in 1931 (fig. 26). The king, mounted on horseback atop a classical column,
towered over two groups below him; they were split and held aloft by the shelves
of the double L’s, Leopold’s insignia. The left side showed a Congolese native,
turned up to regard his redeemer with arms unchained, a typical image of
Belgian colonial visual culture. The statue’s plaque below read that the figure
expressed the “gratitude of the Congolese people to Leopold II for liberating
them from Arab slavery.” The Ostend activists considered the sculpture an
affront to memory and a history left too long unacknowledged. They spent a
few hours one night sawing off the left hand of the African. The protest split the
community and led to vigorous debates in the city council, with some Ostend
citizens scandalized by the “act of aggression against a precious part of our
heritage” and others who attested that the statue now “correspond[ed] better to
historical reality” and should be left with the severed hand.71

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   31

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 26 (left)
Antoine and Alfred Courtens,
Equestrian Statue of King
Leopold II, 1931. Bronze.
Ostend, Belgium. © 2012
Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / SABAM, Brussels.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons,
public domain image.

Fig. 27 (right)
Detail of Equestrian Statue
of King Leopold II. The figure
In another Flemish town, Diksmuide, activists placed a provocative honorary representing a Congolese
wreath at the foot of a statue of Baron Jules Jacques. While celebrated as a hero native at the far left of the
monument had its hand
of World War I, Jacques had also been a military officer in the Congo Free State,
sawed off by protesters in
and local groups aimed to publicize his complicity in the Leopoldian regime 2004. © 2012 Artists Rights
of red rubber. A week of action devoted to the theme of the “forgotten colonial Society (ARS), New York /
SABAM, Brussels.
past” was sponsored by the Diksmuide Communal Cultural Center in May 2005,
and the events began with an evening gathering at the Jacques statue. Organiz-
ers placed a commemorative wreath at the base of the statue—not a wreath of
flowers but a wreath fashioned from a rubber tire. Four severed hands and a
bloodstained placard confronted the public with arresting evidence of the his-
tory long denied and sustained in their midst by the sculpture.72

These symbolic reenactments of colonial violence reveal the continuing and

turbulent conflicts within Belgian communities, and they remain unresolved, as
does the fate of the many other statues and symbols glorifying King Leopold II
and imperial heroes that appear in Brussels and throughout Belgium. The 2005
Tervuren show thus acted as a catalyst for a long-delayed public engagement
with the colonial past, while exposing the fault lines in the politics of memory,
especially concerning the foundational period of Leopoldian rule in the Congo
Free State.

32  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 New Voices, New Histories

New voices in Belgium have emerged since the show from varied sectors. These
range from professional historian Guy Vanthemsche to literary wunderkind
David Van Reybrouck to photographer Carl De Keyzer, all committed to inte-
grating a fuller and unvarnished history into public discourse and national
pedagogy, including at the museum.73 A new generation of scholars and activ-
ists are now at work; both the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Univer-
sité catholique de Louvain, for example, have emerged as hubs of research on
colonial history, including the Leopoldian period.74 A collaborative group of
young documentary filmmakers, graphic artists, and historians, both fran-
cophone and Flemish, recently released a three-part television series on the
history of the Congo that incorporated archival film footage and photographs,
including those never before made public, from the period of the rubber ter-
ror, which they assembled from the Tervuren museum collections. Close to a
million viewers in Belgium have watched the series.75 Yet resistance to these
efforts remains tenacious among some, including ex-colonials, political offi-
cials, and members of the Belgian Foreign Ministry, which still closely monitors
the Tervuren museum.76

The ongoing divisiveness and the intensity of the conflicting claims to the
colonial past surfaced clearly in 2010, the year marking the fiftieth anniver-
sary of Congo independence from Belgium. To dramatize an unexamined
legacy of colonial racism, a Brussels-based Congolese student, Bienvenu Mbutu
Mondondo, filed a civil suit in May of that year with Belgium’s state prosecutor
against the publisher of Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo. Mbutu Mondondo aimed to
draw attention to the book’s perpetuation of offensive stereotypes of black Afri-
cans and to have the book “withdrawn from sale” or required to carry a warn-
ing label like the one included on all editions sold in England since 2007. (The
British Commission for Racial Equality had deemed Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo a
carrier of “hideous racial prejudice.”)77 Then in June 2010, political shock waves
reverberated in Belgium when, a week before King Albert was due to leave for
Kinshasa for ceremonies celebrating Congo’s independence, a group of legal
activists in Brussels filed charges of war crimes against twelve Belgian military
and government officials for collusion in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba
in 1961. Acting on behalf of Lumumba’s three sons, the group included the
dean of the Brussels Free University Law School as well as sociologist Ludo De
Witte, whose research and book, as noted earlier, had led to a parliamentary
investigation and subsequent official apology for state involvement in the mur-
der. The group sought prosecution under international law, which sets no stat-
ute of limitations for war crimes, in order to move from government acknowl-
edgment of general moral responsibility to juridical consequences for particular
individuals. The lead Brussels lawyer for the plaintiffs, Christophe Marchand,
explained that the case was necessary not only for the Lumumba family, “who
have the right to know the truth,” but for Belgium, as an act of self-criticism and
as “a duty to remembrance,” long overdue, for crimes against the Congolese.78

If these two instances publicized new kinds of reckoning with the colonial past,
a third example from 2010 seized the international spotlight, drawing attention

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   33

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 to the chasm that still remains in discussions of the legacies of imperialism
that will continue to affect the Tervuren museum’s future. A week before the
anniversary of Congo’s independence, Louis Michel, a prominent Belgian
politician, a member of the European Parliament, and, until 2009, a European
Union commissioner for humanitarian aid and development, gave an interview
to a Brussels magazine where he defended Leopold II as “a true visionary for
his time” and “a hero with ambitions for a small country like Belgium.” Echo-
ing the styles of argument that extended from loyalists of 1900 to themes of the
Tervuren Memory show, Michel defended King Leopold from what he called the
“exaggerations” and “accusations” that abounded, unfairly, about the Congo
Free State regime and alleged “genocide.” Michel emphasized, once again, the
need to place the Leopoldian regime in the context of the era; while “irregu-
larities” and abuses may have occurred, he noted, “in those days it was just the
way things were done.” “Colonization” may have been “domineering,” Michel
contended, but it “boosted economic growth” and “brought civilization.”79
While a number of commentators were appalled at Michel’s highly publicized
remarks and pointed out assertions long discredited by the historical record,
the affirmation of Leopold II as an intrepid leader purveying the benefits of
civilizational domination revealed the persistence of attitudes regarding the
positive legacies of Belgium in the Congo among some groups, who alternated
between being indignant at national and international criticism and truculent
in lauding the audacity of a small country that came to master a large portion
of the globe.

Stylistics of Violence from Denial to Remembering

to Working Through: Jan Fabre, 2002–11

Perhaps the most astonishing expression of the ongoing process of coming to

terms with the great forgetting in Belgium materializes in visual form in the
work of one of its most well-known contemporary artists, Jan Fabre. Echoing the
new, long-delayed, and slowly resurfacing debate and recognition of colonial
violence coursing through Belgium after 2005, Fabre’s art shows a dramatic shift
from 2002 to 2011. He moves from a work of spectacular amnesia in the halls of
King Leopold’s palace to work that captures the shock of the past resurfacing to
a show representing a direct encounter with Belgium’s role in the devastation of
the Congo and its people.

In 2002 a team of assistants led by Antwerp-based Fabre completed an official

commission to fill in the long stretch of empty ceiling in the king’s royal palace
in the center of Brussels. Leopold II had renovated the residence in 1904 and
added a Hall of Mirrors, modeled as a replica of Versailles; his plans for it
included plying the gallery walls with slabs of malachite from the Congo to be
framed by gilded pillars. At Versailles, the Hall of Mirrors celebrated Louis
XIV’s prowess as expansionist conqueror, with seventeen ceiling frescoes by
Charles Le Brun depicting the many sites of the Sun King’s victories in war.
Large central panels featured “The Capture of the City and Fortress of Ghent in
Six Days” and the defeat of the Low Countries in 1678; in these scenes, Flem-
ish soldiers are represented as helmeted and hysterical women, surrendering

34  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 their weapons on their knees to triumphant French armies. Leopold II’s Hall of
Mirrors was designed as a glorification of his equivalent, but superior, powers
of conquest. In addition to being composed of precious raw materials from the
Congo, the palatial room would feature a giant map on its ceiling, unfolding
the vast reach of Belgian Africa under Leopold’s absolute sovereignty. Despite
relentless hectoring, the king was unable to gain approval from Parliament to
complete the renovations, and at his death in 1909 the ceiling was left blank. All
that remained of the plan for a map was a pediment above a mirrored fireplace
at the back wall filled with a sculpture of a small gilded globe turned to show
the continent of Africa, with an indented area, like a large thumbprint, marking
the center—the Congo Free State.80

Fabre chose neither iconography nor cartography for the ceiling cover, instead
creating a lush and luxuriant canopy of radiant green (fig. 28). From a dis-
tance the viewer is dazzled by iridescent emerald colors, with bursts of darker
mossy greens. On closer look, the sparkle intensifies, and the viewer learns that
the brilliant mix of greens is created by the reflective patterns of a particular
medium: carapace wing casings of 1.4 million jewel beetles compose the mural.
Incapable of limiting the precious colored parts to the ceiling, Fabre and his

Fig. 28 (right)
Jan Fabre, Heaven of Delight,
2002. Jewel beetle wing
case installation in the Hall
of Mirrors, Royal Palace of
Belgium, Brussels, Belgium.
© 2012 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York /
SABAM, Brussels. Photo:
Carolus, Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
Unported License.

Fig. 29
Case of Aphelorhina bella
bella beetles. Collection
of the Royal Museum for
Central Africa, Tervuren,
Belgium. Photo: Author.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   35

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
team crossed the boundary to the chandeliers—the darker mossy and metallic
green covers the light sources in a heavy, molten, and drooping mass.

Fabre had been using the jewel wings in his art for a number of years, fascinated
by their chitin—the beetle’s outer shell—as a structure of maximum strength, a
protective cover invulnerable to disintegration and color fading.81 The selection
of the mass of beetle cases for the royal palace ceiling was particularly fitting,
though for reasons not explicitly discussed. During the period of King Leo-
pold’s regime, state agents in the Congo had identified thousands of African
coleoptera, including the astonishing “Royal Goliaths,” which were sent off to
Belgium and illustrated in the press; these formed the nucleus of what became
a collection of more than six million entomological specimens housed in the
Tervuren museum.82 The galleries today display glass boxes of some of these
opalescent scarabs (fig. 29). The vast quantity of raw materials for Fabre’s new
ceiling were supplied not from Congo but from southeast Asia, including Malay-
sia, Thailand, and Indonesia, the site of a Dutch rule that had first sparked
Leopold II’s fantasies of empire as an extraction colony.83

Jan Fabre called his palace project Heaven of Delight, inspired, he explained,
by a masterpiece he revered: Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.84
Yet Fabre inverted and flattened Bosch’s triptych in provocative ways. Bosch’s
central panel is but one part of a cycle bound by a fundamental theological
unity of pleasure and reckoning, where human desire inexorably exceeds and
impairs. The teeming middle scene of cavorting figures bathing, riding, eating,
and coupling is flanked by the exile from an Edenic garden on one side and the
torments of hell on the other; Bosch’s triptych progresses from paradise lost to
frolicking fullness to desolating suffering. It is worth noting that Bosch’s pasto-
rale is populated in part by exotic plants and creatures from Africa—a giraffe,
a lion, an elephant—culled, according to scholars, from familiarity with a new
world of encounter and exploration at the cusp of empire in fifteenth-century
Europe.85 But Bosch subjects his expansionist menagerie to a visual theology of
matter, transgression, and judgment. His God appears as creator and surveyor
on the outer wings of the triptych and discharges the furies of divine retribu-
tion in the final panel.

On King Leopold II’s ceiling, Fabre collapses Bosch’s vision to a single plane
and shifts the scene of delight from earthly consorts to vacant jungle heaven.
Bosch’s realm is overpopulated and divested of heaven; his heedless, indulged
humanity ends up skewered, swallowed, and tortured by hybrid monsters of
hell. Fabre’s heaven is glutted with the glued-on remains of over a million dead
creatures, a tour de force of acquisitive creativity. The artist invited the media
to chronicle the progress of the daunting work as it unfolded, demonstrating
the tools and methods devised for his équipe; the assistants prepared the lumi-
nous hollow casings for the ceiling by injecting them with syringes filled with
special silicon fixatives, distending the shells, as one commentator noted, so as
to approximate their previous mass as living beetles. And Fabre delighted in
revealing to the public that the cut-up carapaces were arranged in some sections
to compose specific patterns, such as the shape of “giraffes’ legs” and the letters
of his royal patroness Paola, Queen of the Belgians.86

36  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Significantly, Fabre revisited his triumphalist ceiling project with a new self-
consciousness, and a new register of self-criticism, in 2008. The completion of
the Brussels royal palace, with its shimmering armor of aerial jewel beetles, eter-
nalized King Leopold’s Congo Hall of Mirrors with little mention, or register of
awareness, of its spectacular extension. In an exhibition in 2008 in the Bregenz
(Austria) Kunsthaus, Fabre re-created part of the ceiling as a large-scale instal-
lation, ten by ten meters, in a dramatic new form. Fabre built a fragment of the
palace ceiling, with its colorful hard cover of beetle wings, and set it down on
the floor of the Kunsthaus gallery, bordered by an upended scarab-encased
chandelier that in the royal palace hall had sagged down from above. In the
middle of the ground Fabre set a figure of a black man, face down and splayed
to show a body bearing scars. Fabre gave the new piece a provocative title: I Had
to Break Down a Part of the Ceiling of the Royal Palace Because There Was Something
Growing Out of It.87 In the midst of the luminous impenetrable crust of hordes
of jeweled casings, a dark, fleshy, and wounded body emerged; the sky had
fallen, and the ground of history appeared for the first time, with signs of the
life expended to wrest the treasure. No longer able to exclude, or suppress, a
fuller view of the Congo, Fabre was compelled to show a body, scarred, “grow-
ing” out of the precious vault; it covered the iridescent light and was marked
by a violated skin in stark contrast to the hard crusts of the shells it rested on.
With memory released to consciousness, Fabre discovered an arresting design
that indicated how for some in Belgium, the uninflected heaven of delight had
yielded to the heart of darkness.88

The breaking through of 2008 has yielded a new position for Fabre: he is now
creating framed artworks composed entirely of the jewel beetle casings whose
patterns form scenes and figures of colonial violence, racism, and rapacity in
King Leopold’s Congo and after. In 2011 Fabre opened a one-man exhibition
in Rome called Tribute to Hieronymus Bosch in Congo. The gallery displayed seven
large-scale pieces that adapted motifs and symbols from Bosch to startling new
purposes, and in ways that had been so conspicuously missing from Fabre’s
earlier evocation of Bosch in his royal Heaven of Delight. One 2011 work in the
iridescent chitin configured a “black Congolese slave” trapped in a mussel shell
while pearls propelled out of it; another featured a severed hand, with brown
blood flowing, sliced by an upright dagger while a giant strawberry balanced on
its forefingers (fig. 30). Mussel shells encasing rolling pearls and frolicking lov-
ers appeared in Bosch’s central panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights, and giant
strawberries also swelled in this section of Bosch’s rendering of earthly plea-
sures. The right wing of Bosch’s triptych included a severed hand pinned to an
upended table with a die cube above it, symbolizing in Bosch’s vision a punish-
ment fitting for the gambler’s lust for money. Among Fabre’s other compositions
for this bold Congo encounter were a Loterie coloniale (Colonial Lottery) re-
creating a distorted African face typical of racist imagery of the 1920s and 1930s
and a native shown defecating diamonds; both compelled viewers to confront
the abuses wrought by Belgian colonialism and its avidity for precious resources.

Commentary on the 2011 show links Fabre’s new work to direct and unambigu-
ous criticism of King Leopold, who was cast as treating the Congo as “a rich
and private garden,” and of the nation of Belgium as well, for whom “the black,

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   37

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 30
Jan Fabre, Punishment of
Lust, 2011. Sculpture. Jewel
beetle wing cases on wood.
Height: 227.5 × 137 × 8.1
cm (89.6 x 53.9 x 3.2 in.).
Collection of MAM Mario
Mauroner Contemporary Art
Vienna + Salzburg. © 2012
Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / SABAM, Brussels.
Photo: MAM Mario Mauroner
Contemporary Art Vienna +
Salzburg.

golden heart of Africa is a dark page” in “national and colonial history.”89 By

creating all the figural scenes from the same material, Fabre no longer relies on
mounting two separate layers to render a return of a buried history, as he did in
setting a wounded and fleshy black body on a bed of colorful hard shells. He has
integrated the medium and the message, materializing the interdependent his-
tories of victim and oppressor. Fabre’s shift from royal ceiling to floor to integral
Congo here recapitulates in visual form the broader national process of coming
to terms with colonialism in Belgium since 2005. The three works dramatize
the evolution from denial and repression (the untroubled dazzle of Leopold’s
ceiling as jeweled jungle sky) to consciousness and recognition (the sky has
fallen and a black body is growing out of and on top of it) to working through—
integrating the return of the repressed and the repressor in the materials of the
treasure that had set the voracity in motion.

Toward a New Tervuren Museum?

Where do things stand now with the Royal Museum? Since the Memory show,
some important changes have occurred. The palace still greets visitors with the
strange 1997 sculpture group The Congo I Presume? by Tom Frantzen, showing
an African elephant head and King Leopold’s bust topped by three peg-leg
natives (fig. 31).90 In 2006 Frantzen added another group and fountain at the
roundabout entry to the park, a concert of animals entitled The Bandundu
Water Jazz Band (fig. 32). Here a festive band of jungle creatures—jaunty hippo,
grinning crocodile, sporty pelican, and earnest tortoise among them—march
with their spouting instruments as they lead the way to the museum, a disso-
nant riff on the stash of their thanatal counterparts that awaits the visitor in
the galleries (fig. 33).91

38  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 31
Tom Frantzen, The Congo
I Presume?, 1997. Bronze.
Tervuren, Belgium. Photo:
Author. Reproduced courtesy
of Tom Frantzen.

Fig. 32
Tom Frantzen, The Bandundu
Water Jazz Band, 2006.
Bronze. Tervuren, Belgium.
Photo: Author. Reproduced
courtesy of Tom Frantzen.

Fig. 33
Diorama with hippopotamus
and crocodiles. Collection
of the Royal Museum for
Central Africa, Tervuren,
Belgium. Photo: J. Van de
Vyver, © RMCA Tervuren.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   39

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Inside the museum, conscientious efforts have unfolded to update the institu- Fig. 34
tion and make it more welcoming: a design firm was hired to create a new logo, Brochure for the Royal
Museum for Central Africa,
yielding a double “AFRICA” and “Tervuren” medallion that de-emphasizes the ca. 2008. Reproduced with
“Royal Museum” part of the title (fig. 34). A stream of children’s and family pro- permission from the Royal
grams continues to spring up to showcase Congolese music, crafts, and dance.92 Museum for Central Africa.

New marketing initiatives offer sleepovers in the museum for kids called “Night
in the Museum” (evoking the Ben Stiller movie); event planners now rent out
the “colonial rotunda and marble halls” for private parties.93 A recent exhibi-
tion, Uncensored: Vivid Tales from Behind the Scenes, allowed the public to visit the
vast basement storerooms of the palace “for the first and last time” before the
museum closes for renovation.94

Bringing a Congolese public into the museum has been more problem-
atic, with an annual Tervuren Congo fashion show and festival begun in
2007. During one of these special events, the murderous Leopard Man was
temporarily moved to a corner near the shop to make way for a runway of
spotlighted models. The fiftieth anniversary of Congo independence in June
2010 prompted a number of exhibitions celebrating Africa and African com-
munities in Belgium, especially Brussels. Oral histories and film interviews, a
highpoint of the 2005 Memory show, were used very effectively as part of the
museum’s 2010 multidisciplinary show Independence! Congolese Tell Their Stories
of 50 Years of Independence, while the crossover and contrasts of the worlds of
Congolese in Ixelles and Kinshasa emerged in the photography exhibit by
Jean-Dominique Burton called Kinshasa-Brussels: From Matonge to Matonge.95
Children from the Congo now appear on the “Kids’ Pages” of the Tervuren
website, inviting virtual visitors to “discover their country” and providing a
new African presence to the museum’s main gateway and public presenta-
tion.96 In 2008 and again in 2010, two young artists from Lubumbashi (DRC
Katanga Province), photographer Sammy Baloji and writer and cultural activ-
ist Patrick Mudekereza, were invited to spend several weeks at the Tervuren
museum in a new artist-in-residence program.

Some important changes now inform the collections, history, and research
departments, where young curators and scholars have been added to the staff,
and the imprint of a new generation is slowly emerging.97 Exhibitions are high-
lighting artifacts more critically, but they still squeeze awkwardly into existing
structures, and it is not clear how an additive approach can adequately address
the issue of revision.98 Parts of the ethnographic galleries have been remodeled

40  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 to feature more of the museum’s permanent collection of African masks, musi-
cal instruments, and nkondi—the name now used to refer to the magical power
figures, usually bristling with nails, shards of glass, and bits of feathers, rope,
or shells, that were called “fetishes” for more than a century.99 The elegant and
informative installations of these objects, artworks, and contexts help in part to
rebalance the experience of visitors inundated by Tervuren’s countless displays
of mounted and stuffed dead creatures, including beetles, pythons, birds, croco-
diles, and mammals.100

The archives and library in the colonial history collections, housed in a separate
structure next to the museum, are open to researchers, students, and scholars
worldwide, and the staff are widely praised for their generosity and coopera-
tion.101 In 2008 a new summer research program began to bring African gradu-
ate students from the DRC to train on-site in the archives for the first time. Ques-
tions regarding the accessibility and publication of dossiers and objects related
to the sensitive areas of violence, looting, and forced labor in the Congo remain
unresolved in the museum.102 But in 2010 the museum did collaborate with the
Ghent University scholar Johan Legae and photographer Carl De Keyzer to cre-
ate an unprecedented exhibition of some of the early colonial images from their
archives that had never before been seen by the public. Assembled in an exhibi-
tion in Antwerp, these photographs, taken in the Congo from 1885 to 1920, were
reprinted by De Keyzer in large format, and they included depictions not only of
iron bridges and steamers but of pith-helmeted agents testing out their Maxim
machine guns; of natives working, chained together by the neck; and of Con-
radian bodies shown discarded and disintegrating in the bush.103 De Keyzer cre-
ated an extraordinary complement to these early colonial images from Tervuren
by juxtaposing them with his own set taken during months of travel, study, and
encounters in the DRC the year before, and crowds flocked to Antwerp to see
the exhibit throughout its duration.104 A similar experiment exhibiting Congo
photographs, past and present, resulted from a trip taken by museum historian
and anthropologist Maarten Couttenier with the Lubumbashi artist Sammy
Baloji. Together they retraced part of the 1898–1900 expedition to the Katanga
region undertaken for King Leopold II by Belgian military officer Lieutenant
Charles Lemaire. The trip of 2010 included a visit to the site of a rarely discussed
1899 massacre that took place under Lemaire’s authority, and the social memory
and a memorial that have since grown up around it. In a subsequent exhibition,
Baloji’s Katanga photographs were paired with archival images and documents
from the Tervuren collections of the Congo Free State regime.105

These developments in the museum are now part of a more substantial plan
for transformation that has been evolving in the past two years. In 2005, as
mentioned earlier, the museum publicized a refurbishing of the galleries—“A
New Museum in 2010!”—that aimed to keep the building and exhibits open
for visitors during the work and was to be completed in time for the centenary
anniversary of the opening of King Leopold’s Tervuren palace. In the period
after the Memory show, amid the debates and controversies it generated, long-
term strategies for reconceptualizing the museum’s future expanded, and what
was a small-scale adaptation is now a full-scale renovation. The scope, structure,

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   41

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
and contents of a new museum are still under discussion, but an ambitious
architectural plan has been commissioned and publicized. And director Guido
Gryseels has announced to the press that the museum will close for at least two
years and will reopen in 2015; a second phase of change is foreseen for comple-
tion in 2020.106

The emphasis of the director has also shifted in tone and ambition. The
defensive stance of 2005 concerning “allegations” by Hochschild, the need to
contextualize violence, and debates over the misplaced use of the term “geno-
cide” in the Leopoldian colonial past have ceded to an enthusiastic embrace of
the museum’s new direction pointing forward. The outdated displays, Gryseels
noted in an interview, will now give way to a focus on “Africa today and in the
future . . . better late than never.” New partnerships have sprung up, with Kin-
shasa as well as New York’s Museum for African Art, among others.107

The “better late than never” formula redounds not only on a modernizing of the
museum but also on the task of confronting the challenges of the great forget-
ting and the unacknowledged history of violence that distorted the museum
from its inception. Gryseels’s look forward raises questions of how the museum
will deal with the past, and the replacement of the past with the present may
not be an adequate strategy for moving forward. Right now the museum is in a
transitional phase. It is not yet clear if the giant map walls will be preserved or
boarded up. Moreover, in 2008, the product room featuring the wonders of the
Congo lianes—the caoutchouc latex and rubber vines cases, displayed, untouched,
for decades—were shuttered, sealed in frosted glass, and marked with strips of
tape. By 2012 a visitor to the museum would find that the rubber sections of the
gallery had vanished altogether. This bracketing of the past, covering over and
closing off, however, is ineffective: in the rubber cases, the haunched segments
of the vines, scarred with their incisions, loom out, and the shadow and outline
peek through, like specters of dismembered parts or phantom limbs. They
hover, suspended, and intrude on the space outside, as do the memory and his-
tory of the Leopoldian regime that still requires integration.

One way the Tervuren will rethink past and present will likely refer to inter-
national debates and models regarding colonial collections in postcolonial
museums outside Belgium, as well as those that have approached histories of
violence.108 Another opportunity for future directions that could help shift the
focus from culpability to cultural encounters may be found in an undiscov-
ered resource in Belgium’s own national intellectual history: the emergence of
folklore and ethnography between 1897 and 1925. During this period, net-
works of anticlerical writers and scholars began systematically examining what
they called the “primitivism,” “fetishism,” and “polytheism” coursing through
popular religious and oral culture in Belgium, both Flemish and Walloon, and
they specifically emphasized the parallels and commonalities in Belgian and
Congolese popular religion, art, and folk practices, from sorcery and animism
to the power of the caul, the amulet, and the talisman.109

Paul Wissaert’s 1913 Leopard Man, or Aniota, statue (see fig. 18) entered the
museum at the height of this consolidation of Belgian folklore studies. Rather

42  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 35
Chéri Samba,
Musée royal de
l’Afrique centrale:
Réorganisation, 2002.
Oil on canvas, 104 ×
134 cm. Collection of
the Royal Museum
for Central Africa,
Tervuren, Belgium.
© RMCA Tervuren.

than removing the statue (as a famous 2002 painting by Chéri Samba suggested
many would like to do for its racist and murderous stereotype of a Congolese
native; fig. 35), I believe the museum could keep the Leopard Man on display,
allowing it to become a hub of multivalent meanings and new histories. On
one level, it would provide a site for filling out the Congolese context excised
from view for so long, from the sacred and political character of the figure to
its role in African initiation rites over time.110 The Tervuren storeroom collec-
tions include numerous sculptures of the leopard men as tribal leaders, such as
the ones from the Luluwa people of West Kasai shown in the 2011 Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s exhibition Heroic Africans.111 On another level, restoring the
Belgian context of Wissaert’s figure could also reveal some provocative and
unacknowledged patterns of connection and identification with Belgian popu-
lar and oral culture as discovered by the writers of the period of its creation.
Spirits in animal form, especially werewolves, pervaded folk culture in Belgium
and were classified in the late nineteenth century and carried forward into
the twentieth. In the “national bible,” Ulenspiegel, for example, a key part of the
story uses animal disguise, as does Wissaert’s figure, as a cover for murder. In
addition to wrapping his body in wolf skin, the villain in Charles de Coster’s
epic simulated werewolf teeth by using iron spikes from the local Flemish village
waffle maker; the device allowed the culprit to leave what would appear as lethal
bites by a wolf in the neck of his victims. Wissaert’s Aniota similarly relied on
iron claws in the shape of a leopard’s, shown extending from his fingers, allow-
ing him to kill as well with the impunity of a wild beast.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   43

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Fig. 36
Gallery featuring restored
African elephant. Collection of
the Royal Museum for Central
Africa, Tervuren, Belgium.
Photo: J. Van de Vyver, © RMCA
Tervuren.

Visual Unconscious of Belgian Colonialism:

Tervuren’s Elephant in the Room

Whatever directions the museum takes as a global, national, and postcolonial

center for Africa, deeper patterns of resistance and distortion distinctive to the
Belgian case that are more difficult to unravel and recognize may still operate.
One example reveals some of the traces of specific forms of a cultural history of
violence explored earlier—the elephant in the hall.

One of the curators assured me that whatever happens in the renovations of

the galleries, the two “stars” of the museum, the stuffed giraffe and elephant,
will never go (fig. 36). The gigantic elephant is a favorite among the thousands
of children who make their way to the museum on school trips.112 On a stand
in front of the giant creature, a startling eleven-minute film from 2001 plays
continuously. It is called Mémoire d’éléphant and documents the history of this
elephant as a taxidermic wonder. It begins with a thirty-five-second scene of a
troupe of African elephants in the bush, with a text explaining that the animal
is a gentle and sociable creature “who would never hurt a fly, unless attacked,”
and is endowed with “an excellent memory: even after twenty years, it recognizes
its attacker.” The rest of the film shows the elephant being shot by a white hunter
in 1952 and undergoing two generations of taxidermic preparation, presented
in elaborate and excruciating detail. An interview with Louis Poelman describes
how it took the entire village of Luluabourg to turn the three-ton animal so it
could be properly carved up and explains the recipe he devised of salt and a
crisping agent, alum, to conserve the skin for transport and stuffing in 1957.

Most of the film covers a team led by second-generation “taxidermist and

sculptor” Dirk Claesen, who was hired in 2000 to repair the tattered creature.
His interview unfolds an elaborate diagnosis of multiple conditions—crack-
ing skin, disintegrating body filler, tipping trunk, cranial obstructions from
floating bolts and nails. These are revealed by multiple techniques—clinical

44  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 observation, surgical flaying, and X-ray technology among them. The film then
shows us how Claesen and his team addressed each ailment with specific cures.
In one sequence, an electric saw is used to remove the trunk, then a steel brace
is installed as a support for the overly weighty appendage. We also see Claesen
inventing an ingenious solution to fill the gaps and sags created by loose interior
padding and shriveling skin: he creates a “swelling and softening” agent, a spe-
cial milky-white “mousse” that is poured into the elephant’s body through foil
cones set in drilled holes in the skin. This mousse gonflante et durcissante (schuim
zwellend) is soaked up by the brittle straw interior and expands to cohere with
a now softer and tighter skin. Repainted to cover the seals, the elephant “is as
good as new,” concludes Claesen.

The film’s celebration of the pacific, sociable elephant, whose excellent

memory retains for decades the image of its invader-attacker, is only one of
many provocative resonances that call out for attention as we think through
the Tervuren dilemmas. Indeed, the film focuses precisely, in displaced form,
on things that are not said or shown, and have never been said or shown, and
are on everyone’s mind now in the postdenial museum. Here in halls of the
great forgetting, in an institution long criticized for obliterating the presence
and memory of millions of Congo natives, we have a perpetually replaying
record of mémoire d’éléphant and a show of tender, loving care for a taxidermic
creature, even as the film reenacts, with unsparing and relentless detail, the
slaughter, flaying, and dismemberment of its gigantic body. And the pour-
ing of the milky, swelling liquid to repair the body forms a powerful symbolic
reversal of the primary activity of Belgians in the Congo jungle that helped get
the elephant to the museum in the first place—the leaking out or “bleeding”
(saigner les lianes) of the wild rubber vines, known as les saignées, with their pre-
cious gummy white sap, called “vegetable boas” with “veins of gold” (see
Part I, fig. 2).113

Which brings us full circle, back to the hand, and to the museum, and to the
power and persistence, if not overdeterminism, of what can be called a visual
unconscious of Belgian colonialism. The graphic design and advertising agency
used by the Tervuren museum for its new logo and brochures had another
major project in 2007—their client was Brussels Airlines. Pickpockets abounded,
targeting inattentive travelers in the airport. The design company came up with
Fig. 37 the following plan: the firm created “waxy casts” in the form of rubber hands,
Famous (Belgian design firm
formerly known as LG&F),
which were slipped into bags and purses (fig. 37). Unsuspecting travelers were
“This hand just slipped thus alerted to “watch their wallets”; they would realize their carelessness and
into your bag. BEWARE OF vulnerability when they reached into their satchels and found one of the greasy
PICKPOCKETS,” ca. 2007.
Ad campaign for Brussels
rubber hands, which bore the message “This hand just slipped into your bag.
Airlines. Beware of pickpockets.” Beware. Be aware.

Debora L. Silverman

Debora L. Silverman is Distinguished Professor of History and Art History at UCLA, where
she has taught since 1981. Professor Silverman is the author of Selling Culture: Blooming-

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness  45

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 dale’s, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America (Pantheon,
1986); Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (University
of California Press, 1989); and Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 2000), awarded the 2001 PEN America / Architectural Digest Prize for
outstanding writing on the visual arts. Her recent articles include “Marketing Thanatos:
Damien Hirst’s Heart of Darkness,” American Imago 68, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 391–424; and
“Modernité sans frontières: Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of the Avant-Garde in King
Leopold’s Belgium, 1885–1910,” American Imago 68, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 707–97.

I wish to thank the Stanford Center for the Humanities and the Marta Sutton Weeks External Faculty
Fellowship as well as UCLA for granting me the time and financial support to complete this work.
The Society for French Historical Studies, New York University’s forum on “Monuments and Memory,”
UCLA’s 2012 Conference in Honor of Carlo Ginzburg, and the University of Sydney’s Power Institute
/ Sydney Ideas series provided stimulating occasions that helped me to clarify some of the argument
and analysis. For assistance, comments, or suggestions, I am grateful to Robert Aldrich, Perry
Anderson, Joyce Appleby, Roger Benjamin, Edward Berenson, Marc Beyaert, Ruth Bloch, Caroline
Walker Bynum, Saroya Chadarevian, Catherine Chaffee, Margaret Cohen, Frederick Cooper, Sabine
Cornelis, Maarten Couttenier, Robert Darnton, J. P. Daughton, Natalie Zemon Davis, Leah DeVun,
André Dombrowski, Elizabeth Everton, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Saul Friedländer, David Gilmartin,
Carlo Ginzburg, Ann Goldberg, Nile Green, Jacqlyn Greenberg, Thomas Hare, Adam Hochschild,
Michael Ann Holly, Jessie Hunnicutt, Donovan Jenkins, Temma Kaplan, Colette Kennedy-Wanetick,
Gail Kligman, Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi, Daniel Lee, Marion Lefebre, John Lithgow, Keith Luria,
Saloni Mathur, Sarah Maza, Sarah McPhee, David Myers, Philip Nord, Robert Nye, Emily Ooms,
Herman Ooms, Mary Pasti, Peggy Phelan, Gabriel Piterberg, Daniel Prager, Jeffery Prager, Robert
Pynoos, Aron Rodrigue, Larissa Rodriguez, Louis Rose, Janice Ross, Peter Scholliers, Vanessa
Schwartz, Jerrold Seigel, C. Namwali Serpell, Daniel Sherman, David W. Silverman, Eve Silverman,
Tziona Silverman, Gabrielle Spiegel, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Paul Stirton, Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
Charles Taylor, Alan Tobin, Nancy Troy, Marie-Pierre Ulloa, Nancy Vanderlinden, Alan Wallach,
Boris Wastiau, Joan Waugh, Sylvia Yanagisako, and Mary Yeager.

1 Gennardo Postiglione, ed., One Hundred Houses for One Hundred European Architects (Cologne, 2004),
420–23; Klaus-Jürgen Sembach, Henry van de Velde (New York, 1989), 200–201 (see also the Van de
Velde Martens’ Villa in Astene, Belgium, built in the shape of a steamer with the visible smokestack/
chimney, on p. 203). In 2003 Belgium issued a postage stamp with Van de Velde’s portrait and a
rendering of the Nouvelle Maison behind him, which appears elongated and looming; the ship
prow and deck forms here are even more prominent. See the Universal Postal Union website,
http://www.wnsstamps.ch/en/stamps/BE003.03 (retrieved Sept. 18, 2012).
2 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, 1891–1896, vol. 4 (Paris, 1956),
893–94, entry of December 30, 1895.
3 Henry van de Velde, Récit de ma vie, vol. 1 (Brussels, 1992), 275–77. Another important art critic
in Belgium, Henri Hymans, made a similar comment on Van de Velde’s art nouveau, describing the
snug, functional forms as less of a “yachting style” than that of a ship’s cabin (“le style ‘cabine de
bateau’”). In Henri Hymans, Oeuvres de Henri Hymans: L’art du XVIIe au XIXe siècle dans les pays-bas,
vol. 4 (Brussels, 1921), 345.
4 “Nouvelles Africaines,” La Belgique coloniale, February 7, 1897, 69.
5 La Belgique coloniale, June 19, 1898, 289–91.
6 A. M. Hammacher, Le monde de Henry van de Velde (Antwerp, 1967), 115. For photographs of
Van de Velde interiors with the slatted-wood “deck chairs” he created, see ibid., 155–56; for his
insertion of a ship-like coiling stairwell in the Hohenhof house in Hagen, see 149–50. For a
comparison with the deck chairs of cruise ships, like the one Van de Velde sailed on in 1903,
see, for example, a photograph from another passenger ship in the Hamburg–America line in the
same time period, the SS Prinzessin Victoria Luise, 1906, at http://www.totophotos.org/photos
/search.asp?word=liners&page=2#81 (retrieved Sept. 18, 2012). This cruise ship’s coiling stairwell,
very similar to Van de Velde’s Hohenhof, can also be seen on this site in photos ca. 1905, labeled
4a28483u-1.jpg and 4a28483u.jpg.
7 Leon Ploegaerts and Pierre Puttemans, L’oeuvre architecturale de Henry van de Velde (Brussels, 1978),
371; see also 363.
8 Hammacher, Le monde, 215–16; Palais des beaux-arts, Henry van de Velde, 1863–1957, exposition
retrospective (Brussels, 1963), 92 and photos 257–58.
9 Ibid., 92 and photo 255; Hammacher, Le monde, 292.
10 Fabrice van de Kerckhove et al., Henry van de Velde dans les collections de la Bibliothèque royale Albert Ier
(Brussels, 1993), 100 and photo 100.
11 Debora L. Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism,
Part I,” West 86th (Fall–Winter 2011). For basic information, see M. Luwel and M. Bruneel-Hye de
Crom, Tervuren 1897 (Tervuren, 1967), 44–67; Maurits Wynants, Des ducs de Brabant aux villages
congolais: Tervuren et l’Exposition coloniale 1897 (Tervuren, 1997), 96–119.

46  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 12 See Part I, 139–43, 162–65.
13 The Belgian investment company the Société anonyme du chemin de fer du Haut-Congo, headed
by Albert Thys, had begun work in 1890 to traverse what would be a total of 240 miles along this route.
Technological hubris initiated the project to be well funded and thus completed with alacrity, but
the torturous conditions of climate and geography meant that by its completion in 1898, thousands
of deaths, among both natives and Europeans, had accompanied the laying of the rails for what
became small-scale locomotives that more resembled “the little engine that could” than the industrial
behemoth of what Stanley told King Leopold II would be the called “the penetrative express” of a
Congo state connected proficiently to outlets to the seas.
14 Georges-H. Dumont, Léopold II: Pensées et réflexions, recueillies par Georges-H. Dumont (Liège, 1948),
33–41, esp. 40.
15 In 1910 the first director of the Tervuren Royal Congo Museum, Albert de Haulleville,
characterized the work of Belgium in the Congo as one of “invasive civilizationism,” through trade
and, in particular, the process of clothing the naked natives. Quoted in Part I, 144, 174n18. Alexandre
Delcommune’s important two-volume book included a series of photographs showing the progress
of civilization in the Congo as a gradual adoption of clothing—fabric swaths like those arrayed on
Van de Velde’s Export Room walls. Women are photographed in Delcommune’s book and presented
first as naked (“barbarie”), then as partly clothed or quasi-civilized (“en route de civilization”), and
finally as “civilized”—shown fully wrapped in textiles. See Alexandre Delcommune, Vingt années de vie
africaine: Récits de voyages, d’aventures et d’exploration au Congo belge, 1874–1893, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1922).
16 Reports of the flood of weapons into and militarization of the Congo abounded and had been
circulating for at least a decade, beginning with Stanley’s reports when he worked for the king in
the early 1880s that he had distributed “1000 rifles and 2 million rounds of ammunition” to natives
as he explored and occupied the region; quoted in Neal Ascherson, The King Incorporated: Leopold the
Second and the Congo (London, 1963), 122. In a letter of February 1895 from an inspector magistrate
to a court president in Ghent, concern is expressed over the fact that more than two thousand bullets
were discharged in a single village raid by the Congo state troops. On the Liège Cockerill Seraing
manufactures, see, for example, K. Baedeker, Belgium and Holland, Including the Grand-Duchy of
Luxembourg: Handbook for Travelers (London, 1910).
17 The architecture and facade are discussed in Alice Delaville and Philippe Chavannne, L’art
nouveau en Province de Liège (Liège, 2002), with a photograph of the sgraffito mural, 32–33.
18 Lieutenant Th. Masui, Guide de la Section de l’État indépendant du Congo à l’Exposition de Bruxelles-
Tervuren en 1897 (Brussels, 1897).
19 I discuss the predicament of the neutral army and the way it was devalued in Belgium in the pages
that follow. The caricature of threadbare uniforms and other derisions is described in Georges-H.
Dumont, La vie quotidienne en Belgique sous le règne de Léopold II, 1865–1909 (Brussels, 1996), chap. 6.
See also L. H. Gann, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 1884–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1979, 18–24), and Émile
Wanty, Le milieu militaire belge de 1831 à 1914 (Brussels, 1957), 3–271.
20 According to the curator and historian and anthropologist at the museum, Maarten Couttenier.
21 Transferred in 1967, as shown in Luwel and Bruneel-Hye de Crom, Tervuren 1897.
22 Jean van de Voort, “De ‘Belgische stijl’ te Tervuren,” Congo-Tervuren 5, no. 3 (1959): 62–63.
23 See the king’s speech at the 1876 Brussels Conference, reprinted with other important documents,
in Alexis M. Gochet, Le Congo belge illustré (Liège, 1887), 87–89; see also Part I, esp. 139–44 and
nn1–11, 24. The title and contents of Le Congo belge illustré exemplify how irresistible it was to claim
the king’s enterprise as a Belgian colony, despite insistent official statements that the king ruled
a sovereign state and an entity separate from Belgium and that the word “colony” was studiously
avoided in the peculiar legal compact of the union personnelle. Nonetheless, Alexis called his 1887
book Le Congo belge, and the title page has this adage: “La Belgique est là, partout où il y a des Belges”
(Belgium can be found everywhere that there are Belgians).
Maps of the period also occasionally slipped into printing the map title of the new African entity
as “État indépendant du Congo belge,” or as “État indépendant du Congo (belge)”—with “belge” in
parentheses—suggesting again, as in these examples from 1894, the irresistible impulse to connect
them. (See maps in Alexis M. Gochet, Soldats et missionaires au Congo de 1891 à 1894 [Lille, 1896],
37, 117.)
24 “Congo Free State,” The New Volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica Constituting, in Combination with
the Existing Volumes of the Ninth Edition [1879–89], the Tenth Edition of That Work, vol. 3 (London, 1902),
200–207, reprinted in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul Armstrong (New York, 2006), 99–113,
with statistics on 104.
25 Some communities wished to celebrate the heroism of their local citizens in the Congo Free
State, as was the case with the Ghent brothers Lieutenants Liéven and Eevard van de Velde, whose
memorial plaque of 1887 set in the Citadel Park read, “Morts au Congo pour la civilisation,” lauding
their volunteer recruitment to Africa. (See M. Coosemans, “Liéven van de Velde,” Biographie coloniale
belge, vol. 3 [Brussels, 1952], 882.) After the Arab Wars of 1894, more public forms of honoring army
personnel who volunteered in the Congo Free State began to occur, with ships being met at Antwerp
with military bands and returning servicemen being hailed as redeemers and as vengeurs des nègres.
See Gochet, Soldats et missionaires au Congo. On official policy for nonofficial recognition and the
downplaying of military honors, see Lieutenant Colonel Charles Liebrechts, Léopold II, fondateur

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   47

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
d’empire (Brussels, 1932), 210–22, esp. 216; see also the bitter comments of Max Waller, editor of the
avant-garde journal La jeune Belgique, about his brother Lieutenant Charles Warlomont, an army
officer volunteer who died in the Congo and whose remains were not sent home. Waller declares, in
his brother’s name, “N’allez pas là-bas!” (Do not go there!). Waller, preface to Charles Warlomont,
Correspondance d’Afrique (Brussels, 1888), i–xv.
26 Lieutenant Charles Lemaire, Congo et Belgique: À propos de l’Exposition d’Anvers (Brussels, 1894), 17.
27 The tapestries were produced by Hélène de Rudder based on drawings by her husband, sculptor
Isidore de Rudder. The other pairs in the set of four are Slavery and Freedom, Fetishism and Christianity,
and Polygamy and the Family. Fetishism was shown at the 2005 Art and Design exhibition at the Brussels
Royal Museums of Art and History, whose collection now includes the de Rudder panels. The
tapestries have undergone some repair for the tears and gaps in the cloth surface, which includes silk
thread and patchwork sections. I viewed some of the de Rudder panels in the museum storerooms
and studied archival files chronicling the restoration work, with thanks to curator Ingrid de Meuter.
28 Many writers, readers, and members of the educated public still assume that Leopold’s Congo
state was a secret and “private colony” and that few in Belgium knew much about it. But enthusiasts
and antagonists appeared from the outset, and the history of the Belgian fin de siècle can be
understood only by acknowledging the inextricable ties between national culture and the Congo Free
State willed into being and granted to it by the king.
Despite the tenuous compact of the union personnelle, all levels of Belgian government and society
were drawn into the network of operations of the king’s Congo from 1885 to 1908. The thin ranks of
the Congo administration were filled with volunteer noncommissioned officers and servicemen from
the Belgian army, which continued to pay their wages and pensions. The church was also a prominent
presence in the king’s Congo Free State. Belgian missionaries of the Scheut brotherhood, after
repeated overtures from Edmond van Eetvelde, were given privileged rights for native education and
Congo evangelization, and Leopold II contributed the bulk of financial support for their activities.
The diplomatic corps provided the staff and paid the salaries of Congo Free State ministers who
ran the government from the Brussels offices in the rue de Braederode; myriad Belgian concession
companies operated in areas reserved for them by the king, who closed off large zones to international
trade after 1892 (see Part I, n24); Belgian investment company dividends surged with profits from
Congo commodities; and Parliament, which authorized the new kingdom in 1885 on the explicit
assurance of a “no-cost imperialism” (ni un soldat, ni un sou [not one soldier, not one penny] was the
promise, and the refrain, at the outset of the discussions), continually voted after 1887 to supply a
series of enormous loans to the king for Congo operations, from helping to float a speculative railway
lottery loan to outright funding of more than 25 million francs in one year alone (1890).
Distinguished members of the Belgian legal elite also made their mark on the Congo Free State at
a critical juncture. As we have noted in Part I (176n24), Van Eetvelde and the king sought assurance
and a legalistic sanction to enforce the king’s domainal rights in the Congo by soliciting the advice of
a group of eminent national jurists in 1892, including Edmond Picard and Félicien Cattier; they ruled
that the king’s property rights superseded requirements for free trade and that the territory qualified
as terres vacantes, thereby endorsing the king’s right to harvest and tax through labor or product. (See
Part I, 176n24; see also, for a discussion of Edmond Picard’s role as avant-garde innovator, imperial
traveler, and legal expert for the Congo domainal ruling in 1892, Debora Silverman, “Modernité sans
frontières: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of the Avant-Garde in King Leopold’s Belgium, 1885–
1910,” American Imago 68, no. 4 [Winter 2011], special issue honoring Carl E. Schorske, esp. 751–91.)
While these facts of national military, religious, political, economic, and legal interdependence
with King Leopold’s Congo regime can be pieced together from secondary sources, they are only
recently beginning to be reexamined by scholars and writers in Belgium. One historian who has
discussed some important dimensions of political culture is Vincent Viaene, in his “King Leopold’s
Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party, 1860–1905,” Journal of Modern History
80 (2008): 741–90; Jan Vandersmissen reconstructs the circles and networks of geographic societies,
especially in Antwerp, that facilitated the king’s expansionism in the decades before the Congo Free
State in his book Koningen Van de Wereld, Leopold II en de aardrijkskundige beweging (Leuven, 2009); see
also Vincent Dujardin, Valerie Rosoux, and Tanguy de Wilde d’Estmael, Léopold II: Entre génie et gêne:
Politique étrangère et colonisation (Brussels, 2009).
The cultural dynamic of empire, however, and specifically of empire at a distance, set in motion
in Leopoldian Belgium is still understudied. Varied motives and patterns of collective projection,
identification, and ripple-back are evident among a number of key individuals galvanized by the
king’s empire in addition to art nouveau artists I discussed earlier, and these reveal how Leopold
II was able to enlist a talented and devoted cohort of elites throughout his double reign. Three
such individuals that I explore in my larger project are Émile Banning, laissez-faire idealist, fervent
abolitionist, and diplomat responsible for the first Congo treaties; A.-J. Wauters, the art historian,
geographer, and Free State promoter discussed in Part I, who imagined that the Congo would be
a laissez-faire paradise for Belgium and the world, its massive African riverways turned into a “new
Niagara Falls”; and Edmond van Eetvelde, the financial wizard, diplomat, technocrat, and loyal
architect of the king’s African state as a commercially driven regime, who envisioned Belgium as the
headquarters of a global railway company powered by Belgian capital.

48  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 The prospect of accumulating profits while bringing civilization to backward people captivated
broader publics in Belgium as well. Some, as we have seen in Part I, celebrated King Leopold as what
they called a “visionary” who had broken through the torpor of the nation’s limited horizons and
reactivated traditions of Burgundian valor and heroic adventure. Others embraced the king’s charge
to prove to the world that a small nation, like ancient Greece and the early modern Netherlands,
could create an empire and that Belgians were, in the words of Leopold, “capable of domination.”
(Cited in Léon Le Febve de Vivy, Documents d’histoire précoloniale belge, 1861–1865: Les idées coloniales de
Léopold duc de Brabant [Brussels, 1955], 38; see also Alphonse de Haulleville, Les aptitudes colonisatrices
des Belges et la question coloniale en Belgique [Brussels, 1898].) I emphasize in my work that the king’s
antislavery mission for the Congo struck the most resonant chord in the collective national psyche.
Considering itself a nation of the former slaves of Europe, with a national history that glorified
successive liberations from foreign captors, Belgium was for some uniquely suited to liberate the
slaves of Africa. The new nation’s symbol of independence in 1830, “the Lion with broken chains,”
and the 1831 national anthem celebrating a people roused “from centuries of slavery” to law, king,
and liberty mobilized particularly powerful forms of identification with the Congo ideal which
need further study. For example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was widely read in Belgium after 1870, and a
monumental statue by Charles Samain of a runaway slave father and son recaptured by ferocious
dogs, said to be inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, was set on the sculpture corridor of the
prestigious Brussels avenue Louise in 1893. (It can still be seen there today.) After 1885, poems,
plays, and visual arts poured out depicting Belgians as redeemers, the exalted breakers of the chains
of Congo slaves captured by cruel Arab traders. Émile Valentin’s 1894 six-part poem Rédemption, for
example, celebrated Belgium as a new and young country which heeded the call to Africa while the
minions of “old Europe” were too complacent; inspired by the brave H. M. Stanley and buoyed by
their generous king, the text continued, citizen-soldiers delivered black slaves terrorized by Arab
traders to freedom. The Rédemption poem ends with natives hailing their white redeemers and
awaiting the Joyous Entry of a new king (Leopold), with offerings of the bounty of the forests as a
tribute to show their gratitude. This poem, published in multiple editions, had become by 1898 a
standard bilingual text in French and Dutch for secondary schools, with illustrations reprinted from
Stanley’s À travers le continent mystérieux and other explorer books that circulated in Belgium after
1885. See Émile Valentin, Rédemption: Poème antiesclavagiste en six chants (Liège, 1894); and Valentin,
Rédemption (Liège, 1898), illustrated school edition.
29 Among the reasons for the paucity of visual resources for Girault to draw on were anomalies
of Belgian monarchy and Congo sovereignty that I explore in my larger project. Three need to be
mentioned briefly here: first, the Belgian institution of the monarchy, which was of short lineage
in the new nation and contained politically and ceremonially by strict constitutional regulations,
sustained few visual traditions for glorifying the king; second, the extraconstitutional construction of
the king as absolute ruler of an empire of extraction also made it difficult to apply a visual program
of public celebration in a monument heralding its founder; and third, the character of the Congo as a
personal fiefdom could not be openly acknowledged, nor could the overseas conquest be affirmed in
the visual exaltation of a national mission. King Leopold never met anyone from his second kingdom,
and few Belgians worked there, further thinning out imaginative resources for representation. And
by the time Girault and his crews were brooding over what to put on the giant marble walls and how
to partition the galleries of the palace museum, the grand illusions of free trade, free people, and
free state in the Congo had been shattered by the public debate and realities of a violent free reign of
monopolies, forced labor, and private profit (see Part I, 140–43, 165–70, nn9–11 and 68–77).
King Leopold set the groundbreaking of the Royal Congo Museum to coincide with the festivities
celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Belgian independence and the twentieth anniversary of
the Congo Free State in 1905. The ceremony was held at the site at Tervuren. Girault’s lavish palace
was the terminus of the sightline of the newly completed colossal Cinquentenaire Triumphal Archway,
also funded by the king’s Congo treasury, though, as we have seen in Part I (143 and n17), this project
was disguised as being due to the generosity of a group of “civic benefactors,” as the king’s own
municipal building rights were severely restricted. The Congo museum at the royal Tervuren estate
was only part of an enormous complex of buildings designed by Girault in collaboration with the
king, which was to include a World Colonial School, a Colonial Congress Hall outfitted with a three-
thousand-seat auditorium, and a separate pair of structures adjacent to the Congo museum set aside
for future Belgian acquisitions in China and Japan. Girault’s and the king’s plans for this complex,
along with scores of drawings, plans, and blueprints, can be studied in the Girault archives (“papiers
Girault”) at the Tervuren museum; a few appear in the published literature, but they need systematic
study. The museum building itself replaced a temporary museum held over from the 1897 colonial
pavilion and exhibition, much of which concentrated on product promotion for import and export
as well as nascent ethnography. On the history of the king’s plans for the museum in Tervuren and
the global colonial complex he wanted to be built around it, Girault’s plans and work, and the early
history of the Congo museum (1897–1910), I have relied on Colonel B. E. M. Gustave Stinglhamber
and Paul Dresse, Léopold II au travail (Brussels, 1945); Charles Girault, “L’oeuvre architecturale de
Léopold II,” L’émulation, no. 11 (1926): 137–47; Alphonse De Haulleville, “Le Musée du Congo belge
à Tervueren,” La revue congolaise 1 (1910): 206–25; Philippe Maréchal, “Le musée royal de l’Afrique

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   49

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 centrale,” in La dynastie et la culture en Belgique, ed. Herman Balthazar and Jean Stengers (Brussels,
1990), 331–40; Piet Lombaerde and Ronny Gobyn, Léopold II, roi-bâtisseur (Ghent, 1995), 88–91;
Liane Rainieri, Léopold II urbaniste (Brussels, 1973), 141–54; M. Luwel, “Histoire du Musée royal du
Congo belge à Tervuren,” Congo-Tervuren 6, no. 2 (1960): 30–49; Wynants, Des ducs de Brabant aux
villages congolais; and Pierre Pirenne, “Projets de Léopold II: Réalisations actuelles,” Congo-Tervuren 5
(1959): 50–56.
30 These can be seen, for example, in the map of the Congo Free State titled “Grandeur comparative
du Congo et de la Belgique,” in the 1897 guide for the Tervuren Congo exhibition, shown in Part
I, 141, fig. 1; and in the map of “Le Congo belge” in A.-J. Wauters, Excursion au Congo belge (Brussels,
1911), 8. Both maps include details in the lower left corner that read “Le Congo est 80 fois plus
étendu que la Belgique.”
31 Major Albert Thys, the leader of investment initiatives for the Congo railway after the founding of
the Free State in 1885, celebrated the wonders of the king’s huge African territory by comparing it
to a map spreading over multiple continents. See his Antwerp lecture quoted in Ferdinand Goffart,
L’oeuvre coloniale du roi en Afrique: Résultats de vingt ans (Brussels, 1898), 82–83. The swell of the Congo
colony rendered as a map spilling over multiple continents is the first plate in a book by Henri Carton
de Wiart. The illustration is entitled “Le réseau fluvial du Congo à l’échelle de l’Europe,” in Mes
vacances au Congo (Brussels, 1923). An important statesman and defender of King Leopold’s oeuvre
africaine, Carton de Wiart expressed great pride in the ingenuity of the king in seizing the biggest part
of Central Africa for Belgium. In a revealing statement, he expressed ironic delight when recounting
that Britain, whom he called Belgium’s benevolent godmother (la marraine), responsible for setting
the terms and shepherding the new and tiny nation through the post-independence process, soon
had to confront the fact that the godson had outwitted the patron; underestimated, little Belgium
became the envy of Europe for an enormous African territory coveted by her larger neighbors and
protectors in Europe (see Comte Henri Carton de Wiart, Souvenirs politiques, 1878–1918 [Brussels,
1948], 128). I discuss Carton de Wiart as avant-garde writer, lawyer, and imperial enthusiast in the
1880s and 1890s in my article “Modernité sans frontières,” 707–97. I chart the role of mapping in the
colonial imaginary of Belgium, identifying four types of cartographic colonialism and their links to
the museum and to patterns of national humiliation and vindication in my larger study.
32 On the “red rubber” regime, see Part I, 140–42 and nn9–11. Some of the reasons given for this
erasure are the victimization of Belgium in World War I and World War II and the burning of
sections of the Congo Free State archives by King Leopold in 1908. (See Adam Hochschild, King
Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1998), chap. 19.)
The pages of the Congo-Tervuren magazine with its cover image of Leopold on horseback included
articles in 1959 and 1960 praising the king’s imperial status as a modern Alexander the Great and as
Belgium’s Louis XIV. The rehabilitation of Leopold II after World War I and a history of some aspects
of colonial denial in Belgium are discussed in a recent book by Matthew G. Stanard, Selling the Congo:
A History of European Pro-empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism (Lincoln, NE, 2011).
33 On the niche statues in the entry hall, see Wendy Ann Morris, “Both Temple and Tomb: Desire,
Difference and Death in the Sculptures of the Royal Museum of Central Africa” (master of visual arts
thesis, University of South Africa, Nov. 2003), 1–85; Mary Jo Arnoldi, “Art colonial: Les sculpteurs
belges au Congo, 1911–1960,” in Le Congo et l’art belge, 1880–1960, ed. Jacqueline Guisset (Tournai,
2003), 225–50; and Jean Rahier, “The Ghost of Leopold II and the Belgian Royal Museum of Central
Africa and Its Dusty Colonialist Exhibition,” Research in African Literature 34, no. 1 (2003): 58–84.
34 Ludo De Witte, De Moord op Lumumba (Brussels, 1999), translated as The Assassination of Lumumba,
by Ann Wright and Renée Ferby (London, 2001).
35 “The Hidden Holocaust,” Guardian, May 12, 1999, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/1999
/may/13/features11.g22 (retrieved Dec. 8, 2012).
36 Interview with Guido Gryseels, quoted in Alan Riding, “Belgium Confronts Its Heart of Darkness,”
New York Times, Sept. 21, 2002, A19.
37 Musée royale de l’Afrique centrale, La mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial, exhibition pamphlet, 18–19.
38 George Rodenbach, “La Belgique, 1830–1880: Poème historique,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2,
Oeuvres poétiques (Liège, 2000), 835–47, esp. 838 and 842. The poem, commissioned for the fiftieth
anniversary of Belgium, is dedicated to Rodenbach’s grandfather and great-uncle, whom he calls
“the great patriots” who fought to gain independence from the Dutch in 1830. While Rodenbach
(1855–98) is best known for his macabre symbolist novel Bruges-la-morte (1892), the strands of his
regional and national preoccupations have never been braided together with his francocentric model
of decadence and aestheticism. Rodenbach’s 1880 poem “La Belgique” exemplifies and articulates
his engagement with the emerging and nationally specific themes of tyranny, martyrdom, ancestor
worship, and redemptive violence that marked the creation of a unifying culture in Belgium in
the first five decades after independence. On a related topic that takes a different perspective, see
Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, “Group Portraits with National Heroes: The Pantheon as an
Historical Genre in Nineteenth-Century Belgium,” National Identities 6, no. 2 (July 2004): 91–106.
39 King Leopold II inaugurated the monument on August 15, 1887, celebrating the “intrepid militias”
of all social ranks who fought together “pouring out their blood” in the “sublime” spirit of “solidarity.”
Quoted in Stinglhamber and Dresse, Léopold II au travail, 208.

50  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 40 Hendrik Conscience, The Lion of Flanders, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 2003), esp. 1:306–406, 2:41–188.
Conscience’s 1838 book was a foundational historical fiction for Belgium and the first to be written
in Dutch in the new nation. Conscience, a patriot soldier in the 1830 revolution, initiated the Flemish
movement in literature. Supported by King Leopold I, he became in 1846 the Dutch tutor to young
Prince Leopold (then the duke of Brabant). See also William Elliot Griffis, Belgium: The Land of
Art, Its History, Legends, Industry, and Modern Expansion (New York, 1912), 95–102, who discusses
Conscience, the Battle of the Golden Spurs, and the “Good Days,” emphasizing how the “butchers”
of the Lion’s Claws formed an “army of vengeance,” set to “tear the French Lilies to pieces”; Albert
Giraud, “Petite Chapelle,” La jeune Belgique (1883), 23, who noted that “in the time of the Lilies,”
Flanders, roused to battle, “drowned . . . princes and kings in a river of blood” (“Noyait superbement
les princes et les rois / Dans le fleuve de sang”); and Max Waller, “Henri Conscience,” La jeune
Belgique (1883), 409–11, who praised the writer as “the soul of the Flemish” and “of mother Flanders.”
Contemporary histories echoed Conscience’s imagined chronicle of the 1302 battle, such as V.
Mirguet, Histoire des belges et de leur civilization, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1896), 1:261–65; and Charles Severin,
Histoire de la Belgique en images, 2nd ed. (Brussels, 1896). Mirguet’s Histoire des belges et de leur civilization
was included in the list of works available in the library of all the transatlantic ocean liners on the
Red Star Line, which included the Antwerp–Matadi route from Europe to Africa (see the first five
pages of Mirguet, Histoire des belges, vol. 1, “List of Library and Publications of the International Red
Star Line”).
41 The painting was destroyed in the 1944 bombing of the Cloth Hall; some large studies for the
painting survive in the Kortrijk Museum. De Keyser was assiduous in studying the medieval weaponry
available in local museums and collections, but despite his archaeological impulses, the scene he
depicted departed from historical chronicles, romanticizing some elements and improbably freezing
the action to show the surrender of a fallen French knight pinned down by a burly Flemish commoner,
his bloodied ax ready to strike. See Randall Fegley, The Golden Spurs of Kortrijk: How the Knights of
France Fell to the Foot Soldiers of Flanders in 1302 (Jefferson, NC, 2002), 173–74; Musées royaux des
beaux-arts de Belgique, Le romanticisme en Belgique (Brussels, 2005), 84–85; and Patrick Roegiers, La
Belgique: Le roman d’un pays (Paris, 2005), 22–23.
42 Émile Verhaeren, “Les dessins,” in Sur James Ensor, suivi de peintures de James Ensor, présentation de
Luc de Heusch (Brussels, 1990), 96–98 (originally published in 1908); see also Stephen H. Goddard,
ed., Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde, Prints, Drawings, and Books, ca. 1890 (Lawrence, KS, 1992),
211–12. The rarely shown eleven-by-fourteen-inch colored etching from the Firman collection
was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art’s Ensor exhibition in 2009, but it was not reproduced
in the catalogue. In 1902 the sculptor Godefroid Devreese (1861–1941) created a monument
commemorating the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Golden Spurs that features the
Maid of Flanders brandishing a Goedendag with the Lion of Flanders roaring at her side. Devreese
was a close friend of Victor Horta’s, and his statue of David holding the severed head of Goliath was
placed in the stairwell niche of Horta’s first major work, the Tassel House (1892–93). On Devreese,
the Golden Spurs monument, and the Goedendag, see Lucien Solvay, “Notice sur Godefroid
Devreese,” Annuaire de l’Academie royale de Belgique 107 (1941): 1–14, esp. 5–7.
Fin de siècle historians and art scholars such as Henri Hymans, Louis Maeterlinck, and Hippolyte
Fierens-Gevaert were fascinated by the Goedendag weapon and the Battle of the Golden Spurs, and
they debated its form and origins. See, for example, Fierens-Gevaert, Psychologie d’une ville: Essai sur
Bruges (Paris, 1901), with descriptions of the pitiless truculence and brutal mockery with which the
weapon was wielded as a “Bonjour” with a slash to the face, 46–51, and the history and legacy of the
Goedendag, 186–89. Fierens-Gevaert, himself a friend of Horta’s, is the art critic whose essay noted
that art nouveau was called “Style Congo” (Part I, n21).
43 Immersing himself in Flemish popular culture, history, folklore, and legends from the thirteenth
to the sixteenth century, de Coster (1827–79) aimed to evoke through his invention of an archaic
and idiosyncratic writing style in French the tone and themes of a premodern Flemish world and
the sounds of a populist Dutch language. Some literary scholars identify de Coster as the first
francophone writer. Three important editions of de Coster’s Til Ulenspiegel epic I have consulted
are La légende et les aventures héroiques, joyeuses et glorieuses d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak au pays de
Flandres et ailleurs (Brussels, 1867), with a preface by Camille Lemonnier and illustrations by F. Rops,
Boulanger, and others; an unillustrated popular edition (Brussels, 1893); and a limited edition
with hand-colored illustrations by Amédée Lynen and prefaces by Émile Verhaeren and Camille
Lemonnier (Brussels, 1914). Lemonnier called the book “notre bible nationale” in his speech to
inaugurate a monument to de Coster in 1894, cited in Camille Hanlet, Les écrivains belges contemporains
de langue française, 1800–1946 (Liège, 1946), 70; the full speech appears in Camille Lemonnier,
Inauguration du monument élevé par l’administration communale d’Ixelles à Charles de Coster le 22 juillet 1894
(Paris, 1894). See also two indispensable works by Joseph Hanse: Charles de Coster (Brussels, 1990), esp.
32–35; and Naissance d’une littérature (Brussels, 1992), 41–141.
44 The quotes are from the English edition, The Legend of Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak, and Their
Adventures Heroical, Joyous and Glorious in the Land of Flanders and Elsewhere, trans. F. M. Atkinson
(London, 1928), 196–202, 438–56, 499–509, 521–64, 577–94, 604.
45 The role of de Coster’s book, and of foundational violence, in the emergence of national and

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   51

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
imperial culture in Belgium between 1870 and 1910 have never been discussed. I assemble and
trace in my larger study the multiple forms of the diffusion and impact of de Coster’s book and the
adaptation of the Til hero in the fin de siècle, from the avant-garde circles of La jeune Belgique to
the Flemish and francophone artists and intellectuals such as Georges Eekhoud, Émile Verhaeren,
Camille Lemonnier, and Henri Carton de Wiart. Albert Giraud included de Coster in a pantheon of
new literary heroes for the avant-garde in his “Petite Chapelle,” 21–22, where he celebrated de Coster’s
epic as a song to the bravery of “the Beggars” (les gueux—the name for the rebel insurgents against
the Spanish), “licked by the flames of torturers.” Georges Eekhoud, student and friend of de Coster,
tried to write a ballet based on Ulenspiegel in the 1880s, while Lucien Solvay, art critic and essayist,
co-wrote a libretto for an opera, “Thyl Uylenspiegel,” with music by Jan Blockx, which was performed
at the Brussels Théatre de la Monnaie on January 18, 1900. (See Henri Cain and Lucien Solvay, Thyl
Uylenspiegel drame lyrique en trois actes et quatre tableaux, musique de Jan Blockx [Paris, 1899].) The opera
has a penultimate scene where the characters and the ensemble beat the drums of war and vengeance,
singing and chanting “O Sang! O Sang!” (O Blood! O Blood!) for an entire set. Calendars and popular
prints of the 1890s also featured Til Ulenspiegel, and the 1894 monument to de Coster formed an
important chapter in the resurgence of de Coster’s reputation in the last two decades of the century.
One scholar has explored the reception and adaptation of de Coster’s epic and hero in the long
period from 1867 to 1998, Marnix Beyen, in his Held voor alle werk de vele gedaanten van Tijl Uilenspiegel
(Antwerp, 1998). Beyen has a short section on the period 1867 to 1914 (pp. 37–45), and his book
emphasizes the multivalent political uses of Ulenspiegel, especially in emerging Flemish nationalism
and in the period of the two world wars. My analysis highlights a discrete time and a different issue:
the importance of de Coster and the character of Til in the imperial culture of Leopoldian Belgium
and the way the book and the writer generated a model of heroic bellicosity in a nation constrained
by the condition of imposed neutrality in a period of overseas expansion.
46 Henry van de Velde, Récit de ma vie (Brussels, 1992), 399–412. The book cover is listed as La
légende d’Ulenspiegel in L’Écuyer Gallery, Exposition Henry van de Velde, 1863–1957 (Brussels, 1970), 51;
in addition, the Palais des beaux-arts, Henry van de Velde, 77, no. 111, includes Charles de Coster,
Ulenspiegel, “reliure.” No photographs of the book cover exist to my knowledge, and the entries list the
date as 1893 and 1895, respectively.
47 The archives in the Brussels Musée Horta include a list of books in Horta’s library, where the 1914
color edition of de Coster’s La légende d’Ulenspiegel appears.
48 Charles Samuel’s ivory figures called Ulenspiegel and Nele, ca. 1900, shown sitting together on a
marble base, can be seen in the ivories gallery of the Brussels Royal Museums of Art and History.
Til, sword at his side, is shown with the pouch of his father’s ashes on his chest; Nele is leaning over
to him. Samuel (1862–1938) inscribed the base with the last lines of the book, after Til rises from
the grave, exclaiming that the “spirit” and the “heart of Mother Flanders” “may sleep but never
die.” Samuel created some of the painted plaster group statues of imagined Congo life for the 1897
Tervuren exhibition, such as the improbably balletic Porters group that remains on display. The same
artist’s chryselephantine statuette La Fortune (Fortuna) shows an ivory figure of a scantily clad woman
cradling a horn of plenty in her arm; it overflows with gold and silver coins that pour out to a number
of pudgy babies playing below. La Fortune was reported to be a favorite of King Leopold’s, and it
was exhibited in the 1897 Hall of Honor’s chryselephantine group at the entry to the exhibition.
On Samuel’s La Fortune, see F. Khnopff, “The Revival of Ivory Carving in Belgium,” Studio 4 (1894):
151–52; and Silverman, “Modernité sans frontierès,” 747–51.
49 Jean-Jacques Altmeyer, Une succursale du tribunal de sang (Brussels, 1855); see also Alphonse
Wauters, Collection de mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de Belgique, XVI siècle: Mémoires de Viglius et d’Hopperis sur
le commencement des troubles des pays-bas (Brussels, 1858).
50 Paul Delsemme, “Charles de Coster,” Revue littéraire en ligne, no. 39 (January 15, 2006): 1–14,
found at www.bon-à-tirer.com, is an excellent source on de Coster’s relationship to Altmeyer; see
also Hanse, Charles de Coster, 11–53, 176–205; Hanse, Naissance d’une littérature, 52–55; Raymond
Trousson, “Présentation,” in Charles de Coster, Légendes flamandes (Geneva, 1980), i–xii; Jethro
Bithell, Contemporary Belgian Literature (New York, 1916), 28–41; Hanlet, Les écrivains belges, 64–71; and
Th. Behaegel, “La sorcellerie au temps d’Ulenspiegel,” Le folklore Brabançon: Commémoration Charles de
Coster, numéro spécial: Le folklore dans l’oeuvre de Charles de Coster 7 (Aug.–Oct. 1927): 78–96.
Hanse explores in intricate detail how de Coster wanted to evoke an “exact physiognomy of the
sixteenth century” and how he borrowed directly from specific historical accounts of the horrors of
the Spanish regime in Flanders, especially those by the authors Motley and Van Meteren. The article
by Behaegel shows how de Coster’s characters were made to suffer the specific types of torture and
punishment for sorcery and heresy prescribed in Joss Demouder’s Praxis Rerum Criminalium, which de
Coster adapted from the 1570 text and its illustrations. Hanse, as well as the other writers noted above,
all emphasize how de Coster’s fierce anticlerical liberalism and anti-Catholic Freemasonry of the
1850s and 1860s led him to simplify sixteenth-century history and recast it as a Manichaean division
of Spanish oppressors and Flemish radicals. But de Coster’s vision was shared by intellectual elites
in his midcentury circles, and this was a history being instantiated into the core of the new nation of
Belgium. One example of this can be seen in the textbook of 1896 by Mirguet, Histoire des Belges, which
relies heavily on the same Motley account of the period of the Spanish Fury that shaped de Coster’s

52  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 writings. Mirguet even repeats Motley’s dramatic rendering of the way the crowds reacted to the
executions of counts Egmont and Horne by filing by in silence and dipping their handkerchiefs into
the pools of blood that had gushed out from the beheaded bodies of the two noblemen (2:560–67).
51 An extraordinary and meticulous presentation of the folkloric sources of de Coster’s epic, by the
book’s chapters and sections, can be found in Le folklore Brabançon: Commémoration Charles de Coster,
numéro spécial. The werewolf, which plays an important role in the plot of de Coster’s Ulenspiegel
book, is a vital character in the folkloric culture and oral tradition that extends well into twentieth-
century Belgium, as the journal Le folklore Brabançon and the texts of Isidoor Teirlinck indicate. One
extraordinary recent example of the persistence and vigor of oral culture and supernatural creatures,
spirits, and forces is the current project called the “Vlaamse Volksverhalenbank,” an ongoing
database of seventy thousand Flemish legends from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries now
being digitized and stored on the Internet with the cooperation of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
More than twenty thousand legends, including will-o’-the-wisps, werewolves, dwarves, witches, and
ghosts, are already in the database, as are transcripts of interviews with tale-tellers still living in West
Flanders. See Katherine Van Effelterre, “The Disclosure of a Rich Collection of Flemish Folk Legends
on the Internet,” Fabula 46, nos. 3–4 (Aug. 2005): 314–23.
While de Coster was one of the first intellectuals to study and collect popular legends, folklore, and
fairy tales, beginning with his 1857 Légendes flamandes, the consolidation of the field of folklore took
place in the late 1890s, coinciding with the period of the Congo Free State. Scholars and folklore
circles in Belgium in 1897 and after began to associate national and Congolese forms of what they
called “primitive” culture and religion; these intellectuals examined what they saw as the shared
“polytheism” and animistic practices of Catholic Belgians (both Walloon and Flemish) and the natives
in their African empire. I discuss these fascinating folklorists and their important and unexamined
ideas of what I call “parallel primitivisms” in my larger study.
52 De Coster, The Legend of Ulenspiegel, trans. F. M. Atkinson, book 1, 95, 201.
53 Le folklore Brabançon: Commémoration Charles de Coster, numéro spécial, 62.
54 Ibid. The folklore compendiums also include discussions of the cult of magical fingers and
other dismembered body parts, such as in Dr. Robert Foncke, “Les doigts de malfaiteurs,” Le folklore
Brabançon 1 (1921): 92–93.
55 According to the archives of the École militaire, de Coster was responsible for national history
in two parts: through the time of Charles the Fifth, followed by the rest, called histoire nationale
complète. Students enrolled at the École during de Coster’s tenure included a score of early volunteer
noncommissioned officer recruits to the Congo, such as Charles Liebrechts, Charles Warlomont,
Albert Thys, Ernest Cambier, Louis Crespel, Guillaume Ramaekers, Émile Popelin, Jerome Becker,
Camille Storms, Camille Coquilhat, and possibly Charles Lemaire. Their names and dates of service
can be traced in the entries in the Biographie coloniale belge as well as in the records of the École
militaire. I am grateful to historian Marc Beyaert, director of the Brussels École Militaire Museum as
well as creator and curator of its archives, for directing me to important materials and information
during my visit there.
The links between de Coster’s work as author of Til Ulenspiegel and his teaching at the École
militaire, the appeal of a book celebrating heroic bellicosity in a condition of imposed neutrality, and
the role of the Congo Free State as an avenue for frustrated collective aggression—what the writer
Edmond Picard called those “warrior instincts” of “no use” in Belgium (a neutral country with a non-
conscription army until 1909)—have never been identified. (Picard’s statement appears in his book
En Congolie [Brussels, 1896], 151.)
An interesting convergence of de Coster, Til Ulenspiegel, and the Congo emerged through the
artwork of Amédée Lynen (1852–1938), a devotee of de Coster who spent two decades after 1885
preparing prints and hand-colored illustrations for an edition of Ulenspiegel, based on extensive
research and immersion in sixteenth-century society, culture, and war in the southern Netherlands,
and amassing a visual archive for an exacting and historically authentic set of images to evoke de
Coster’s world. Lynen was also fascinated by the Congo Free State and created virtual “intuitive”
paintings of Congo scenes without ever having left Belgium. Most important, between 1896 and 1897,
while he was busy working on Ulenspiegel, Lynen was also preparing all the extensive drawings for the
official exhibition catalogue for the Tervuren Congo section of the 1897 Brussels World’s Fair. Lynen
never traveled to Africa but studied Congo materials through photographs, maps, explorer literature,
and travel books. He was particularly fascinated by Congolese ironwork and weapons. Lynen’s
depictions of these African objects show some striking affinities with his drawings of the arsenal of
combat of Til Ulenspiegel and his rebel Beggar armies of 1575, and Lynen relies on an identical visual
strategy for presenting the two cultures of combat in both volumes—he fills the sides of pages in
each, for example, with side rows and clusters of clearly rendered spears, bladed and carved swords,
axes, and bows and arrows. The intersection of Lynen, de Coster, and Africa has never been studied.
On Lynen’s work on Ulenspiegel after 1885, see Émile Verhaeren, preface to de Coster, La légende
et les aventures héroiques (1914), esp. v–viii; the Congo images course through the entire exhibition
catalogue of Masui, Guide de la Section de l’État Indépendant du Congo (“Illustrations d’Amédée Lynen”).
Lynen’s African artwork is noted by his inclusion in the Biographie coloniale belge, vol. 3 (Brussels, 1952),
573–76, including a discussion of the “intuitive” paintings and watercolors of Africa.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   53

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 56 General Liagre spoke at de Coster’s funeral in 1897, and he worked hard after the author’s death
to enhance his reputation and publications, as discussed by Hanse, Charles de Coster, 32, 37. On the
career and activities of Liagre, including his early African initiatives in the Royal Geographic Society
and the AIA, see M. Walraet, “Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Liagre,” in Biographie coloniale belge, vol. 3 (Brussels,
1952), 552–55, which also includes a long list of Liagre’s extensive work in astronomy, latitude, and
geography; A.-J. Wauters, “Le Général Liagre,” Le mouvement géographique (1891): 6; Émile Wanty,
Le milieu militaire belge de 1831 à 1914 (Brussels, 1957), 117–204; and Commission internationale de
l’Association africaine, session de juin 1877, 2–53, a report of the meeting where the flag type was chosen,
after rejecting a proposal to use King Leopold’s own Brabant Lion of Flanders in favor of a flag with
a gold star and deep blue background. Wauters, another ardent Brussels Freemason, celebrated
Liagre’s scientific research in cosmographie stellaire (also the title of a book Liagre wrote in 1883),
cartography, and astronomy, all fields of enthusiasm among the Freemason imperial liberals seeking
a secular religion of universalizing geographic exploration. The link between Liagre and the Congo
“Freemason” flag has never been identified, and while the 1877 commission meeting report does not
identify by name the person who suggested the flag design, it seems inconceivable that Liagre, a
prominent member of the group and Belgium’s own representative, would not have been the one to
choose the Freemason design regnant in his own Brussels lodge.
57 General information on Jef Lambeaux (1852–1908) can be found in Jacques Van Lennep,
Catalogue de la sculpture: Artistes nés entre 1750–1882 (Brussels, 1992), 271–76; and S. D. Générale de
Banque, La sculpture belge au 19ème siècle, vol. 2 (Brussels, 1990), 478–83. Art nouveau architect Paul
Hankar worked on one version of the monument, but Lambeaux completed the work on his own. The
1887 Antwerp Brabo sculpture has received little attention, and my analysis that follows is informed
in part by the language and themes of “violence,” “virility,” “impetuosity,” “temerity,” and “ferocity”
expressed by contemporary art critics who discuss Lambeaux and the monument: Edmond-Louis
Taeye, Les artistes belges contemporains (Brussels, 1894), and Sander Pierron, Études d’art (Brussels, ca.
1910). Pierron, a close friend of Victor Horta’s, also devotes a chapter of Études d’art to Horta in this
invaluable book from the period.
58 On the Antwerp port and wharves redevelopment of 1877–85, see Edmond de Bruyn, “Anvers,”
Notre pays 1 (1905): 245–76, esp. 258–61; Herman Wauters, De Semini-saga (Brasschaat, 2010), 51–60,
with the information on the Afrikadok on 55; Paul Belien, A Throne in Brussels (Charlottesville, VA,
2005), 113–16; Demetrius Boulger, Belgian Life in Town and Country (New York, 1904), 79–92; William
Elliot Griffis, Belgium: The Land of Art (New York, 1912), 5–7, 273–92; Karl Baedeker, Handbook for
Travelers, Belgium and Holland, Including the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg (Leipzig, 1905), 159–200; and
Piet Kimzeke, All about Antwerp (Ostend, n.d.), 5–9. On nineteenth-century Antwerp before the
imperial period, see G. Beeteme, Anvers: Métropole du commerce et des arts (Antwerp, 1886), chaps. 8–10.
59 See, for example, Jacob Jonghelinck’s statue of Mercury, God of Trade, ca. 1570, a bronze figure
with gold pouch and gilded wings on his feet, illustrated in Jan Van der Stock, Antwerp: Story of a
Metropolis (Antwerp, 1993), esp. 148–49; Beeteme, Anvers, 35–83; Henry Crittendon Morris, The
History of Colonization from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, vol. 1 (New York, 1900), 302–9; and Peter
Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca, NY, 2008),
with an excellent section on the flourishing of Antwerp before Charles the Fifth, 133–43.
60 Jan Van der Stock, “The Creation of a Past, Fact and Fiction,” in Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis,
176–81, 243–47, with selections from chronicles, maps, and prints.
61 See Jan Lampo, Het Stadhuis van Antwerpen (Brussels, 1993), with high-quality photographs of
the renovated interiors, multiple emblems of the severed hands, and an excellent section showing
the relationship between the new Brabo statue and the new town hall. The train station, subsidized
largely by King Leopold II from the Congo crown treasury monies, is a lavish expanse, with a gilded
clock and the escutcheon of the severed hands of the city of Antwerp in the main arrival hall. The
Flemish modernist writer from the fin de siècle Georges Eekhoud (1854–1927), a former student
and friend of Charles de Coster’s at the École militaire, reclaimed the legend of Brabo, Hand
Werpen, and Druon Antigoon for the late nineteenth century in such provocative writings as “Les
origines fabuleuses d’Anvers: Tachelin et les enfants du Priape,” in La Belgique artistique et littéraire
20 (1910): 31–47.
62 At the height of Antwerp’s glory in the mid-sixteenth century, the town hall proudly displayed the
charter of the city’s privileges as well as what was identified as the giant Druon Antigoon’s physical
remains, and they became part of the lore of the city and its celebration of a legacy of urban pride
and freedom of the seas. The giant’s remains took the form of giant bones, illustrated in Van der
Stock, Antwerp, 176–81, 243–47. One skeptical contemporary, historian Johannes Goropius, rejected
the “fable” of Brabo and the hand-throwing and derided the giant bones on view as “elephant
bones”; they were also called “whale bones.” See ibid.; Jochen Becker, “Das Rathaus van Antwerpen
(1561–1565): Architektur und Figurenprogramm,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art
17, nos. 2–3 (1987): 199–203, 201n; and Arnade, Beggars, 251. The sixteenth-century town hall display
of the giant as “elephant bones” bears many levels of irony for the Antwerp of Lambeaux’s Brabo and
Leopoldian imperial civic culture of the 1890s, when elephant tusks, giant bones, and crania were
regularly shipped out from the Congo to the Belgian port as treasured merchantables and objects for
display in museums and exhibitions.

54  West 86th V 20 N 1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 63 The playful adaptation of the giant and Brabo appeared already in the sixteenth century, when
Antigoon was featured in tableaux vivants, as noted in Arnade, Beggars, 251, and Mark Meadow, “Ritual
and Civic Identity in Philip II’s 1549 Antwerp ‘Blijde incompst,’” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek
49 (1998): 39–67. Eekhoud’s essays and fiction emphasize the incorporation of the giant Antigoon
to the kermesse tradition and to the Ommegang festivals in nineteenth-century popular culture, such
as in “Les origines fabuleuses” (cited above) and his short story “La pucelle d’Anvers,” in Kermesses
(Brussels, 1884), 90–112, which takes place during the parade of the Antwerp giant and features the
construction, and destruction, of the elaborate float that carried him through the city streets, as well
as revealing, as Eekhoud’s writing always does, the narrow boundary between carnival and carnage
and the eruption of violence amid collective festivity.
64 No photographs of the Lambeaux statue I know of ever reveal what is apparent only in viewing the
statue in the round, at the site: the giant’s severed head is held aloft at the back of the statue by one of
the twisting nudes in the middle of the composition. The base shows the giant’s dismembered body
and arm stump, and the head is visible midway, compelling the viewer to move from body to head to
hand, recapitulating the act and stages of Brabo’s grisly force.
65 On the sixteenth-century niche statues, the Roman Brabo of the town hall and the replacement
with the Virgin, see Van der Stock, Antwerp, 243–47, with plates; Becker, “Das Rathaus,” 200–203; and
Arnade, Beggars, 250–53, 323–27.
66 Van der Stock, Antwerp, 176; Eekhoud, “Les origines fabuleuses,” who notes a Joyous Entry festival
of 1873 when Leopold II encountered a cavalcade with a float of the giant Druon Antigoon; and
Arnade, Beggars, 251.
67 From King Leopold II’s letter to the agents of the Congo Free State as a statement of their mission,
June 16, 1897, reproduced in Liebrechts, Léopold II, fondateur d’empire, 212–16, including this passage:
“L’exemple des officiers blancs, la discipline militaire leur inspireront l’horreur des trophées humains
dont ils [les natifs] sont prêts à s’enorgueillir. . . . Nos sociétés policées attachent avec raison à la vie
humaine un prix inconnu aux communautés barbares” (213).
68 Africa as an outlet for the “energy, initiative, and audacity” missing or prohibited from expression
in Belgium, especially among the military, is an important theme of imperial culture which I develop
elsewhere. The compensatory arena of Africa for an underfunded and underappreciated military
sector in the 1880s and 1890s is suggested by Wanty, Le milieu militaire belge, who uses the three terms
quoted above. Diaries and correspondence of officers and explorers offer ample testimony of this
dynamic. Captain Charles Lemaire, for example, volunteered for the Congo Free State in 1889,
and by age twenty-seven, in 1890, he was the commander of the vast Equator district. He hoped, as
he wrote in his diaries, that Africa would provide him with the “honor” and “élan” missing in the
lackluster army with which he had trained, which stung his pride and belittled his ambition as an
institution routinely ridiculed as a group of “sabre-rattlers” and “old women.” Camille Coquilhat
joined the army at seventeen and found in the Congo in his early twenties a space for adventure and
a way “to test his mettle” and to pursue his “passion for the unknown.” “Adieu à la vie en pantoufles
des Belges immobiles dans leur bien-être” (Goodbye to the good life lived by Belgians padding
around in their bedroom slippers), he exclaimed as he set off. The Delcommune brothers were also
in the Congo by their early twenties. For Alexandre Delcommune, Africa offered a break from the
stifling “casanière” (homebody) life of Belgium and a space to feed his “aspiration for the unknown.”
Lemaire’s diaries are cited in L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 1884–1914
(Princeton, NJ, 1979), 23–24; Coquilhat’s comments are in Sur le Haut-Congo (Paris, 1888), 9–10;
and Delcommune’s are in his Vingt années de vie africaine: Récits de voyages, d’aventures, et d’exploration
au Congo Belge, 1874–1893 (note the incorrect title of the Free State as “Congo Belge,” again), 2 vols.
(Paris, 1922), 1:4. Edmond Picard’s comments about “warrior instincts” being of no use in Belgium
are in his book En Congolie, 151.
69 See, for example, J. Maes, Le musée du Congo Belge à Tervuren: Guide illustré du visiteur (Antwerp,
1925), 112–13.
70 The mask and its restoration are now featured, without the turntable, in a separate case in the
museum’s ethnographic gallery.
71 Michael Meeuwis, “Het activisme van der verminking” / “L’activisme de la mutilation,” in
Belgische Vereniging van Afrikanisten / Association Belge des Africanistes, Nieuwsbrief/Bulletin,
forum no. 25, July 2005, 3–12, quotes on 9, 10. The Ostend provocation was the work of the group De
Stoete Ostendenoare, who hoped the action would “prepare” visitors for and “sensitize” them to the
Memory show at Tervuren as well as bring a missing critical perspective to the local 2005 exhibition
celebrating the centenary of King Leopold II’s lavish transformation of Ostend during the Belle
Époque, which was funded with the proceeds of his Congo treasury.
72 Ibid., 6–7, 11–12. My thanks to Adam Hochschild for alerting me to this important article.
73 Belgian colonial historiography has been revitalized in the past six years, and professional
historians are developing new approaches and exploring new topics while enlisting a dispersed
but voluminous empirical record provided by two generations of foundational scholars, who
expressed varying and often contentious positions on the scale and significance of colonial violence.
Guy Vanthemsche (Université libre de Bruxelles), a leader of a new generation of colonial and
postcolonial historians in Belgium, discusses the dual and nationally specific challenges of moving

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   55

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 forward from what he calls the “weight of the Leopoldian heritage,” which contributed to a “Belgian
colonial historiography” that, “in comparison to other imperial countries,” “is lagging behind.” He
also highlights the perplexing and obdurate gap between the state of historical knowledge and
broader public awareness and understanding of colonialism and its legacies, with the example that,
even in 2006, middle school student textbooks still celebrated the way Belgium brought the virtues
of Western civilization and progress to a world of blight and slavery in Africa. See Vanthemsche,
“The Historiography of Belgian Colonialism in the Congo,” in Europe and the World in European
Historiography, ed. Csaba Levai (Pisa, 2006), 89–120, quotes on 106, 89. This article is illuminating but
tends to flatten out the antagonisms that split different segments of the Belgian scholarly community
between 1980 and 2005 regarding colonial violence, the systematic and structural forces of the rubber
regime, and King Leopold II’s role as national leader. These divisions erupted, as we have seen,
during the period of the reception of Adam Hochschild’s book. One telling example of this acrimony
can be found in the H-Africa reply of Jean-Luc Vellut, professor emeritus at the Université catholique
de Louvain, to an interview with Jan Vansina, a pioneer in African studies and Congo history who has
spent his career at the University of Wisconsin after leaving Ghent University. Vansina’s innovative
and prolific scholarship combined anthropology and history and explored oral traditions with
pathbreaking fieldwork in the rainforests and rural areas of west-central Africa, especially among the
Kuba peoples, and he was a vigorous early champion of ending the silence about Belgian violence in
the Congo as well as a central adviser to Adam Hochschild, which made him a controversial figure.
See Vellut, “Jan Vansina on the Belgian Raid: A Reply to ‘History Facing the Present’: An Interview
with Jan Vansina,” H-Africa, November 1, 2001, www2.h-net.msu.edu/-africa/africaforum
/VansinaInterview.htm; and Jan Vansina’s most recent book, Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience
in Rural Congo, 1880–1960 (Madison, WI, 2010).
Signaling the type of work of a new generation of historians in Belgium is Vanthensche’s volume
in a prestigious series of scholarly textbooks on Belgium’s national history, where he offers the first
interpretive synthesis interlinking the national and colonial histories of Belgium and the Congo in
the modern period, though it is weighted toward economic, political, and institutional structures:
Nouvelle histoire de Belgique, vol. 4, La Belgique et le Congo: Empreintes d’une colonie, 1885–1980 (Brussels,
2006). Cultural dynamics of national and imperial interactions are only beginning to be studied
systematically, especially for the period of the Congo Free State as “virtual” colony (1885–1908); two
early and important forays into this area can be found in the following collections: Marc Quaghebeur
and Émile Van Balberghe, eds., Cellule Fin de Siècle: Papier blanc, encre noire: Cent ans de culture
francophone en Afrique centrale (Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi), 2 vols., especially the articles by Pierre Halen,
Pierre Salmon, and Sabine Cornelis; and Pierre Halen and Janos Riesz, eds., Images de l’Afrique et du
Congo/Zaire dans les lettres françaises de Belgique et alentour: Actes du colloque international de Louvain-la-
Neuve (Brussels, 1993), especially the articles by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Sabine Cornelis, and Marc
Quaghebeur. I explore some of the patterns of collective projection and ripple-back from the Congo
in the creative consciousness and artistic production of the fin de siècle Belgian avant-garde from
1885 to 1908 in Part I and Part II (Debora L. Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African
Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part II,” West 86th [Fall–Winter 2012]) of this article, as well as in my
“Modernité sans frontières.” A study of the political culture of Leopoldian Belgium and elite mobilization
and dissension concerning Belgian expansionism in Africa can be found in Vincent Viaene, “King
Leopold’s Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party, 1860–1905,” Journal of Modern
History 80 (2008): 741–90; see also Viaene, David Van Reybrouck, and Bambi Ceuppens, eds., Congo in
Belgie: Koloniale Cultuur in de Metropool (Leuven, 2009).
African history and anthropology are robust and critical fields in the developing perspectives
on colonialism in Belgium, with an active interdisciplinary organization, the Belgian Association
of Africanists, loosely uniting them; Boris Wastiau’s ExitCongoMuseum: An Essay on the “Social Life” of
Masterpieces of the Tervuren Museum (Tervuren, 2000) is an early, arresting, and creative example of the
new generation of scholars.
David Van Reybrouck, a multitalented Flemish essayist, historian, playwright, and public
intellectual in Belgium, has brought a bracing, complex, and humane vision of the relationship
between Belgium and the Congo, past and present, to a wide audience in Belgium, in a series of
works in a number of different media. He has a deep and ongoing engagement with people and
communities in the DRC that inform his historical writing in unusual ways. Van Reybrouck’s works
include Missie (Mission), an award-winning 2007 play based on interviews with missionaries in
the eastern Congo, and Congo: Een Geschiedenis (Amsterdam, 2010), a lyrical, deeply researched,
and multidimensional interpretive history of the Congo from 1870 to the present, written for the
general public. Van Reybrouck selected texts from oral tradition and oral interviews to inflect the
photographic exhibition and book of Carl De Keyzer and Johan Legae, Congo (belge) (Tielt, 2010),
which created new encounters between the public in Belgium and the legacy of the colony; I discuss
this further in the last section of this article.
74 Scholars at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) recently embarked on a study of its
own ethnographic collections from the Congo. A landmark exhibition and accompanying book here
was Jo Tollebeek et al., Mayombe: Ritual Sculptures from the Congo (Tielt, 2010), featuring objects from
the Scheut missionary collections and those from the first Leuven University Congolese Ethnography

56  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Museum, with a series of essays and collaborators from KU Leuven, the Université catholique de
Louvain (UCL), the Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa, K ADOC (Documentation and
Research Centre for Religion, Culture and Society), and the research unit “Cultural History since
1750” of KU Leuven; see also the article of KU Leuven historian Idesbald Goddeeris, “Congo in onze
navel: De omgang met het koloniale verleden in België en zijn buurlanden,” Ons Erfdeel 54, no. 1
(2011): 40–49. A group of social scientists at UCL published a wide-ranging book of essays by Belgian
scholars on King Leopold’s colonialism: Dujardin, Rosoux, and de Wilde d’Estmael, Léopold II: Entre
génie et gêne. Jan Vandersmissen’s dissertation, now a book, is also a cornerstone for a new generation
of scholars. See his Koningen Van de Wereld: Leopold II en de aardrijkskundige beweging (Leuven, 2009).
75 The group, led by documentary filmmaker Samuel Tilman, who has a PhD in history from Brussels
Free University, includes Daniel Cattier, a great-grandson of Félicien Cattier, the jurist who helped
provide the legal basis for King Leopold’s domainal rights in the Congo Free State and who by 1906
had become one of his most tenacious critics. The “Eklektik” production films used the technique
of what Tilman called “docu-fiction,” re-creating important historical characters and events by
combining two-dimensional cartoon graphics with archival film and photos. One frame, for example,
shows a scene of King Leopold with a barred door blocking the atrocities and Congo realities;
the frame below it reimagines a famous statement by Congo reformer and Belgian socialist Émile
Vandervelde in 1905 concerning the architecture of the triumphal arch, funded by the king’s Congo
treasury, as “the archway of the severed hands.” Here the filmmakers melded contemporary photos
of the arch with graphics of a river of blood and dismembered black bodies floating in it. For the film
series, and the research and production undertaken by the group, see http://www.eklektik.be
/basic_pages.php?pID =11&type=page&language=en.
76 In 2008 Philippe Van Cauteren characterized “Belgium’s colonial politics” as “a badly healed scar”
and emphasized that “many of the archives from the colonial period are still deliberately inaccessible
so that the common suspicion of abuse and slavery, maltreatment and exploitation remains only a
suspicion.” See his essay “Heart of Darkness (Letter to Jan Fabre II),” in Kunsthaus Bregenz, Jan Fabre:
From the Cellar to the Attic, from the Feet to the Brain (Bregenz, 2008), 205.
77 See AFP, “Tintin in Peril: Congolese Man Seeks Ban on Racist Cartoon,” May 4, 2010, http://www
.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gO9-Znz-MYKKDPvNzJHNhuELLNrQ; Leo
Cendrowicz, “Tintin: Heroic Boy Reporter or Sinister Racist?” May 4, 2010, Time, www.time.com
/time/arts/article/0.8599.1901775.00.html; and Bruno Waterfield, “Tintin Ban Is Like Book
Burning,” Telegraph, June 1, 2010, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/belgium/7793767
/Tintin-ban-is-like-book-burning.html. Mbutu Mondondo recently lost the suit.
78 “The wounds of the past will disappear only when the truth comes out and justice is served,”
Marchand stated. Robin van Wechem, “Charges Sought in Lumumba Death 50 Years after DRC
Independence,” Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, June 28, 2010, www.rne.nl/article/charges-sought
-lumumba-death-50-years-after-drc-independence; Antonia Van de Velde, “Belgians Accused of War
Crimes in Killing of Congo Leader Lumumba,” Independent, June 23, 2010, http://www
.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/Belgians-accused-of-war-crimes-in- killing-of-congo-leader
-lumumba-2007587.html; Slobodan Lekic, “50 Years On, Belgians Face Trial for Murder of Congo
Premier,” News.Scotsman.com, June 22, 2010.
79 Sections of the interview can be read in Leigh Phillips, “Ex-Commissioner Calls Congo Colonial
Master a ‘Visionary Hero,’” EUobserver.com, June 22, 2010; Reuters, “Fifty Years On, Belgium
Struggles with Ex-colony Congo,” June 28, 2010; “MEP Louis Michel Says: King Leopold II Was a
Hero,” Afro-Europe International Blog, June 24, 2010, http://afroeurope.blogspot.com/2010_06_01
_archive/html; “Congo: Louis Michel prend la défense de Léopold II,” ACTU Belgique, June 22, 2010;
Chris Betram, “Plucky King Leopold,” Crooked Timber, June 24, 2010, http://crookedtimber
.org/2010/06/24/plucky-king-leopold/.
80 On King Leopold II’s plans for a Hall of Mirrors in the Brussels royal palace, see Arlette Smolar-
Meynart et al., Le palais de Bruxelles: Huit siècles d’art et d’histoire (Brussels, 1991), esp. 294–364; Irene
Smets, Het Koninklijk Paleis Brussel (Ghent, 2004); and A. Molitor et al., Koninklijk Paleis Brussel (Ghent,
1993). Like his architectural projects after 1900 (the Cinquentenaire arch, the Tervuren museum and
World Colonial School, and the Laeken palace expansions), King Leopold II planned to cover the
lavish expenses for the Brussels palace Hall of Mirrors with funds from his Congo treasuries—in this
case, the shadowy front called the Niederfullbach fund. An indispensable text on Leopold’s drive to
architectural expansionism, including his preoccupation with Versailles, is Stinglhamber and Dresse,
Léopold II au travail, chap. 14, “Léopold II, Bâtisseur,” 239–59.
Discussion of the iconographic programs, political and cultural symbolism, and unusual melding
of allegory with contemporary history in Louis XIV’s Versailles Hall of Mirrors ceiling series by
Charles Le Brun, including illustrations of the frescoes of the Fall of Ghent and the Dutch wars, can
be found in Gérard Sabatier, Versailles ou la figure du roi (Paris, 1999), esp. chap. 8, “Le roi de guerre”;
François Gebelin, Versailles (Paris, 1965), esp. chap. 3; Joel Cornette, Le roi de guerre: Essai sur la
souverainété dans la France du Grand Siècle (Paris, 1993), 231–82, which includes a diagram of the whole
cycle on 245; and T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe,
1660–1789 (New York, 2002), 30–52.
81 In 1997, for example, Fabre created a huge globe with iron stand completely covered with jewel

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   57

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
beetle wing cases; it is now in the collection of the Brussels Royal Museum of Fine Arts. He also
constructed figures such as Flemish Warrior (1996), with a torso of beetle wing cases mounted on wire
partly enclosed in armor, and Tomb (2000), a wall covered with the colorful carapaces and mouths
closed around varied stuffed animals. Since 1998 Fabre has also composed large-scale standing and
suspended figures made from human bone slivers mounted on wire, such as the Bruges Monk (2002).
Some of Fabre’s art, exhibitions, and writings focus on what he describes as the frail permeability from
skin to blood and the quest for a more impenetrable barrier for the body as warrior. From an early
film called Je suis sang and a series of drawings in blood called “My Body, My Blood, My Landscape,”
Fabre’s work has been preoccupied with formalizing vulnerable, wounded figures and their paired
opposite: militant figures encased in steely, hardened shells. Fabre’s writings and interviews explain
that he prefers the protective cover of what he calls “exoskeletons,” of skin as bones, like the beetle
wing case’s hard shell outside and fragile organs within, to the porous physicality of human skin and
bones. The royal Hall of Mirrors ceiling thus extended a central feature of Fabre’s artistic practice,
where violence—endured and enacted—is paramount, recapitulating in contemporary art the long-
term legacy of martyrdom and vengeance central to the invented tradition of modern Belgium as a
new nation since 1840. Here the “skin of steel” of Til Ulenspiegel (a hero of Fabre’s) takes on new form.
For examples of the beetle wing case figural art and the human bone figures, see Jan Fabre, l’ange de la
métamorphose (Paris, 2008), esp. the Antwerp exhibition installations, 20–86.
82 See the articles “Les coléoptères, le goliath royal,” Le Congo illustré (1892); and “Entomologie: Les
coléoptères,” Le mouvement géographique 8 (1892): 8.
83 King Leopold II’s fascination with Java and his determination to re-create the Dutch cultivation
model in an overseas area of extraction and commercial exploitation for modern Belgium is well
documented, beginning with the foundational studies and archives in Jean Stengers, “La genèse
d’une pensée coloniale: Léopold II et le modèle hollandais,” in Congo, mythes et réalités (Paris, 1989),
9–40; and Léon Le Febve de Vivy, Documents d’histoire précoloniale belge (1861–1865): Les idées coloniales
de Léopold duc de Brabant (Brussels, 1955), esp. 18–35, which shows the young Leopold’s extensive
research into types of colonies and his recognition of what he called “forced labor” as a feature of the
Javanese model.
84 Dirk Braeckman, Stefan Hertmans, and Roger-H. Matijnissen, Heaven of Delight, Jan Fabre,
Koninklijk Paleis Brussel, Palais Royal Bruxelles (Brussels, 2002), 66–85, with dialogue with Fabre on
77–85. This volume has the most extensive color illustrations of the large-scale project in process, the
artist’s intentions for it, the work of his équipe of assistants indispensable to realizing it, and the way it
looks on completion.
85 A good discussion of Bosch’s Garden and early exploration can be found in Hans Belting,
Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” (New York, 2007), 99–122, with detailed illustrations; the
Museo del Prado website now has an extraordinary image of all parts of the work, with “zoomable”
details of each section.
86 Braeckman et al., Heaven of Delight, 6–93, with photographs of the stages of the ceiling project
and discussions of the techniques and equipment as well as compositional elements. The section with
the letter P for Queen Paola built up from a beetle wing pattern is illustrated on 64; the comments
regarding the silicon injections returning the beetles’ bodies to life are on 19, 23.
87 “Ik heb een stuk van het plafond van het koninklijk paleis uitbreken omdat er iets uitgroeide.”
88 Kunsthaus Bregenz, Jan Fabre: From the Cellar to the Attic, esp. 85–104.
89 Cited in a Magazzino d’arte moderna web review, Nov. 2011, http://www.magazzinoartemoderna
.com/GALLERIA/Engls/mostra.php?id_msotra=38 (retrieved Aug. 6, 2012); see also the objects
from the show in Chiara Ciolfi, “Belgio Congo, sola andata,” Artribune, http://www.artribune
.com/2011/12/belgio-congo-sola-andata (retrieved Aug. 6, 2012, and Oct. 1, 2012). Fabre’s Bosch
in Congo exhibition subsequently traveled to MAM Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Gallery,
Salzburg.
90 The forms and meaning of the sculpture group and the peculiarly missing feet, partial legs, and
prosthetic-like poles of the three standing natives have not, to my knowledge, received commentary,
nor has the artist Frantzen explained them.
91 Frantzen stated that this roundabout statuary was inspired by the “African water animals on
display” in the museum. When asked about the Frantzen works, museum staff members are quick
to point out that the sculpture groups do not represent their institution, as they are the result of
decisions by, and the budget of, the Tervuren commune, which controls the public spaces around the
museum. Basic information on these works by Frantzen can be found in the “Open-Air Sculptures”
section on his website, www.tomfrantzen.be/en/arta.htm.
92 The children’s workshops have taken place in the large open galleries that form the original,
cavernous “product rooms” of the museum, which for decades showcased the precious raw materials
of the Congo and their conversion into merchantable commodities. At the center of these galleries is
a colossal shaft of Congo hardwood.
93 Rental options and photos of venues are shown on the museum website at http://www.africa
museum.be/about-us/private-events/index_html#event (retrieved Aug. 6, 2012).
94 The basement vaults opened for public view include a series of eerie rooms called “The Trophy
Cellar,” filled with mounted stuffed heads of giraffes (these with their long necks as well), hippos,
gazelles, and antelopes. Another section of the storerooms is crammed with racks and rows of African

58  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 antelope skulls with their intact, heavily ridged or spiral long horns; another haunting room here,
like a catacomb, shows scores of elephant crania and tusks on shelves and on the floor, some arranged
in a semicircle to frame a central giant elephant skull and jaw with intact tusks, mounted high on a
post. This Uncensored exhibition opened in September 2011 and was extended through August 2012.
See posters and ads on the museum’s website for Uncensored: Kleurrijke verhalen achter de schermen /
Uncensored: Histoire animées des coulisses. There was no exhibition catalogue.
95 The innovative Independence! exhibition was organized by the colonial history section of the
Tervuren museum in partnership with the Institut des musées nationaux du Congo and the University
of Kinshasa. Matonge, in the Brussels municipality of Ixelles, is home to a large African community,
with a great proportion from the DRC. A mural by renowned Congolese painter Chéri Samba had for
many years marked the entry to this area of the city. An interesting analysis of the Independence! show
is provided by Véronique Bragard, “‘Indépendance!’: The Belgo-Congolese Dispute in the Tervuren
Museum,” Human Architecture 9, no. 4 (Fall 2011).
96 Some of the 2010 exhibitions were more successful than others in setting the tone for a new
museum. Initially, as discussed above, the plans for 2010 revolved around small-scale refurbishing of
the galleries (which were to remain open) and inaugurating them in time for the centenary of the
opening of the 1910 Tervuren palace, placing the emphasis squarely on the architecture and legacies
of King Leopold II. In the period after the Memory show, long-term strategies for the museum’s
renovation expanded, while the focus on 2010 broadened to balance the museum’s own centenary
with the fiftieth anniversary of Congo independence. The Leopoldian anniversary was marked in a
number of ways: with a synoptic publication and small exhibition on the history of the museum from
1910 to 2010, and with the promise of a future volume to explore the museum’s restructuring plans
(see Maarten Couttenier, Als muren spreken: Het museum van Tervuren, 1910–2010 / Si les murs pouvaient
parler: Le musée de Tervuren, 1910–2010, and the show 100 Years in 100 Photographs). A daylong festival,
“Happy Birthday, Museum!” was held at Tervuren on May 2, with multiple family activities, rides, and
live music.
In addition to the shows on post-independence Congo and Matonge/Kinshasa, the major
exhibition of the season of the two 2010 anniversaries at Tervuren elided the problem of colonial
violence and history in a multimedia spectacle of nature. The museum invested considerable
resources and extensive efforts to sponsor an expedition and create a sprawling, interactive
exhibition called Congo River, 4700 Kilometers Bursting with Nature and Culture (“nature et culture en
effervescence”). Teams of researchers were brought together to chart and follow the course of the
river from “source to mouth through equatorial forest,” allowing visitors to move with them through
“Central Africa’s main artery” and experience its astonishing scale and “biodiversity.” Packed with
objects in brightly lit cases along curving alleys to simulate the water flow, the show did gesture
toward new material, but the welter of artifacts and theatrical lighting largely prevented close
attention. Moreover, the form and content of this show bore some striking affinities to the journeys
upriver that structured the European “discovery” and occupation of “the heart of Africa” in the
late nineteenth century, from Schweinfurth and Stanley to Coquilhat and Conrad. And the show’s
emphasis on monumental nature, transhistorical time, and the subordination of human efforts to the
requisites of a majestic and merciless natural power that could nonetheless be harnessed for human
profit were all reminiscent of the discourses of the colonial period, and the Leopoldian regime in
particular, when the Congo was first defined as a river, not a place. The 2010 Congo River exhibition
was extended and, in 2012, still dominated a wing of the Tervuren galleries with its multimedia
displays and theatrical spectacle. See Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale, Fleuve Congo, 4700 km de
nature et culture en effervescence (Tervuren, 2010).
97 These include, among others, the anthropologist Maarten Couttenier, historian Mathilde Leduc-
Grimaldi, and ethnography department curator Vicky van Bockhaven. In contrast to the Congo
River journey and the scenic exuberance of the Fleuve Congo show it yielded, Couttenier undertook
another expedition to the DRC in 2010, a more somber and meditative journey of memory and
history. In the company of the photographer Sammy Baloji, Couttenier retraced part of the route
through the Katanga region traveled by Lieutenant Charles Lemaire from 1898 to 1900 on behalf of
King Leopold. Lemaire’s expedition included rarely discussed episodes of brutality and violence, and
Couttenier and Baloji visited a number of sites of conflict in the colonial period and the forms of their
commemoration in village communities since then. See the catalogue of the exhibition, Musée royal
de l’Afrique centrale, Sammy Baloji & Patrick Mudekereza en résidence au Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale,
Congo Far West, Arts, sciences et collections (Milan, 2011), esp. 34–109; see also Maarten Couttenier, “De
reddened leugen: De tekstuele en museale representatie van de expeditie Charles Lemaire, 1898–
1900,” Feit & fictie 5, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 50–66.
98 This was evident, for example, in two shows: Collections of the RMCA: Headdresses (2007), where
boxed galleries with entry placards were nestled in between the giant wall maps on either side, and
the packed and rambling Congo River (2010, extended through 2012). The Headdresses exhibition
drew direct attention with wall texts and its printed catalogue to the role of pillage and looting that
yielded the earliest “acquisitions” of the museum, highlighting the brutal seizures of Lieutenant
Camille Storms during the late 1880s, for example, before going on to the later periods of headdress
provenance, which still left many questions unanswered about how the objects made their way to
Tervuren. See Vicky van Bockhaven, The Royal Museum for Central Africa, Collections of the RMCA,

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   59

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Headdresses (Tervuren, 2007).
The recent Congo River exhibition, in a similar manner, squeezed in some new materials and
emphases: along the route of the show’s meandering and overcrowded display cases was one devoted
to King Leopold II, noting in a short text the king’s claim to profit in the Congo through ivory.
This case included two art objects: Thomas Vincotte’s ivory bust of Leopold II (ca. 1900) and the
chryselephantine sculpture The Guardian Angel (ca. 1897), by Jules Legae, both of which had been
languishing in the basement of the museum. The impact of this case dissipated quickly amid the
welter of stuff in the show. More important, this display of ivory for the 2010 show was left as a short
stop along the route of the mighty river, unconnected to the major gallery in this “product” section
of the museum that for decades had celebrated, uninflected, the central part of the Leopoldian
regime: the wonders of caoutchouc (rubber) and its manufacture. Indeed, the 2010 Congo River show
took up the space that had been occupied by the museum’s historical cases of the rubber vines—the
lianes Owarensis and others, which had shown the vines with their thick, coiling branches suspended
and pinned above samples of the latex balls and cakes that their dried sap yielded for export.
The return of the Vincotte and Legae fin de siècle ivory statuettes to public view, however, might
provoke an opportunity for a more systematic study of these ivory objects and their “biographies.”
Unmentioned in their presentation in the Congo River show was that the Leopold ivory bust, mounted
on a stand, had long marked the entry to the opulent rotunda of the museum, beginning in 1910, and
that the visible splits and cracks along the ivory plaques forming the king’s body are the result, in
part, of bombings that shook Tervuren during World War II. A bronze version of this same Vincotte
portrait still rests, without comment, on a column in the museum courtyard. Other ivories in the
Tervuren storerooms would be worth exhibiting and reconnecting to the museum’s history; they
would illuminate the ways the Congo was displayed and encountered in Belgium. Examples include
the ivory plaque of the transfer of the Congo Free State to Belgium in 1909 and the extraordinary
ivory statuette by Eugène de Bramaecker, L’esclave (ca. 1900), of a seated slave, arms raised and open
wide, waiting for liberation. The slave’s face bears in ivory the scarification patterns well known
in Belgium after 1880 to mark natives’ bodies; the raised arms, made from a number of different
contiguous tusks, reveal the gaps as a slice on the arm’s surface. Museum postcards from the 1920s
and 1930s show that this diminutive figure, in a mounted case, was displayed and positioned in front
of the vast cases of ivory tusks and pieces in the “products” room. The slave is shown facing an array
of ivory of all shapes and sizes, arms opening forward, as if to reveal the yield from slavery to freedom.
This exact theme (gratitude for deliverance from slavery and the joyous transfer of jungle treasures
to the Western agents of the natives’ redemption) was represented in the 1894 poem Rédemption,
by Valentin. But the ivory slave in the museum, arms up and open to his benefactors and showing
off the bounty of the jungle, also carries on the surface of his limbs the mutilation of the imperial
interaction, a formal quality of the ivory medium that, as I have shown in Part I, is uncannily fitting in
this context of the suppressed history of violence.
99 This change in nomenclature is evident in museums in other settings, such as the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s Rockefeller Gallery and the Geneva Museum. Innovative exhibitions and
international networks of ethnographic arts and display have been promoted by Tervuren chief
curator Anne-Marie Bouttiaux. See, for example, Persona: Masks of Africa, Identities Hidden and Revealed
(Tervuren, 2009) and Fetish Modernity (Tervuren, 2011).
100 The staggering number of “items” in the “Central African fauna” collections, always referred
to with pride in the publicity literature, catalogues, and website of the Tervuren museum, include,
among others, 7,000,000 invertebrates, 600,000 fish, 200,000 amphibians, 200,000 birds, 100,000
mammals, and 40,000 reptiles, numbers that indicate an astonishing scale of extraction. The rows
of galleries in long corridors in part of the museum are packed with examples of each of these types,
representing only a tiny fraction of what is housed in the vaults and study center nearby, some of
which were viewable in the Uncensored exhibition of 2011–12.
101 Dr. Sabine Cornelis, longtime head of the colonial history section, has facilitated the work of
many historians who have worked in the collections, as have Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi, Maarten
Couttenier, and Nancy Vanderkinderen; I am indebted to all of them. Cornelis’s research on
Belgium’s early explorer artists during the period of the Congo Free State and, more generally,
on the visual and literary representations of Congo in Belgium are foundational sources. Her
unpublished two-volume dissertation can be consulted on request at the Tervuren museum library;
among her important articles are “L’image et les artistes dans la littérature belge inspirée par
l’Afrique: Quelques observations,” in Quaghebeur and Van Balgerghe, Cellule Fin de Siècle, 1:203–42;
and “Le colonisateur satisfait, ou le Congo représenté en Belgique, 1897–1958,” in Musée royale de
l’Afrique centrale, La mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial (Snoeck, 2005), 159–69.
102 During the period of the Memory show, for example, the Royal Museum did co-sponsor and host
a two-day international colloquium, in May 2005, with the Belgian Association of Africanists on the
topic of “Colonial Violence in Congo,” with an opening and welcome by director Guido Gryseels.
The conference was organized by Boris Wastiau, an anthropologist in the ethnography department
of the museum and also the president of the Africanists’ association. The papers at the conference,
including those by renowned writers on the topic Daniel Vangroenweghe of the University of Ghent
and Robert Harms of Yale, were wide-ranging and important, but the promised volume was never

60  West 86th V 20 N1
This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 published by the museum, and only some of them became traceable online.
Wastiau has been active as a scholar and museum curator in bringing attention to the topic of
violence and collecting, and he has also pointed to the reluctance of the museum to engage fully in
providing and publishing the records about it. Wastiau no longer works at the museum and is now
director of the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva. He presented some of his findings about the
violence of collecting at the January 2009 meeting of the American Historical Association, in a panel I
organized with Adam Hochschild on “History, Museums, and the Politics of Memory in Belgium after
King Leopold’s Ghost.” Wastiau’s paper was entitled “The Violence of Collecting: Objects, Images, and
People from the Colony.” See also his critique and pioneering exhibition catalogue ExitCongoMuseum.
103 These photographs represent only a tiny fraction of the thousands in the Tervuren collections
taken by early officers of the Congo Free State and the concession company expeditioners, such as
those by Alexandre Delcommune; photographs, along with maps and travel literature, formed the
main way the Congo Free State became known to the public in Belgium. Some of Delcommune’s
photographs were exhibited as early as 1890, for example, in the Cercle artistique of Brussels, and the
show was visited by King Leopold himself; they also appear on the walls of the Congo sections of the
Antwerp and Tervuren world’s fairs (1894, 1897).
De Keyzer and Lagae’s project, called Congo belge en images (Tielt, 2010), aimed to highlight and
deconstruct what they called the “propaganda” view of the Congo from a distance during the period
from 1885 to 1920, encapsulated by the signature anthology of A.-J. Wauters called Le Congo belge
en images (Brussels, 1914), which presented the Congo as a treasure house of merchantables and an
idealized site of laissez-faire exchange, heralded by the sign in the frontispiece of the book: “Ce que
l’on peut y vendre, ce que l’on peut y acheter” (What one can buy and sell there).
104 This part of the exhibition and catalogue were called Congo (Belge) (Tielt, 2010), with texts
interspersed of contemporary Congo and Congolese life chosen by David Van Reybrouck.
The parenthetical title had a number of meanings. One may have been a sly inversion of the
presumptuous claims of Belgium to “acquire” the Congo during the Leopoldian regime; despite
continual disclaimers to a settler colony, the repeated emphasis by parliamentary deputies that
they authorized the king’s venture as a purely “personal union” divested of national and military
requirements and resources, and the fact that the king was involved with an independent and
sovereign state known as the “Congo Free State,” many imperial enthusiasts in Belgium were drawn
irresistibly from 1885 on to celebrate the territory as what they called “Le Congo belge,” and maps of
the period labeled the area “L’État indépendant du Congo (belge)” or “L’État libre du Congo (belge),”
with “belge” in parentheses (see note 23 above).
105 See Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale, Sammy Baloji & Patrick Mudekereza en résidence au Musée royal
de l’Afrique centrale, 34–41, 44–57.
106 Philip Blenkinsop, “Fifty Years On, Belgium Struggles with Ex-colony Congo,” Reuters, June
28, 2010, 2; and Guido Gryseels, “Avant-propos,” in Couttenier, Als muren spreken, 5. Initially the
renovations were to begin in 2010, but the date has been steadily pushed back and is now scheduled
for a museum closure in 2013. The architectural plans and renovation model are now displayed in the
entry hall to the museum; they can also be seen on the museum’s website.
107 Blenkinsop, “Fifty Years On,” 2. Director Gryseels has also expanded the ties between the
museum and the Belgian Development Cooperation, which has supported a number of scientific
projects and exhibitions and aims to promote “public awareness” and spread knowledge about Africa.
108 These could include the Johannesburg Museum of Apartheid, the National Museum of the
American Indian, and the Vancouver Museum of Anthropology. I provide a comparative look at
how these and a number of other museums address the histories of violence in my larger study. The
literature and debates on postcolonial museums abound, and those on the Paris Quai Branly have
dominated the discourse. Two key works here are Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum
on the Quai Branly (Chicago, 2007), and Daniel Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire,
1945–1975 (Chicago, 2011).
109 One example is the creation in 1897 of a society to study Congolese folklore as part of the
recently organized associations of folklorists in Belgium, as noted in “Le folklore belge,” La revue
encyclopédique (1897): 636; see also note 51 above.
110 The Africa galleries in the Museum of Natural History in New York present the Aniota Leopard
Men as part of regional secret societies and initiation rites. Vicky van Bockhaven is studying the
Aniota Leopard Men in the Congo, including their place in the colonial imagination and their role in
colonial resistance. See “Leopard-Men of the Congo in Literature and Popular Imagination,” Tydskrif
vir letterkunde 46, no. 1 (2009).
111 Alisa LaGamma, Heroic Africans, Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures (New York, 2011), 205–14.
112 “Forty to fifty thousand children visit every year,” according to Gryseels, quoted in Blenkinsop,
“Fifty Years On,” 2.
113 The discussion of “vegetable boas” with “veins of gold” and their “ablations” is from A. Merlon, Le
Congo producteur, 2nd ed. (Brussels, 1888), 87–94.

Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness   61

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 12:08:44 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions