Reconstructing the Old Masters: Hugo Claus and his inter-artistic poems

Abstract

Hugo Claus is not only one of Flanders' most prominent writers, he also earned a solid reputation as a painter: as a young artist he worked together with the international COBRA group and continued painting for most of his life. Some of his poems reveal a complex inter-artistic dimension and show affinities with works by contemporary artists such as Corneille, Alechinsky, Appel and Raveel. In the early sixties his highly visual poetry borrowed a wide range of motifs from the baroque surrealism typical of some paintings by Brueghel, Bosch and their followers who had created an infernal world in which the themes of vice, seduction, guilt and punishment were closely connected. The poet was fascinated with the bizarre and the grotesque but reframed those symbols and allegorical figures in a personal way, distancing himself from their original moralistic intent. Long before the concept of postmodernism was coined, Claus already combined the canonized status of mediaeval art with the undermining registers of colloquial language. In his ekphrastic poems devoted to Memling and Van der Goes, he sharply rejects the religious, social and ideological values those painters stand for: he replaces the apodictic with the ambiguous, discards the balanced structure of the triptych and turns to a decentred montage of statements drifting on irony, satire and cynicism. He systematically undercuts Christian iconography and symbolism as he feels suffocated by religious traditions and rigidly organized social structures.