Art: THE GLORY OF FLANDERS–AND DETROIT

SUPERB!” cried the London Times after its art critic returned across the Channel from the city of Bruges. The word has been echoed in recent weeks by more than 150,000 visitors from all over Europe. In Bruges’ small, whitewashed Groeninge Museum, tucked away behind the gabled houses that line the ancient Dyver Canal, hung the largest show of 15th century Flemish artists ever assembled. It was a nostalgic occasion for the Belgians, for here were all the glories that had been theirs when Bruges was the mightiest seaport in northern Europe and one of the greatest art centers the world had ever seen. But the idea for the exhibit did not originate in Belgium. It came from the seemingly unlikely place called Detroit.

A longtime Flemish-art buff, Director Edgar Richardson of the Detroit Institute of Arts decided more than a year ago that such a show, opening first in Bruges and then in Detroit, would be an excellent way to celebrate the Detroit Institute’s 75th anniversary. After all, the institute owned 10% of all the Flemish art in the U.S. King Baudouin was approached, and agreed to be a patron; so did President Eisenhower. Museums from San Francisco to Munich lent works, and the U.S. Navy was called in to carry the U.S. loans across the Atlantic. This week, when the show completes its run in Europe, it will be packed into air-conditioned trucks that will head with motorcycle escorts to Saint-Nazaire, where a Navy transport is waiting to take them to their second grand opening, in Detroit.

The Great Dukes. The century on display was the age of the Burgundian dukes, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, who by marriage and conquest so augmented their insignificant duchy that they came to be known as “the Great Dukes of the Occident.” In Bruges, Venetians and Genoese, Danes and Swedes met to trade, and from all over the Low Countries great painters came—Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, Hans Memling, Gerard David, and the three artists known today only as the masters of Flémalle, of the St. Ursula legend, and of the Tiburtine Sibyl.

The Bruges-Detroit show starts with Jan van Eyck, who was court painter and varlet de chambre to Philip the Good, and did as much as any man to change the history of painting.

He was a deeply religious artist, but what struck his contemporaries and swept his influence across Europe was his liberating naturalism. His predecessors, in an effort to keep their religious themes on a properly spiritual level, tended to idealize their figures. Van Eyck had a passion for detail, and his people —whether saints or not—were complete individuals. Landscape and still life came into their own; light and shadow played a more subtle role; the way was open for the time when the everyday mortal would become a worthy subject for art.

Black Depressions. About the time that Van Eyck lay dying, Hugo van der Goes was born. In 1468 history records that he helped design the street ornaments in Bruges for the marriage of Charles the Bold to Margaret of York. He rose swiftly after that, carrying on the trend to greater humanization (see color). But Hugo van der Goes was obsessed by the belief that he was damned. At the peak of his fame he withdrew to a monastery, where kindly monks played sweet music to him when his black depressions came. He died in 1482 hopelessly insane.

For all his inner torment, there was about the work of Van der Goes, as in all the 15th century Flemish masters, an atmosphere of calm and quiet reverence. But in the work of the last of the artists shown in Bruges, all hell literally broke loose. Hieronymus Bosch filled his canvases with demons and monsters, naked little humans, and a catalogue of symbols that have kept the experts guessing ever since. In the Last Judgment (see color), tiny sinners are systematically crushed, drowned, stabbed, hanged, butchered and eaten alive. A huge mouse turns into a kind of coach, a shoe becomes a boat, a fish sprouts a human face, a man crawls like a crab under a metal shell. Of Hieronymus Bosch personally, almost nothing is known—except that as a painter of nightmares, he has never been excelled.