William Degouve de Nuncques

Ronald Feltkamp, Brussels

Tokyo, International Symbolist Exhibition, n.d.
Vienna, Kunstforum, Der Kuss der Sphinx. Symbolismus in Belgien,  2007- 2008, no. 34, illustrated

Beeldende Kunst, 9de Jaargang, no. 44, illustrated

Original canvas. There are no signs of retouching visible under ultraviolet light. This work is in fine original condition and ready to hang. Held in a black and gold, hand-painted moulded plaster and wood frame.
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Painted in 1899, it is likely that the present work was inspired by the Cala Encantada (the enchanted beach), in Deià, Mallorca. Degouve de Nunques lived on the Balearic Islands for a while, settling in Mallorca from 1900 to 1902. It was on this stretch of the coast that Degouve produced some of his most fascinating, dreamlike, almost surreal Symbolist landscapes (see also lot 229 & fig. 4). Degouve found in the Mallorcan coastline and caves a landscape profoundly suggestive of visionary experience, its watery depth and the meandering passageways in the rocks providing a structural metaphor for the unconscious mind.

It was in Deià that he met the Spanish artists Mir (fig. 1) and Rusiñol (fig. 2), and their exchange of ideas as well as Degouve's acclaimed exhibition of Mallorcan paintings in Barcelona in 1902 left a profound impression on their work. In turn it inspired that of the following generation of Spanish artists, such as Oscar Dominguez, as well as other painters, such as Magritte, Max Ernst and Lévy-Dhurmer (figs. 3 & 5).

Mir first met Degouve in Deià in January 1900. Degouve had already established himself in Deià and tried to discourage the young Catalan artist from staying and painting the same spot, by proclaiming that the Cala Encantada was a place that was explicitly for himself. Mir was not dissuaded, and both artists drew inspiration from this area on the North West coast, which features some of Mallorca' s most spectacular landscapes.

Degouve's art is one of simplicity and suggestion, emphasizing intuition and sensation rather than delineation of form. As in Whistler's nocturnes where gradations of selected monochromes merge, in the present work Degouve created luminously melting harmonies of blue, grey and dimmed green.

An essential aspect of Degouve's symbolist aesthetic was the denial of concreteness. Rather than realistically depicting a particular landscape or view, Degouve blurred and dissolved its material presence, to induce sensations of disembodiment in the viewer, penetrated by the yielding, dream-laden atmosphere of the scene. Intangible and elusive, glowing yet subdued, the rocky landscape of Rêve de Voyage has a distant, seraphic quality. Rêve de voyage thus becomes an embodiment of mood, the juncture of a fleeting atmospheric condition and the vague melancholy it evokes.

Degouve de Nuncques derived much of his inspiration from the visionary Symbolist poetry of Verhaeren and Maerterlinck, sharing a similar aim of seeking to portray objects and places in a manner that suggests their mystery and ambiguity. Among the techniques he used to achieve this effect were the use of uncommonly compressed or expanded compositions, idiosyncratic use of colour, muted or absent colour suggestive of silence, and emphasis of stasis and suspended animation.

Degouve's symbolist landscapes, such as Rêve de Voyage, were a visual expression of the void that surrounds the transitory manifestations of existence, and displays his preference for states of imagined non-being, states of suspension rather than motion, silence rather than speech, and an emphasis on the nebulous rather than the fulsome and solidly permanent. The lake surrounded by rocks in the present work has a surreal stillness and other-worldliness to it. An ambiguous Atlantis, hovering in a half-state both aqueous and terrestrial, it calls stability into question and heralds a voyage that leads to a severance from the 'real' world, a symbolic disincarnation and descent into the underworld, and an exploration of the tenebrous depths of the unconscious. Time seems to be arrested in Rêve de Voyage, which adds to its eerie atmosphere. Progress, the obsession of the modern age, is countered by suspended animation.

It is probable that Degouve's art was influenced by the concurrent emergence of psychiatry and dream research. The relationship between the dream state, the unconscious and madness was a key theme of nineteenth-century thought. Dreams and associated phenomena such as somnambulism, ecstasy and hallucinations, as well as the question of whether dreams and daydreams may be a source of creativity, preoccupied artists, writers, philosophers and psychiatrists. Baudelaire's maxim 'Natural things exist only a little, reality lies only in dreams' (Paradis artificiels) was representative of the stance of many Symbolist painters, including Degouve, and found expression in oneiric landscapes such as Rêve de Voyage.

Fig. 1, Joaquim Mir, La Cala Encantada, Deià, circa 1900, Aena Colleccion de Arte Contempôráneo
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Fig. 2: A photograph of Rusiñol and friends at the Café Cau Ferrat with Rusiñol seated below a painting by Degouve de Nuncques (upper right corner)
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Fig. 3, Max Ernst, Vision Induced by the Nocturnal Aspect of the Porte Saint-Denis, 1927
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Fig. 4, William Degouve de Nuncques, La cave de Manacor, Mallorca, 1901, E. & P. Serck Collection
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Fig. 5, Lucien Levy-Dhurmer, La Cala, ca. 1935-36, Musée d'Orsay
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