Léon Spilliaert

Madeleine Spilliaert, Brussels
Thence by descent

Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, L’Art en Belgique, 1990-91, no. 264
Knokke, Imelda Art Gallery, Léon Spilliaert : œuvres inédites / onbekende, 2000, n.n.

Executed on white wove card, not laid down, floating in the frame, fixed to the backing board along the edges. There is a sight waviness to the sheet and artist's pinholes are visible in the corners. The right edge is uneven with some creasing and the lower right corner is missing. Some time-staining is visible along the edges and there is a pinhole loss near the upper left corner, otherwise this work is in overall good original condition.
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What is a vanity, if it isn’t the "unsettling strangeness” that Sigmund Freud described, a feeling of terror when confronted with simple reality. In the present composition the artist has dimissed all necessary elements, all that remains is a skull, symbol of the chair’s former occupant’s past life. The artist seems to want to show that all that remains of our existence is an object. The same fears, the same preoccupations that Spilliaert expressed in his self-portraits are also present in this painting: is our existence in vain? Why not see in this skull another self-portrait of the artist? It may be more subliminal, but it is also much more honest, much more accomplished and more true. This skull, more than any other self-portrait of the artist, projects us into a near future just as empty as the skull’s eye sockets. In this Vanitas we can see the culmination of Spilliaert’s quest through his self-portraits to explain the reason and the status of his fleeting existence.