Artworks

 Léon Navez (figs. 1a and b) was born in Mons, Belgium where he first studied before moving on

to the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. There he took courses in decorative arts but

also pursued painting with Anto Carte, who was to be his mentor and friend. In 1924 Navez’s

talent was recognized as he won the Prix Godecharle, which allowed him to go to Paris where he

remained until 1928. In Paris he certainly became familiar with the developments of Cubism but

was also influenced by the work of Modigliani. Following his return home, Navez next won the

Belgian Prix de Rome, which in turn allowed him to spend time in Italy absorbing the influence of

Renaissance frescos by Giotto. On his return to Belgium, Navez split his time between teaching in

both Mons and Brussels. He was an active member of the Belgian art establishment and one of the

founding members in late 1928 of the Nervia Group of artists from the province of Hainaut. With

his colleagues in this group he created the official decorations for the 1935 Exposition Universelle

in Brussels. During the war years he assisted in the resistance. Late in his life in 1956 he visited

the Congo.

Navez pursued an essentially solitary, independent career, producing works – portraits, still-lifes,

landscapes, nudes, and genre - often classified as Neo-Classical in a stylized, decorative manner.

Already at a sale of one of his paintings in 1930, he was described as an “Artiste penseur et

anallyste raffiné,” both “an artist en vogue” and “a painter with a fine future.”1

 His early work (fig. 2) shows a variety of influences from Cézanne and Cubism, but tempered by

the Belgian manner of his friend Carte (fig 3.). Works produced in the mid-1920s in Paris, like his

The Ages of Women  (1924, fig. 4), Mother and Child  (1925, fig. 5), and Self-Portrait with Models

 of 1926 (fig. 1a) reveal a further development. By the later 1920s he had evolved his spare style of

large empty spaces populated by Vermeer-like figures (fig. 6) but often with the surprising

addition of a nude, as also occurs in his La Toilette  of 1935 (fig. 7).

The subject of this portrait, Gustave Van Geluwe (1881-1962), first established himself as a tailor

in Brussels in 1910 and eventually founded there a successful couture house. In addition to his

fashion business, he was also a distinguished art collector (figs. 8a-d) and focused especially on

the Belgian school with such well-known masters as Ensor and Permeke. But Van Geluwe also

amassed works by many of the younger contemporary Belgian painters. Like Helena Rubinstein,

he commissioned a number of portraits of himself from these artists. This dapper portrayal of him

looking out at the viewer with drawings of nineteenth-century fashions in the background was

painted by Léon Navez in 1925. Navez, based at this time in Paris, did a number of paintings that

reflect an interest in fashion (figs. 9 and 10). Later depictions of himself that Van Geluwe

commissioned are a more full-length oil of 1946 (fig. 11) by Jean Brusselmans (1884-1953);2  a

very colorful, less staid portrait (fig. 12) by Henri François Raemaeker, known as Ramah, (1887-

1947);3  and a 1955 treatment by Serge Creuz (1924-1996, fig. 13).4

 The plain directness of Navez’s 1925 Portrait of Gustave Van Geluwe  is oddly reminiscent of the

realistic portraits being produced at just this time by the German painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit

 (New Objectivity). Although he did not visit Germany, it is certainly possible that while in Paris

Navez saw examples or reproductions of works by such leading artists of this movement as Otto

Dix, Christian Schad, and Rudolf Schlichter (figs. 14-18). Navez never followed these painters in

their extreme departure into Expressionism or caricature, but instead remained faithful to his

modest Belgian roots, continuing to produce his own unique, often haunting, poetic portraits (figs.

19-20).

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