Constant PERMEKE (1886-1952)

CONSTANT PERMEKE  — De groene zee, c. 1924–25

Three quarters of a century separate the earliest landscapes in In Their Nature from Constant Permeke’s De groene zee, yet the painting brings to a radical conclusion many of the liberties claimed by Guillaume Vogels and his generation. The continuity need not imply direct influence. In his essay Éclat et densité de la peinture en Belgique, the art historian Philip Roberts-Jones explicitly identified Vogels as a precursor of Expressionism in Belgium, before drawing the line forward to Permeke, whose powerful handling of the Flemish landscape he considered to belong “au même registre”. By 1924–25 Permeke had reached the height of his first great Expressionist maturity, painting the North Sea obsessively and progressively eliminating beach, dunes and breakwaters until almost nothing remained but water, weather and paint. Karel van de Woestijne, visiting his Ostend studio and writing at precisely this moment, described Permeke as living “in eene abstractie van het zee-landschap”, where “Alles bezinkt. De wereld wordt kleur en rythmus” — everything settles; the world becomes colour and rhythm. De groene zee makes that transformation visible. Only curling strokes of white along its lower edge still resolve themselves as breaking waves; beyond them sea, horizon and sky merge into immense fields of green and brown. Permeke himself supplied the key: “Ik schilder niet zooals ik zie, maar zooals ik meen gezien te hebben” — I do not paint as I see, but as I believe I have seen. What Vogels had begun by allowing landscape to dissolve into sensation and facture, Permeke pushes towards its Expressionist conclusion: nature remains the point of departure, but painting has become its expressive equivalent.