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Devlin Hall felt more like a cocktail party than an admissions building Tuesday night. There was mood lighting, live music, scattered conversation, desserts, and, oh yes, art - Belgian modernist art, to be exact.
All the pomp was for the McMullen Museum's new exhibit: A New Key: Modern Belgian Art from the Simon Collection. Here until July 22, the exhibit includes 53 works that have never been displayed together, let alone in North America.
"This is a world-class event that's right here on this campus," said Nancy Netzer, McMullen Museum Director and professor of art history. "It came to you."
"Unless you're traveling in Europe, you really wouldn't see an exhibit of this nature in such a small, intimate setting," said Elisabeth Narkin, A&S '07. "It's really nice to have it on campus."
The exhibit's overall rarity complemented the provincial music played by student musicians from BC Bop and the Wind Ensemble. Amid candle light that transformed Boston College's reception room into a parlor room from centuries past, Sebastian Bonaiuto, director of bands at BC, conducted the students to the music of René Magritte, one of the painters featured in the exhibit.
Exhibit curator Jeffrey Howe procured the songs from a museum owner in Brussels and Bonaiuto turned the simple voice-and-piano arrangements that had never left Brussels into fully orchestrated pieces here in Boston.
As a leading American historian of modern Belgian art and a professor of fine arts here at BC, Howe praised the exhibit as a new way of understanding Belgium's rich history and the modernist movement - hence the exhibit's title New Key - which took place from the late nineteenth century to World War II.
"Belgium is a very interesting country with multiple layers," said Howe. "The paintings match that complexity and creativity."
Right after opening the museum's heavy glass doors, the viewer is greeted by a painting of many inky, skeletal trees with sinuous branches that wind into a muffled dusk as smooth and gray as the snow that covers a red cabin, seemingly the perfect place for a fire and a good book.
"It often happened that I would study a simple pear tree for weeks on end in order to unravel the tangle of intertwined branches, to clearly see the capricious pattern of the delicate twigs and understand the purpose and meaning of this wondrous sight," the artist's quote on the plaque reads beside Valerius de Saedeleer's "Old Orchard in Winter."
Bonaiuto said the lyrics of the music he conducted were "concerned with romance and the romantic notion of life, maybe a little bit of escape, as well."
This theme of escape resurfaces in the seemingly sun-lit room of peach walls downstairs that's dedicated to the "Fantastic and Carnivalesque."
The room's paintings "[sanction] brief periods of excessive uncivilized and sinful behavior," reads the description on the wall. James Ensor's "Fantastic Ballet" appears in this room. A delightful array of pinks and blues swirl throughout the painting, portraying a dream-like Mardi Gras scene that's quite appropriate since New Orleans will be hosting its annual Bacchanalia this weekend until Fat Tuesday.
"The exhibit is a particularly great show for the general student interest because it has something of everything: landscapes, flowers, people, nudes, war scenes, [and] still lifes," said Howe, who is currently teaching a nineteenth-century European art class here.
Lauren Murphy, A&S '07, took Howe's class on Belgian art last semester and ambled through the exhibit Tuesday night. "This particular period of art is, I think, more accessible to people, especially our age," Murphy said. "I mean, even if you don't understand stuff on a symbolic level, the colors and subject matter in the paintings are really interesting."
The works, which also include a drawing and four sculptures, normally reside in London and France as part of Henry and Françoise Simon's private collection, which comprises the largest group of modern Belgian art outside of Belgium, according to the event's press release.
The Simons visited BC and met with Howe after a museum patron and BC alum who knows the Simons, Joan Hill, sent them a catalogue from an exhibition Howe organized at the end of 2004 on the Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff.
The Simons were so impressed with Howe's work that they decided to loan their coveted collection to the McMullen Museum, "and the rest is history," said Netzer.
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