FOREWORD
by Andrea S. Norris, director, Spencer Museum of Art
Jules De Bruycker's work is dense, amusing, frightening, satirical, whimsical, and
powerful. He
depicted with biting accuracy the drama and social life of Flanders during the first half
of the
twentieth century; his career spans the two World Wars. Though De Bruycker is not widely
known in the United States, he has been an interest of Spencer Museum Curator Stephen
Goddard for several years. In his hometown of Ghent, De Bruckyer was always referred to as
a
tapissier or behangersgast (upholsterer or paper hanger), even when he was a successful
artist
elsewhere. To his colleagues he may have seemed an ordinary bourgeois, but his work
displays
strong visual powers and extraordinary understanding and criticism of the culture in which
he
lived.
Goddard's essay places De Bruycker in both the Flemish community in Belgium and the
artistic
community in Ghent, so that this catalogue and exhibition provide a view on early
twentieth-
century Belgium life. De Bruycker depicted his surroundings in the medium of the graphic
arts,
particularly etching. The brutal humor of some of his imagery contrasts to the more
romanticized
view of poverty characteristic of much of turn-of-the-century realism.