Studio: international art (12.1898)

Georges De Feitre

save in the works of some
of the master-minds of the
Renaissance.

De Feme's gifts have
something essentially femi-
nine about them. One
feels that he loves woman-
kind in its supreme beauty,
which is the supreme evil
itself. He strives to paint
in all its varieties her
eternal feline attributes—
the woman of a thousand
curves, a thousand fascina-
tions, consumed by a
selfish love, given to all
excesses, the trunk whence
all the vices spring, the
source of all the ills, the
soul of every forbidden
delight. He sees in these
sirens nothing but demons
whose mission it is, as St.
Augustine thought, to in-
crease sin and degrade all
vigorous thought. Thus
continually haunted, like a
visionary, by the sight of
an endless procession of
human woes, Georges de
Feure devotes his whole
mind to lamenting them

"la fille de leda" from a painting by georges de feure m hLs eloquent works a

series showing Man bear-
ing his cross under the

ing. His line has all the sureness of a Vivarini maleficent influence of Woman, perverse, distract-

or a Van Eyck ; he goes so far even as to insist ing, unconscious. This series he calls Les Caresses

upon it cruelly, scarring the flesh with the marks de Satan.

of the fire into which he thrusts his figures. And Another picture by De Feure, which, doubtless,

this gives to his works a certain character which satisfies his artistic soul, is composed as follows :

certainly adds to their beauty and force." In a sky, quivering with clouds of miraculous

In his Spleenetique, a big decorative canvas in- flowers, and studded with celestial jewels, one sees

spired by some melancholy poem of Baudelaire's, a woman's form, regal, triumphant, satanic. De-

De Feure paints a quite modern woman, with red liciously childlike in its virginal simplicity, her

flowers in her hair, like a Bacchante, sitting on a youthful body is outlined in gracious curves, soft

terrace beneath the browning leaves of autumn, as a caress ; her heavy masses of hair crown her

and looking across the grey and misty plains into brows as with a diadem; her face bears the stamp

the distance, soft and milky, and plunged in of a strange and prodigious beauty; from her

mystery; while the sun hides behind the dense mouth, with its blood-red, kiss-provoking lips, and

clouds, scarce showing his disc, half covered with its two rows of pearls, gleams the light of hell ; her

whitish film like the iris in the eye of the blind. nostrils quiver in ardent palpitations; while below

There is a pervading atmosphere of sadness about her pure forehead are two terrible eyeless orbits,

this painting, a depth of dreaminess and a sense of staring vacantly on the world, blind to the victims

wandering thought, which one can scarcely equal of her fatal body,
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