Edgard the Odd

Outside Belgium, Edgard Tytgat is not a particularly well-known painter, but in his native Brussels he rates tops. Last week Brussels' Palais des Beaux Arts was staging its fourth Tytgat (rhymes with Pete got) retrospective in 20 years. As usual, the critics smiled dreamily on his work. Sample comments:

"A sort of Peter Pan of painting."

"An element of good humor and young buffoonery streams into the soul and spirit of exhibition visitors."

"His universe [is] like Jehovah's at the end of the sixth day of creation."

"In the end, his art is sublime folklore and his style that of a genial Sunday painter."

The exhibition's main strength was its youthful exuberance, and its weakness was its slapdash air--both odd qualities for a 72-year-old gentleman well-schooled in his craft. Tytgat's paintings have the warmth, without the solidity, of Renoir, and all the gaiety, without the incisive style, of Dufy. They are little more than illustrations, as he cheerfully admits. "All my pictures are really stories," Tytgat says. "Most of the stories turn out wonderfully well, but a few have horrible endings." Tytgat's own story turned out fine. An invalid as a child, he found a measure of health after deciding to be an artist. An impressionist for a while, he gradually simplified his art. He learned to give his pictures an unpremeditated air by means of a few purposely clumsy touches, practiced a calculated naivete that underlined his impressionistic sparkle. In 1927, the police raided a Tytgat exhibition because it included a painting of a nude clasping a gilded cage between her thighs. The uproar made him renowned in Brussels, and the public came to expect and enjoy the lighthearted eroticism of his later art.

Convalescing from an abdominal operation, Tytgat left the hospital to be on hand for his exhibition's opening. He looked rather like Ed Wynn in the role of an artist, met the praises of friends and visitors with jokes. A reporter's question about modern art sobered him long enough to say that he thinks the world will soon tire of abstractionism, just as it did of impressionism. After a moment he grinned and added: "It was good luck I didn't stay an impressionist, wasn't it?"

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