Belgian Bulldozer

"There are my brushes," jokes Belgian Painter Constant Permeke, 64, pointing to the brooms in the corner of his studio. At first glance, Permeke's lowering land and seascapes, bulky peasants and heavy-limbed nudes look as though they might well have been swept on to the canvas with a carelessly bound bunch of straw. But their spontaneity and crudely powerful draftsmanship have earned him a place as a leader of Belgian expressionism and, according to some critics, "one of the most incontestable masters that Belgium has given to art."

Belgians first began to hear of burly Constant Permeke when he blustered into the Flemish art settlement of Laethem-Saint-Martin in 1909. There, with a few other young experimenters, he set about fighting the impressionist artists-in-residence. For their softly lighted diffused studies Permeke substituted virile paintings of grubby, stocky farmers with huge limbs and bullnecks, stuck them in earthy, gloomy landscapes.

By the 1920s, Permeke had bludgeoned his way into the art consciousness of even the most conservative Belgians. In 1930, his output was already so large that he was able to collect 550 paintings for a Brussels exhibition. He boasted that in many of his pictures there was not a single bit of retouching; some of the vast land-and seascapes were the work of an afternoon. At 50, he decided that painting was not enough to consume his prodigious energy, and began doing big, sprawling sculptures of his sturdy models.

Last week Permeke was still going at his art with the same bulldozer determination. At Antwerp, he closed his second big show of painting and sculpture in less than six months and hustled back to work.

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