Antoine Wiertz (1806-65) and the Quest for Modern Genius

The Reverse of the Sublime

Oostveldt, Bram van (ed.)
Bussels, Stijn (ed.)
Eck, Caroline van (ed.)

In art history, the Belgian romantic artist Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806–65) is often considered as the prototype of the artist as a “failure”. Contemporaries described his colossal and melodramatic works as an odd and monstrous potpourri lacking focus and escaping all aesthetic categories. This disparaging for his work already began in 1839 when Wiertz exhibited his Greeks and Trojans fighting over the body of Patroclus at the Paris Salon. After seeing the painting, the Parisian critic Eduard Thierry wrote that “the step from the sublime to the ridiculous has been completely trespassed”, while Charles Baudelaire described Wiertz as this idiot whose paintings were as large as his stupidity. Until deep in the twentieth century, this criticism would set the tone for the Wiertz study and reception, often labeling him as a curiosity and an outcast operating within the margins of contemporary artistic circles. This collection of essays corrects this cliché of Wiertz as an outsider. The first part of the book studies his oeuvre within an international art historical context focusing on the diverse genres and media he practiced. The second part focuses on the Musée Wiertz as one of the earliest examples of the artist museum as a new nineteenth-century phenomenon. Written by internationally renowned scholars, this book provides a new and exciting perspective on this fascinating but hardly studied artist.