22. Modernism
At the turn of the century, modernism emerged in Belgian art: artists involved primarily painted in a personal and original manner. This heralded the end of the 'still-life painter': artists had to be themselves, become their own brand name!
Some 'Soft Modernists', such as Louis Thevenet, clung to the traditional pictorial space and vocabulary of still lifes.
However, Léon Spilliaert, Walter Vaes and Gustave Van De Woestyne, went further in the modernist approach, each in their own way.
They did so by focusing on alienation, by radically depicting matter or by essentialising objects into object types: the object was not a vase, but THE vase. While Rik Wouters and Albert Saverys tilted the traditional tabletop as a support against the perspective, the narrowly defined setting disappeared in some of Spilliaert and Van De Woestyne's works. However, still life as a genre remained of crucial importance also within modernism, as a space for experimentation and as a cherished subject.