Marthe Massin

Marthe Verhaeren, drawing by Auguste Donnay (undated)

Émile Verhaeren writing at his desk. Marthe Verhaeren, Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp

Jan Mees: Statue in honor of Marthe and Èmile Verhaeren in Sint-Amands

Marthe Massin (married: Marthe Verhaeren, also: Massin-Verhaeren; born October 6, 1860 in Liège; † June 2, 1931 ) was a Belgian painter and wife, muse, assistant and guardian of the estate of Émile Verhaeren .

Life

Marthe Massin was born into a wealthy family in 1860. Her mother was Constance Marchet, her father Gustave Massin, a cigar dealer. She had a younger sister, Juliette, who later married William Degouve de Nuncques .

Marthe Massin, like her sister, received training at the private art academy in Brussels, which - unlike the state academies - has admitted women since 1883 and even made it possible for them to study on (female) nude models. After graduating in 1889, he set up his own studio in his parents' house.

She painted and posted - quite cautiously - some exhibitions with her work, such as the Salon Triennal in 1884 or the Salon de Voorwaarts in 1889. During this time, she chose cityscapes as well as women farmers and workers as motifs. She also gave art lessons herself, including teaching the children of Count Marnix von Sint-Aldegonde in Bornem . Here she met the poet Émile Verhaeren in 1889 , an encounter that is described in Verhaeren's biographies as “love at first sight”. According to their correspondence that followed, the feelings were probably mutual and the couple married in August 1891. The relationship between the two had an impact on their respective work - Vehaeren's poetry became less gloomy and he wrote several collections of love poems, she gave up art class and chose primarily her working husband and places of life together as the motif of her drawings and paintings. She painted the garden where they met, or her house. She used a variety of techniques such as oil painting, red chalk or ink. Small studies show Verhaerens pencils and pens on his desk.

Verhaeren encouraged her in her artistic activity, but she no longer exhibited publicly and supported him in editing his work - many of his manuscripts have corrections with her handwriting.

In the memories of Stefan Zweig , who was on friendly terms with Verhaeren and who had translated his work into German, Marthe Verhaeren is described as "shadowy" behind him, "almost unknown". Her only ambition is "invisible in this work, to perish in this existence in order to let the poetic power of her husband unfold in a beneficial way". She is the "luminosity of his life", a clever, serious advisor who saved him from the tumult of passion and never touched the innermost will of his nature and his freedom. The art historian Renate Berger noted in her essay Artist Couples - or the Art of Disappearance 2007 that a desire for subservience and a "care service" becomes visible, which an important man like Verhaeren could easily have done without, especially since he was in his Poems "Self-realization through own strength" have formulated. Representations by the art historian Barbara Caspers warn of anachronism, relativize the classification of the relationship as an act of self-sacrifice by Marthe Verhaeren and see it as her conscious decision to live by the side - not in the shadow - of the famous poet. The sheer number of her drawings testifies to an incessant exercise that contradicts the generally accepted notion that she has given up her own artistic activity in order to devote herself entirely to her husband. She remained an artist all her life.

After the death of her husband in 1916 until her own death, Marthe Verhaeren devoted herself entirely to looking after his estate and the memory of Verhaeren. She had the house in Sint Amands that had been destroyed in the war rebuilt true to the original, made drawings for the reconstruction of his study in the Royal Library in Brussels and, after her death in 1931, left the entire literary and documentary estate to him.

The majority of her portfolios of drawings are kept by the Archives et Musée de la littérature in Brussels; Parts of it were shown in 2016 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tournai as part of an exhibition on Émile Verhaeren. Some previously unseen works were part of the Aimer et être aimé exhibition at the Verhaeren Museum in Sint Amands. Another part of the work ended up in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp through a private estate .

Web links

Commons : Marthe Massin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marthe Verhaeren (1860-1931). In: data.bnf.fr. Bibliothèque nationale de France, accessed on February 21, 2020 (French). 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Barbara Caspers: Marthe Massin, femme (d ') artist . In: Textyles. Revue des lettres belges de langue française . No. 50-51 , May 1, 2017, ISSN  0776-0116 , p. 65–74 , doi : 10.4000 / textyles.2761 ( online [accessed February 21, 2020]).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Barbara Caspers: Marthe Massin (1860 - 1931) . In: Université libre de Bruxelles (ed.): Les femmes artistes et femmes d'artistes au sein des groupes artistiques des XX (1884 - 1893) et de la Libre Esthétique (1894 - 1914) . Volume II. Brussels 2015, p. 139-143 .
4. ↑ Emile Verhaeren (° Sint-Amands 1855 - † Rouen 1916). (No longer available online.) In: provincieantwerpen.be. Archived from the original on March 22, 2004 ; accessed on February 21, 2020 (Dutch). 
5. ↑ Emile Verhaeren Museum - biography. In: emileverhaeren.be. Accessed February 21, 2020 (French). 
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Stefan Zweig: Émile Verhaeren (=  collected works in individual volumes ). 1st edition. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-10-400189-0 , p. 218 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
7. ^ Renate Berger: artist couples or the art of disappearing . In: Paula Modersohn-Becker: Paris - life like in a frenzy: biography . Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2007, ISBN 978-3-7857-2308-1 , p. 225 .
8. ↑ Campagne Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles: 21 fiches trouvées . Archives et Musée de la Littérature , accessed on February 21, 2020 (French, result of the search for Marthe Verhaeren). 
9. ↑ Aimer et être aimé . ( Online [accessed February 21, 2020]).
10. ↑ Iris Kockelbergh (ed.): Texts on the new exhibition in the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp . Antwerp, S. 34 ( digitized via museumplantinmoretus.be [PDF]).