Poet and early fan
Franz Hellens, the pseudonym of Frédéric Van Ermengem, was a Belgian writer and art critic.1 He played an important role in French literature in Belgium.
Hellens was born in Brussels, but grew up in Wetteren near Ghent.2 Like many writers and poets of his time, he studied law at Ghent University. The city had a great influence on his literary work, which is characterised by melancholy, the unusual and alienation.3 Not surprisingly, he was drawn to the works of Léon Spilliaert.
Visual art had a major influence on his literary creations. He discovered Spilliaert’s work in July 1909, while working for the leading Belgian magazine L'Art Moderne.4 Between 1909 and 1931, Hellens wrote some 15 articles full of praise for Spilliaert.5 He compared him to artists such as Rembrandt, Ensor, Turner and Lautrec and called Spilliaert a visionary yet, ‘the most real artist I know.’6 Hellens wrote how, on his first visit to a Spilliaert exhibition, he became particularly fascinated by a work featuring glass bottles, a motif Spilliaert often depicted. According to Hellens, the bottles with their ghostly reflections embrace the essence of Spilliaert’s oeuvre. He was playing on the French word ‘essence’, which also refers to the contents of the bottles.7 After a first visit to the perfumery of Spilliaert’s father, it all made sense and he gained an even better understanding of Spilliaert’s art. Spilliaert allegedly offered Hellens the work featuring the bottles.8
During the First World War, Hellens stayed in Paris, where he became part of the artistic milieu and met Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Maurice Maeterlinck.9 In 1920, Spilliaert provided the illustrations for Hellens’ collection of poems, La femme au prisme.10 The thirteen poems in free verse, about a woman’s daily routine, are each preceded by a piece of prose. Spilliaert initially created thirteen stylised pen drawings, and eventually six full-page illustrations were included in the volume, which appeared in a print run of 123 copies. In the same year, Hellens wrote an introduction for Spilliaert’s exhibition at Sélection. Hellens and Spilliaert were also previously in contact regarding the illustration of Le fantôme de la liberté, but that project did not seem to have worked out.11 In May 1921, Hellens founded the magazine Signaux de France, which became Le Disque vert in 1922. Spilliaert initially designed a cover vignette for the magazine, which was initially called L'Oeuil Ouvert.12
