Since 1997, Spilliaert expert Dr. Anne Adriaens-Pannier has been working on a catalogue raisonné, a process that has taken years and on which she is keen to elaborate.
During preparations for the first touring retrospective exhibition Léon SPILLIAERT, in Paris, Grand Palais in 1981 - the following year the exhibition could also be seen at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo - I met Ms Madeleine Spilliaert, daughter of the artist, for the first time. My task was to curate a modest documentary exhibition of correspondence, sketchbooks and smaller-scale drawings to accompany the ensemble put together by Ms Francine-Claire Legrand, a Spilliaert specialist. A few years later, as of 1990, being responsible for the collection of works on paper at the KMSKB, which has a fine collection of Spilliaert pieces, I immersed myself in the artist’s work and wrote several contributions, including about two sketchbooks that had been donated to the museum. While working on my doctorate at Ghent University, which I defended in March 2003, I was in frequent contact with Madeleine Spilliaert, who during the course of 81 conversations, gave me access to her extensive documentation and provided me with a great deal of information. Eventually, in May 1997, I was formally asked by Madeleine Spilliaert and her three children to be responsible for the artist’s catalogue raisonné.
Starting with a corpus of 400 works described by Ms Legrand, published in book form in 1981, to date I have personally studied approximately 5,000 works by Léon Spilliaert at home and abroad, compiled an inventory of them and organised them in Word documents. They were collated in 33 work files and printed as a collection of 95 folders.
The inventory includes the work’s technical data, inscriptions, labels applied to frames, restoration files and a photographic record of each work. A catalogue raisonné also includes a follow-up of each exhibition in which a work participates, as well as bibliographical data on how the work is included in the literature. Furthermore, the confidential details of successive owners of the works are completed after sales at auctions and gallery exhibitions, as well as in the case of an inheritance.
In 2023, the digital platform PANOPTIKON was acquired in New York, it already includes these entries: the list of past exhibitions and the complete bibliography to date. The individual works will not be entered chronologically, but thematically, starting with the important self-portraits. The majority of the works were created on paper using the following techniques: Indian ink wash drawings, works consisting of pastels, coloured pencil and coloured chalk, watercolour and gouache. A separate section will contain the 65 or so oil paintings on cardboard or canvas.
