Belgian Francophone Library - Böcker

Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916), art critic, poet and homme de lettres, was a man whose vision transcended his native Belgium. With close ties to Mallarmé in France and Rilke in Germany, Verhaeren, a peripatetic student of the arts, readily traveled to Paris, Berlin, Cassel, Vienna and Amsterdam. From the mid-1880s until his death in 1916, his many trips abroad resulted in a raft of essays and short monographs on the arts of the Northern Renaissance. Yet, despite the insights, scholarship and markedly precise and revealing descriptions of these studies, they have long been neglected in art historical circles, overshadowed, perhaps, by Verhaeren’s own poetic outpourings and his numerous essays on contemporary art. In this book, Albert Alhadeff translates, edits, annotates and contextualizes these often brilliant and always revealing studies on artists such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Memling, Bruegel and Grünewald, masters from the North who worked mostly in Flanders, Holland and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Alhadeff reveals, Verhaeren’s studies of the masters of old in Germany, Flanders and the newly born Dutch Republic are as much about Verhaeren the man as they are about the subjects of his inquiries.

A Maeterlinck Reader is a compilation of plays, poems, essays, short stories and aphorisms by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, Maurice Maeterlinck. The editors have included, in fresh translations that convey Maeterlinck’s revolutionary innovations in theatrical language, selections that show facets both exemplary and extraordinary of this Nobel Prize winning author, the «Missing Link of Modern Drama.»

The twenty-two essays in this volume are contributed by Belgian, French, and American scholars to honor the memory and work of Adrienne Fontainas (1929-2010). The interdisciplinary scholarship this community of international scholars has produced is of lasting importance in underlining the significant role of Brussels from 1870 to 1914. A leading European scholar and bibliophile, Adrienne Fontainas served as Vice President of the International Association of Bibliophiles and membre d’honneur of the Royal Society of Bibliophiles and Iconophiles of Belgium. Her groundbreaking books on the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his Brussels’ editor Edmond Deman (Edmond Deman éditeur : Art et édition au tournant du siècle and Edmond Deman : Publications de la librairie) are model studies of the book publishing trade in France and Belgium.The essays in this book explore a wide variety of interdisciplinary fields, including art history, book collecting, publishing, literature and music, and cover subjects such as Félicien Rops, William Degouve de Nuncques, Symbolism and Surrealism, Maurice Maeterlinck and Émile Verhaeren, Paul Signac, Victor Horta, Edmond Picard, André Fontainas, Edmond Deman, and Franz Liszt in Belgium. In addition, a comprehensive bibliography of Adrienne Fontainas’ writings in the visual arts, literature, and music, as well as a discussion of her working methodology, are included.This book contains contributions in French and English.