Page 48 - Studio International - July 1966

Flemish men, men of the people, man himself; his
Young girl, Peasant woman, The mother were not repre-
sentatives of a sensitive, sophisticated race or kin to
Aphrodite—they were natural powers, womanhood, fer-
tility.
In this he went further even than Breughel, who described
people rather through their outward appearance, where-
as Permeke tried to describe them through an inward
experience. Permeke is more dramatic, and as an
Expressionist even tragic when compared to Derain or
Vlaminck, less playful than Chagall, less refined than
Rouault. Yet he is religious in the sense that he is
shaken by the sensation of life and the rhythm of the
seasons.
Permeke and Ensor represent two sides of their people's
spirit—Ensor the bourgeois age and the symbolist-
phantastic, even surrealist, aspect of Netherlands art (one
thinks of Bosch, Peter Huys, Rops, Delvaux, Magritte),
Permeke the timeless peasant world and the Expression-
ist current (the School of Laethem-St Martin in the
twenties, Servaes, Gustave de Smet, Fritz van den
Berghe). When Permeke deforms, he does not do it for
purely formalistic or intellectual reasons. In fact he once
hit out at bloodless 'modernist' inventions : 'They do not
like it because I use deformations ? Look, here are much
less admissible deformations.' These figures of his are like