Emile Delrue 1878-1928

Born in Antwerp, Émile Delrue was a Belgian painter and decorator whose singular work has yet to reveal all its mysteries. Likely influenced by Symbolist ideals, he joined at an early age the avant-garde circle ‘De Scalden’, founded in 1889 in his hometown under the leadership of Jules Baetes, an Antwerp-based medallist, sculptor, poster designer, engraver, and decorator. The term De Scalden can be literally translated from Dutch as “The Scalds,” humorously referring to the Scandinavian bards and poets of the Middle Ages.

The group’s main aim was to organize exhibitions combining fine arts, decorative arts, and applied arts, thereby extending in Belgium the ideals of Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau, sometimes incorporating archaic elements inspired by Flemish Renaissance. In addition to painters, engravers, and sculptors, the circle uniquely brought together architects, poets, writers, composers, leatherworkers, decorators, blacksmiths, chiselers, poster designers, and master glassmakers, eventually totaling over 120 members. Beyond exhibitions, they organized several carnivals and festive events in Antwerp, providing occasions to design costumes, floats, and banners.

Although World War I and the German invasion of Belgium ended ‘De Scalden’, Émile Delrue continued his career as an inventive poster designer and decorator. Notably, in 1923, he executed the complete decorative program, featuring stylized plant and floral motifs drawn from the Art Nouveau repertoire, for the new villa of jeweler Raymond Ruysin the “New Park” of Wilrijk, a luxury district of Antwerp.

Through its strange iconography, our large pastel plunges the viewer into Émile Delrue’s dreamlike universe, evidently enamored with a singular, dark Symbolism. Its title, inscribed in capital letters at the lower left, “Kerkspinnen” (“Church Spiders”), identifies the creatures inhabiting the vaulted ceilings of Gothic buildings with their webs. Delrue depicts four anthropocephalic spiders with long hairy legs clinging to one another around a capital, like woolly monkeys in a jungle.

While spiders have inhabited human beliefs, fears, and fantasies from Ovid’s Arachne in the Metamorphoses to Odilon Redon’s black spiders, passing through the illustrations of Gustave Doré and Arthur Rackham, Delrue presents them in a tender, humorous, and smiling manner. He even grants these hybrid beings a certain sensuality, giving them female attributes, such as breasts and long hair. Like living gargoyles with apotropaic virtues, they blend perfectly into the church’s medieval decor.

However, Delrue’s spiders retain their venomous and malevolent character, as evidenced by the perspective the artist employs, associating them with a stained glass of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit. Dominating the primal couple in the act of original sin, one spider, suspended on its web, has thus taken the place of the tempting serpent of Genesis.