Emile Fabry 1865-1966

Born in Verviers in 1865, Émile Fabry trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels in the studio of Jean-François Portaels. Soon drawn to a resolutely Symbolist aesthetic ideal, he absorbed the influence of Puvis de Chavannes, Michelangelo and the Italian masters before discovering the writings of Maurice Maeterlinck and Joséphin Péladan.

In 1892, he became one of the founding members of the circle Pour l’Art, alongside Jean Delville, designing several posters for the group. He subsequently participated in the Salons de la Rose+Croix in Paris in 1893 and 1895. His early works, often visionary and imbued with a disturbing spirituality, embody a powerful form of Symbolism in which tormented figures, hallucinatory visions and proto-Expressionist experiments convey an intense inner life.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, his style evolved towards a form of monumental Idealism. Appointed professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1901, where he taught until 1939, he developed a personal visual language based on sculptural figures bathed in vibrant light, achieved through divided brushwork and the frequent use of tempera and egg-based paint.

A friend of Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, Fabry contributed to the decoration of several emblematic Art Nouveau buildings, including the town halls of Saint-Gilles, Laeken and Saint-Josse. He later devoted himself to major decorative schemes, among them the Théâtre de la Monnaie between 1905 and 1925, the Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren and the Cinquantenaire mosaics, created in 1926 with the group L’Art Monumental, founded in 1920.

Having taken refuge in England during the First World War, Fabry discovered the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, which enriched his artistic vocabulary and deepened his reflections on harmony, light and the relationships between painting, architecture and spirituality. Supported by prominent figures such as Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, Émile Fabry remained one of the leading representatives of Belgian Symbolist Idealism until his death in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre in 1966.