We had another restful night, had tea, yogurt, and granola for breakfast in our room, and spent some of the morning on our computers (I had to get a paper revised by deadline, trip or no trip; Mark has some tech stuff he needs to work on as well, but he mostly read the news). Then we set out for another art adventure, this time with sunshine (still quite cool, in the lower 60s, but that was actually very pleasant). We went to a beautiful cultural center from the 1920s in the museum district now known as BOZAR (the penny dropped yesterday: that’s Beaux Arts, spelled phonetically). I had gotten us tickets for an exhibition called “When We See Us” on figurative art by Black painters from all over the world that I had read about in the New York Times early this year. I had already decided that this was a must-see exhibition when the news hit last month that Koyo Kouoh, the woman who pulled this show together for the premier art space in Cape Town, and who had been chosen as the first Black female director of the Venice Biennale for this year, had suddenly and unexpectedly died. It was so very sad and gave an extra edge to this beautiful and important show that emphasizes African and Caribbean artists over Black Americans (also represented) and really brought home to me how embarassingly little I know about African or Caribbean contemporary art. (The familiar names were almost always the Americans: Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald were represented, and of an older generation Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, and Jacob Lawrence). I’ll just leave you with a gallery of images and not much comment on just a handful of the many things I thought were amazing in this large and well-arranged show, with visitors from all over the world and from all over Brussels, which is a highly diverse town and very proud of it!
After our museum visit, we had a mini literary tour. Nudged by my friends who are scholars and fans of the Brontë sisters and who had to (embarrassingly) remind me that Charlotte and Emily Brontë spent a significant amount of time in Brussels as pupil-teachers at a boarding school for young women, the Pensionnat Héger (both were there in 1842-43, but Charlotte returned on her own and stayed until 1844). There are only minor traces of their presence left, because the downtown area has changed so much, but thanks to a dedicated bunch of people that formed a literary club here, there is good online information, not to mention a couple of plaques. As it turns out, the street where the pensionnat was is long gone, but the BOZAR basically sits on top of where it was, just at a much higher elevation. Part of a street called Rue Terarken is still visible underneath it, and one plaque is where it dead-ends into the building’s basement–while the BOZAR itself has a second plaque that it took a while to find.
It’s hard to imagine what the basically medieval “lower part” of Brussels (below the heights on which the royal palace and government buildings sit, and where all the art museums are now) looked like in the 1840s, with rundown streets and steep stairs, but it is clear that Charlotte Brontë really disliked it and that the sisters were quite miserable here. They were also very staunch Protestants in a very Catholic town, but my friend Kate pointed out that Charlotte actually went to confession once, in the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula that was our first accidental stop and rain protection after our arrival on Wednesday. Today, with the sun shining, it looked much prettier!
After our little Brontë tour, we found ourselves some cheap Asian lunch, checked out the Botanical Gardens just North of the downtown area, walked back across and all over said downtown for a bit more, and later had coffee and lemonade and another sample of apple cake on one of the innumerable plazas with monuments to people we had never heard of (our ignorance about Belgian history is vast). Eventually we bought some bread and an interesting-looking dessert on the way home and had the second half of our tomato soup with bread and butter. Another good day!
