One morning last February, in a chilly studio in Brussels, 28 people in white coats gathered to watch Sylvie Van der Kelen paint the sky. “The first touch of the brush is generally the best,” said Van der Kelen as light, pink-tinged clouds began to appear. “It is preferable not to make revisions.”
For a few days this winter I was allowed to sit in on classes at the École Van der Kelen-Logelain, a mythologised painting school in Brussels that is unlike any other arts education institution in the world. Run by the same family since it was founded in 1892, the Van der Kelen course takes place every winter underneath its glass and wrought iron roof, extending out of the back of a gothic brick townhouse.
Students must arrive by 9am, otherwise they will be shut out until lunchtime; they must not bring phones or cameras into the school’s workspace; they must wear white lab coats while they work; and they must work in silence. They also must be able to stand the cold: the studio is ineffectually heated by an ancient single wood-fired stove nicknamed “la mama”, an ancient metal contraption that gently ticks over by the entrance.
If students can tolerate these strictures, by the end of the six-month course they will possess a number of specialised skills, from sign painting and lettering to the application of gold and silver leaf, and manipulation of textural finishes. The core of the course, though – what the school is most famous for – is its trompe l’oeil painting techniques.
Literally translated as “deceive the eye”, trompe l’oeil refers to a genre of illusionistic painting with a history stretching back to the time of the ancient Egyptians, in which artists use textures, shading and tricks of perspective in order to create three-dimensional illusions. At the Van der Kelen, students learn to conjure fake relief sculptures and architectural details out of flat surfaces; create copies, in oil paints, of 28 different types of wood grain and 33 different types of marble; and, like Sylvie, paint a perfect trompe l’oeil sky. (A tip: clouds are rarely rounded, more often “elongated like the shape of the human body”.)
When the Van der Kelen was founded by Sylvie’s grandfather Alfred, it capitalised on a late-19th century vogue for the style: scores of housepainters graduated with careers in highly paid decorative painting ahead of them. In the 21st century, however, the school has found itself facing existential challenges. The passion for decorative painting among the wealthy upper middle class has evaporated, and fussy-seeming trompe l’oeil has fallen out of style in interior decoration and high art. Student numbers have correspondingly dropped to dangerously low levels.
And yet, every winter, the family continue to oversee a course that has barely changed since 1892, and students still arrive from across the world to put themselves through a bizarre and sometimes punishing routine (“There is roughly one breakdown every week,” a student told me). What keeps the school standing – and why do so many aspiring artists still find their way to this chilly studio in Brusselshere?
“Everybody is in search for something special here,” Sylvie tells me after her demonstration that morning as the students quietly set to work. “Everyone is here for a reason.”
This year marks the first time that Sylvie, 52, has taken over the running of the school from her mother Denise – the “Coco Chanel of fake marble” – who herself has been in charge since 1995. (Though she officially retired last year, the 82-year-old known among students as “Madame” remains a presence in the school, regularly drifting into the workshop to dispense advice. Her comments range from the practical – “You have made a lot of white accents, it’s too much” – to more oblique statements. “Sometimes the wind is blowing longer,” I hear her tell one student.)
With Denise’s help, Sylvie oversees a schedule that has barely changed since the school’s inception. Students must attend the workshop from 9am to 6pm five days a week, and half a day on Saturday. Every morning a new technique is demonstrated by one of the Van der Kelens (the school invites outside teachers to teach extra classes, but only members of the family teach the core trompe l’oeil course). The students observe and make notes, before producing an exact copy themselves on a large sheet of paper; this piece of work is known as a “panel”.
No panel, however, can be finished in a single day, because each requires multiple “operations”: different stages of work, separated by a day or more to allow the drying of paints and varnishes. As a result, students end up with a dizzying number of panels in progress at any one time, with more added every morning. Even after the workshop closes at 6pm, everyone has homework, sometimes until midnight. “It’s brutal,” one student, a British painter, told me. “Every day you’re learning something new, and just when you think you’ve got good at it, another panel arrives to cut you down.”
Why would anyone put themselves through this? Talking to this year’s cohort, I hear a number of reasons. There’s a small but significant contingent of people from various professions – architects, graphic designers, interior designers – who have become dissatisfied with the computer-based nature of their industry and are looking for something more hands-on. After graduating, students might hope to find work as painting assistants for established artists, painting interiors for wealthy clients, working on film or theatre sets, or working for European fashion houses periodically drawn to the trompe l’oeil aesthetic for runway shows and boutiques.
Every student from an arts background that I speak to, however, cites the work of another painter, Lucy McKenzie, who has arguably done more to revive the school’s fortunes than any other person of late. The young Glaswegian artist was browsing in a secondhand bookshop in Brussels in 2007 when she came across a mention of the school in a book of interiors and – amazed that such a place still existed – immediately enrolled. At that time, McKenzie was almost a decade into an already accomplished arts career, but she signed on because she found the school’s illusionistic techniques fascinating: for her, they were associated with “profound human connections of carnivals, fairgrounds, markets”, in contrast to the “resistant and hermetic” nature of much contemporary art at the time.
By the mid-oos, the school was in crisis. Class sizes had fallen: just 10 or 11 students, from an interwar peak of more than 100. Its competitors had all closed down, and it seemed like the school, and the unique skills it taught, was destined to go the same way.
That is until McKenzie used the school’s techniques to create thrilling large-scale paintings, such as the vertigo-inducing Untitled (2010), and, along with a book she published about her time at the school, it is works such as these – exhibited at London’s Tate Britain, Amsterdam’s Steidlijk and the Art Institute of Chicago – that have caused a steadily increasing stream of students to arrive at the Van der Kelen’s imposing wooden doors. “Lucy McKenzie has a lot to answer for,” one student told me cheerfully, as he contemplated the daunting amount of work ahead of him.
Sylvie Van der Kelen believes that the skills and the styles her family teach go in and out of fashion according to 40-year cycles. There was a huge demand in the 1920s and 30s, and then again in the 70s and 80s, but by the mid-2000s, the Van der Kelen was, in Sylvie’s words, “regarded as something a little bit dusty”. In the last decade, however, there’s once again been a growing interest in trompe l’oeil and decorative painting – including a major exhibition at the Met on cubism and trompe l’oeil, and a number of younger artists exploring the possibilities of the form.
The fluctuating fortunes of the school reflect those of trompe l’oeil as a genre. Sometimes the technique has been seen as the highest form of art – an aspiration for ancient Greeks and Renaissance painters – and other times it has been called cheap “trickery”, as John Ruskin wrote in 1843.
Often dismissed as a “popular” form of art, it also seems to come back into fashion among the rich during times of great inequality – in recent years Loewe, Louis Vuitton and Acne Studios have all experimented with trompe l’oeil-inspired illusions in their collections.
The criticisms aimed at trompe l’oeil and decorative-style painting – that it is inaccessible or outdated – could arguably also be levelled at the Van der Kelen school itself, an entity that has resisted change since its founding, with a fee of €13,750 (tools and materials included). (McKenzie says a sizable number in her cohort were simply “posh kids who liked art but didn’t want to go to art school”.) Should the school be dismissed as a reactionary institution, a relic from another era?
“That would be reductive,” says McKenzie, arguing that the Van der Kelen, for all its idiosyncrasies, “is a national treasure. It should be Unesco protected. Aspects of its identity are conservative, but ‘complaints about the awful modern world’ is not the kind of thing that they offer. You get the skills and you do what you want with them. I personally took them and did as much as I could, and still try to.”
For Sylvie and her mother, their work is important as a way to “preserve these techniques”, many of which are not taught anywhere else. More fundamentally, there’s the joy that comes from seeing students – “my kids”, Sylvie calls them – develop into skilled artists every winter. “They all discover something in themselves, working here,” Denise tells me.
As for the future of the school, the week when I visit is half-term, and Sylvie’s 10-year-old son Hilaire can be seen playing with fragments of wood and marble around the balcony, as Sylvie used to do. “My father’s life was the students and the workshop, nothing else,” she remembers.
Sylvie had a career as an archaeologist before taking over the school, studying some of the earliest examples of trompe l’oeil from around the world, in ancient Egypt and on the walls of villas in Pompeii. She is adamant that she was always sure she would return to the family business. What about Hilaire?
“Sometimes he says he wants to take it over, sometimes not,” she says.
“It is a really nice job that he is going to learn,” says Denise, more certain of what his future will hold. “I think he will be convinced.”
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