Eric Rinckhout
KMSKA & Pelckmans, 2025
€34,50
October 1, 2025, marks the 150th birthday of Belgian artist Eugeen Van Mieghem. To mark this anniversary, Eric Rinckhout wrote the book “Eugeen Van Mieghem (1875-1930)” for the exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA).
Artist Eugeen Van Mieghem lives and works in a time of radical change. Antwerp is once again becoming a world port, the largest after New York. Steamships, trams, automobiles, and electric lighting are making their debut. Dockworkers (male and female) are being exploited and gradually overtaken by ocean-going giants and grain haulers. Social struggles erupt. Revolutionary movements in art are occurring at a rapid pace. Eugeen Van Mieghem is everywhere. He sees, draws, and paints everything incessantly in his dynamic, dazzling style: workers, paupers, strikers, Jewish transmigrants on their way to America, refugees and soldiers in the First World War, but also the upper class in opera and art circles, whores in harbor pubs and demi-mondaines in brasseries, and—last but not least—his own wife and child. His eye is a camera, his hand draws rapidly to keep pace with his restless gaze. He is the raging reporter of everyday life. His oeuvre reads like the diary of a city in flux, a world in transition. IN DUTCH!
ISBN: 9789463100823
