GHENT.- The theme of love and infatuation has a long history: not only in literature and poetry, but also in the visual arts, photography and cinema. The exhibition focuses on the period from 1870 to 1930. During this tumultuous era – which ranges from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, through the Belle Epoque and the First World War, to the Interbellum and the Great Depression of 1929 – the society and visual arts underwent a profound revolution. Artists played a pioneering role in the transformation of life. Their intellectual and emotional sensibility did not only point the way forward on the artistic front. Often moving with greater freedom through daily life, artists tended to challenge traditions and were thus able to extend the boundaries of social conventions. Their haptic gaze – towards their surroundings and society, and not least in regard to their relationships with their loved ones – is preserved in a remarkable number of highly personal written and visual testimonies.

The exhibition traces, in broad lines, tender, devoted, hidden or forbidden love stories, feelings of admiration, exaltation, desire and doubt, declarations of love from widowers to young girls, or from ‘demi-mondaines’ to their admirers, from believers in platonic love and whoremongers. It considers the visual evolution of these themes through the art of the time: the visual traces left behind by letter writing and, more generally, by picturing the first flush of love or a profound, lasting passion – as seen primarily in art works but also in the form of the letters themselves. Correspondence flourished in the last quarter of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century thanks to the growing literacy – particularly amongst women – and the development of the international postal system. Less well-known, but particularly poignant, are the love letters written during the First World War. Written to and from the front, they reveal how both sides of the lines suppressed the horrors of war in handwritten messages of hope to distant loved ones. In this way, the unique voices of everyday lovers also find a place in the exhibition.

Among the highlights of the exhibition are the love letters from the poet Oscar Wilde to his friend Lord Alfred Douglas, Dante Gabriel Rossetti to his muse Jane Morris (the wife of William Morris), Dora Carrington to Lytton Strachey, and from Stanley Spencer to his wife Hilda. Museums, libraries and archives, as well as numerous private collectors from all over the world, have opened their collections. The Archive of Modern Conflict and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Berlin Galerie, the Kirchner Museum in Davos, the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Morgan Library in New York, The British Library, The National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, amongst others, have all agreed to lend masterpieces. Through their involvement, works by Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Hannah Höch, Max Klinger, László Moholy-Nagy, Alfred Stieglitz, Charley Toorop and Félix Vallotton will travel to Ghent. One masterpiece is Stanley Spencer’s monumental The Apotheosis of Love, a magisterial ode to his wife Hilda, which will be exhibited with his love letters from the 1920s.

Mona Hatoum: Close Quarters
Just as the exhibition Love Letters in War and Peace presents the essence of art and life through messages of longing and affection between lovers, Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum focuses on the complexity of relationships in Close Quarters. The Close Quarters project is composed of earlier works, including Incommunicado (1993), Philadelphia (1996), Grater Divide (2002), Nature Morte with Grenades (2006-7) and Daybed (2008). A bed in a confined space is a key element in Hatoum’s work, and can be interpreted as a place of intimacy, love, sleep, sexuality, birth and death – or healing, peace and quiet. But Close Quarters also refers to soldiers’ barracks or a struggle that takes place ‘in close proximity’: a bed can become an instrument of torture during the violence of war. Together, the works allude to life in a safe, everyday environment as well as to that in a conflict zone, a hospital or a prison. This can be deduced from the revolving barbed wire that blocks access to the installation, as well as from the Murano-glass grenades that, while possessing a rare beauty, also attest to the potentially lethal power of a highly efficient weapon of destruction – in this case, however, they would shatter into smithereens if thrown.