IMAGE DETAILS

Galerie Oscar De Vos

Frits Van den Berghe (Ghent, 1883-1939)
Ooidonk alley, 1923
Oil on canvas
48.5 x 55 cm
Signed lower right: FVBerghe
Provenance: Galerie Campo, Antwerp
Literature: Boyens, P., Frits Van den Berghe 1883-1939 (1999), 396, n° 309 (ill.); Servaes, W., V. Van Doorne & R. Van Lerberghe, 1924 Honderd jaar later, exh. cat. (2024), 56-57 (ill. & cover)
Exhibition: 2024, Sint-Martens-Latem, Latemse Kunstkring/ Gemeentehuis, 1924 Honderd jaar later, s.n.

Ooidonk Alley belongs to the key works of Van den Berghe’s short but decisive stay in Bachte-Maria-Leerne (1922–1923). He lived there at the entrance of the quadruple beech-lined avenue leading directly to Ooidonk Castle. That place was an actual re-grounding – a breakthrough towards a new way of painting that no longer records, but constructs.

Here, the Lys landscape is no longer seen ‘from the outside’, but becomes an inner building site. The trunks become cylindrical volumes, the soft bend of the road becomes a carrier of rhythm. The colour language definitively abandons the sombre earth tones of his Ostend years: a new clarity emerges, a ‘new spring’, in which light assumes a plastic role.

Ooidonk Alley is thus a document of the moment in which Van den Berghe finds his modernity: pure form, condensed space, a landscape as architecture. This work shows how, at the end of 1922–1923, Van den Berghe redefined the Lys region: as an ordered space of line, colour and spirit – rather than a piece of nature.