Flanders Literature stimulates the writing of biographies. That support results in a flood of exiting biographies on painters, musicians, writers and other culturally important people, on political figures and even cities. A selection.
Huet’s writing is quite simply superb: elegant, colourful, lively, with great feeling for detail, witty and never condescending.
Kees 't Hart
Of all the art of the Flemish School, the work of Pieter Bruegel (1525?-1569) seems most typical of the Low Countries. His familiar and much loved paintings turned him into a folkloric icon, even if that does not entirely square with his life story. Leen Huet has written the first proper biography of the sixteenth-century master.
A magnificent style – scholarly but vivid and punchy
Ons Brussel
James Ensor (1860–1949) was everything in one: cocky and solitary, baron and bohemian, a misunderstood bourgeois, a peintre maudit who surveyed the world from his ivory tower in Ostend and sought refuge in the salons of Brussels. Min peels away the mask of the mythmaker to create a wonderful portrait of this enigmatic and multi-faceted painter.
Words fail me. This is a book you will never forget.
Geert Mak
If there was ever a man who rose from the ashes like a phoenix then it was the painter Felix Nussbaum. Mark Schaevers follows Nussbaum on his wanderings through the Nazi years, from Rome to the Italian Riviera, from Paris to Ostend and Brussels.
She succeeds in making the first king of the Belgians a man of flesh and blood.
Erwin Mortier
Based on Leopold’s private letters, Gita Deneckere paints a portrait of a melancholy ruler who managed like no other to weave together the personal and the political. Through his eyes she examines the history of Europe in a period of change.
