In Landscape with Nudes (1921), Campendonk disrupts time and space. The characters that populate the painting are loosely connected. None of them seem to understand why or how we ended up in this disjointed world.

Campendonk met Van Ostaijen during his time in Berlin. The poet-critic was able to articulate precisely why he admired Campendonk so much. He did so in an essay about the German expressionist and in two “country-like poems” that he dedicated to Campendonk.

Campendonk’s painting and Van Ostaijen’s late poetry reinforce each other. This painting, for example, emphatically evokes the atmosphere of the poem “Jong Landschap” (Young Landscape), after which the current exhibition at the Jakob Smits Museum in Mol is named.

Heinrich Campendonk, Landschap met naakten, 1921, olieverf op doek, Museum van Elsene (Brussel)