Jac Boonen // Sports

Playwright and art critic Michel de Ghelderode described Jac Boonen as a true successor of James Ensor and Jules de Bruycker.

Ensor unmasked the sovereign status of the bourgeois citizen. De Bruycker was the more refined chronicler of remarkable details in the everyday life of ordinary people. And Boonen – one of De Bruycker’s pupils – was obsessed by the dynamics of the masses. By the dark powers that push these hordes in various directions.

Sports is the perfect exampe. In 1936 nazi Germany organized the olympics in Berlin and Boonen – 25 years old at that point – depicts this event as a form of mass hysteria, as an inevitable race to hell.

 

Jac Boonen

Sports

1936

76 x 66 cm (plate)

etching // signed