HALFWAY BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE. UCCLE CENTRE D’ART, A COLONY OF ARTISTS IN BRUSSELS’ SUBURBS IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD

In the early years of the 20th century, an interesting shift occurred in the residential geography of artists within and around European cities. For half a century, nature had become an important source of inspiration and a seasonal destination for many artists. At the turn of the new century, a combination of factors including the development of transportation networks and ambiguous feelings for the “villes tentaculaires” amongst the urban elites led to an unprecedented situation in the history of art: painters and sculptors started to settle permanently outside of the cities in suburban areas where they lived, produced art works and took part to everyday sociability. In Brussels, outside of the major urban artistic concentrations formed in the end of the 19th century, the first and main suburban area that permanently attracted visual artists in the first decades of the 20th century was the surroundings of the village Uccle. An artistic circle emerged in 1922 after several country exhibitions, called Uccle Centre d'Art. Through its origin, its organisation and the causes it defended (notably the defence of a natural environment threatened by the urban sprawl), the circle illustrated in an exemplary way the relationships that artists had with their environment at that time, their connections to the city, as well as the relationships that they developed with non-artistic elites of the locality. Based on original exploitation of the archives of the arts circle, iconography and maps, the chapter provides an illustration of how the artistic, environmental and intellectual ideals of the turn of the century materialised in Brussels, and transformed its artistic geography and its suburbs.