Eugeen Van Mieghem )1875-1930(
Jewish Immigrant with Bowler Hat
Antwerp, c. 1904
Charcoal on paper
Gift of Erwin Joos
Must Know
Van Mieghem (1875-1930), a realist attuned to the working class in his home city, Antwerp, Belgium, was a fine draftsman and colorist whose long-forgotten work evokes that of van Gogh and Käthe Kollwitz.
Born near Antwerp’s docks, Van Mieghem was, since childhood, a close observer of maritime activity. His subject matter would become the millions of emigrants who embarked for America from Antwerp: in acutely observed paintings and drawings, he portrayed them as they walked through the city, dragging themselves and their pitiful possessions onto ships that took them to life in the New World.
From 1873 to 1934, the Red Star Line, its ships flying the Belgian flag although its ownership was American, took 2.7 million emigrants from Antwerp to America. Many were Jews escaping the poverty and pogroms of Eastern Europe. Exhausted from the ordeals of illegal border crossings, endless train rides and travel by foot, those who had to travel in steerage — which meant most — were subjected to dockside inspections and the disinfection of their luggage. Those who couldn’t be given a clean bill of health were turned back. Those sent on were examined more exhaustively on arrival.
(First- and second-class passengers were exempt from these procedures, and enjoyed considerable luxury on board. One 1927 photo depicts three men in dinner jackets playing cards in a first-class salon of the S.S. Belgenland; a 1905 menu for first-class diners on the S.S. Vaderland features ”Oysters on Half Shell” and ”Supreme of Golden Plover.”)
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he also never tired of portraying the vitality of the port and other parts of the city, in all kinds of weather, as in a pastel and charcoal sketch from 1912 depicting the docks touched by the faint glow of the winter sun. Occasionally he showed a more satirical edge — his work bears the direct influence of Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen, the Swiss-born social satirist and genre painter whose milieu was Paris — focusing on the high life that swanned the boulevards and caroused at cafes.
Though his no-style style, realism with Expressionist overtones, remained a constant, Van Mieghem started out as a champion of modernity. Early on, he was dismissed from the Antwerp Art Academy because his conservative teachers disliked his subject matter and his free, spontaneous way with it. he threw his lot in with progressive political and cultural movements, even becoming involved with an anarchist group, and by the early 1900’s was recognized as one of the most promising young artists of the Antwerp school.
Van Mieghem’s work continued to be well received as he took part in various Belgian and European shows over the years, occasionally experimenting with new forms but always going back to his port subjects. No innovator, but an artist of strength and sentience, he had found his métier and stuck with it. If his was an impersonal art that dealt with people as social types, it nevertheless gave a cleareyed view of their circumstances. In 1920 he was appointed a professor at the very academy that had dismissed him.
After World War II, interest in his work began to wane. But attempts are being made in Belgium to rehabilitate his reputation. The Eugeen Van Mieghem Society was formed in 1982 and held its first retrospective three years later; the Eugeen Van Mieghem Museum opened in Antwerp in 1993. In 1995 a Dutch museum became the first outside Belgium to organize an important Van Mieghem show. The current show is a combined effort of the Eugeen Van Mieghem Foundation, various Belgian supporters and promoters, and the Friends of the Red Star Line, in partnership with the South Street Seaport Museum.
As for the Red Star Line, it went out of business in 1934, thanks in part to the stock market crash and drastically decreased immigration. But its buildings, purchased in 2004 by the city of Antwerp, are still located on the Rijn Quay and are to be converted into a space ”dedicated to reflection and memories,” where visitors can learn about the wrenching immigrant experience.
