Ten Favorites: Fernand Khnopff, Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer, 1885

Sometimes I don’t know if I go to the Getty so much because of its gardens and evening views of L.A. or to visit my beloved Fernand Khnopff painting, Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer, 1885. Khnopff was Belgian involved closely with symbolist currents of the late 19th century flowering all over Europe, especially in Victorian England with Rossetti and Holman Hunt, France with the Nabi Fellowship, Gauguin, Redon, and Moreau, Vienna with Klimt, Germany with Klinger, and we shouldn’t forget the Dutchman Johan Thorn Prikker (who happens to have the most hilarious name ever). The roster of great painters is long and deep.

Jeanne Kéfer was the daughter of a friend of Khnopff, and this work is one of the most restrained and haunting portraits around. Small Jeanne is caught in a trap of space, both receding into the door (her dress slightly wooden) and falling forward on a severely sloping floor (her dress serves a double ambivalent duty, it extends forward and down as if against the will of Jeanne). She is obviously unsettled, not offering a smile but expressing further her distrust of the viewer by inserting her hand into the front of her coat. Khnopff placed her slightly off center and the entire scene tilts to the right, and then, in a truly enigmatic gesture, Khnopff get brushy with his blues and black in the door’s window, contrasting the bleached hues of the rest of the painting.

The drama of many of Khnopff’s works occur behind closed doors, where dreams overtake reality and fantasy lives out its locked up melancholy. Knowing Khnopff and not quite sure why Jeanne seems so afraid, I must conclude that the painter makes these gestures on the window to add another troubled edge, the possibility of something horrible in the background, the type of thing that maybe children pickup on and adults fail to notice. If that is true, then the viewer is strangely implicated. Are we the horrific stranger or are we suppose to help this little girl? It is difficult to know. This painting just goes on and on for me. I will visit it for a long time to come. It helps that it is just a few rooms away from James Ensor’s Christ in Brussels, 1888.