The Last Flemish Primitive: Jan Vercruysse’s Self-Fashioning of Artisthood and National Identity

In 1989, the artist Jan Vercruysse (1948–2018) stated that he was “the last Flemish Primitive”. This comment, despite being only a fragment of a lengthy interview with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, became a trope in subsequent writings on Vercruysse. I argue that the statement was part of a deliberate strategy by Vercruysse in shaping his identity as a (Belgian) artist. First, I focus on Vercruysse’s Portraits of the Artist (1979–1984), a series of photographic works in which he uses the genre of the self-portrait—thereby implicitly referring to the Flemish Primitives—as a means to express the c... Mehr ...