Nice itinerary, shame about the scenery

Spent yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon at the "Karel Appel. On the road" exhibition at Bozar in Brussels. Subtitled "A journey through art in the Low Countries by Rudi Fuchs", the aforementioned curator has come up with an interesting twist on the standard retrospective, presenting it as a journey through 500 years of Flemish and Dutch painting by the subject of the restrospective, Dutch painter Karel Appel.
Hence, at one point an Appel portrait from the CoBrA era, Mens (1953) is cheekily juxtaposed with Rembrandt's Portrait of the preacher Eleazar Swalminus (1637). The concept is also applied to the field of landscape painting with some success, with Van Gogh's Field with poppies (1890) offering a curious counterpoint to Appel's Cloud with trees (1984) and Horizon in Tuscany #24 (1995), while Fuchs' placing of Jean Brusselmans' Storm (1936) next to Piet Mondrian's Red cloud (1907), next to James Ensor's White cloud (1884), next to Appel's Black clouds over the city (1984) creates a chain of correspondances where none previously existed, surely the goal of all mixologists whatever their medium (paintings, music, alcoholic drinks).
Yet despite these successes, the exhibition as a whole doesn't entirely convince. Perhaps in part because Appel's oeuvre is not sufficiently interesting to support the curator's conceit. Later works such as The victory of matter (five parts) (2003), with its stuffed animal heads chained to canvases full of bold splashes of colour, do not captivate in the way that much simpler, but more profound, paintings from half a century earlier such as Stierege Cat (Bull-Cat) (1951) do.
A second flaw in the program is the large chunk of the exhibition that is dedicated to Appel's CoBrA cohorts, Hugo Claus and Lucebert, whose art work is largely of academic interest only these days.
Despite these gripes, there is just enough to justify the entrance fee, should you be so inclined. (For more information visit www.bozar.be. The exhibition ends January 16th).