Brussels Metro: An Underground Museum

The Unique Flower or The Wonderful Birds by Serge Vanderkam at Josephine-Charlotte Station

It’s easy to imaging taking a subway ride to a museum of modern and contemporary art, but in Brussels the subway, or Metro, is a museum of art, commissioned to give each station its own personality, and to evoke memories of local events, places and people.

The plan started in the 1960s when Brussels began building its Metro and pre-Metro stations; there are now 69 stations and 90 works of art along platforms, corridors and mezzanines. Obviously not the only transit system with art, but surely the one with the densest collection and greatest variety.

I spent several hours on my recent stay in Brussels not only going to and from places by Metro, but also purposely traveling the system for art, just jumping off when something caught my eye. Obviouly, I didn’t see everything—but if you’d like to, Discovering Belgium has conveniently published an online booklet with the whole collection, along with descriptions and artist information.

It’s not all abstract art, of course; at the Aumale station, above, Jean-Paul Laenen and co-workers used a variety of images to show the area around the station as it existed before and during its construction.

Photographic images are seem prominent at La Roue station. The name means The Wheel, and the nine snaking murals that are mounted on the walls and into the ceiling are titled The Cycle of the Wheel. But appearances can be deceiving: the images are all photo-realistic painting by Denis de Rudder. It was his first major commission.

At Jacques Brel station, Maurice Wyckaert’s Coming Up for Air lives up to its name by continuing up the wall from the platform and along the escalators

At CERIA station (French, in Dutch it’s COOVI, and that can lead to real issues if ignored), Marin Kasimir’s “Intercity” left me with a real sense of looking out not at a subway wall but into city streets; it’s difficult not to feel a connection to someone staring in at you!

You could get your mind in a tangle over string theory at Delacroix, although the name of Thierry Bontridder’s work is actually Coherence.

At Anneessens, Vincen Beeckman covered the station’s 11 pillars with photos of people who live a stone’s throw away, including scenes in locals schools, shops and businesses with the idea of having people feel involved in their station. Some images are large for viewing by people in a hurry; others are smaller to be seen by people waiting for a train.

Another work that plays with concepts of inside/outside is Promenade by Joseph Willaert, at the Clemenceau station, with scenes of an idyllic and simplified countryside framed by brick arches. The arches are three-dimensional, but not structural; they’re part of the installation.

At Simonis station, the walls are ‘hung’ with what look at first glance like carpet patterns. The entire work, by Berlinde de Bruyckere, is made of multi-colored cement tiles with the joints meticulously painted to match the design. For reasons not clear to me, she titled the work Four Sizes Available, See Over.

The Stuyvenbergh station is more or less an homage to Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth, wife of King Albert I and great-grandmother of the present king; her retirement years were spent at Stuyvenbergh Castle. Aside from the queen herself, there are 25 statues in various niches of people she was involved with in various periods of her life, including musicians, artists and Albert Einstein.

At Ribaucourt, we get a comics-style splash with two 60-metre long installations, telling two stories—The Fire of Nero and the Supermen, and The Battle of the Stylites—neither of which I can tell you much about, but the effects are spectacular. The artist, Fernand Flausch was known for murals in a pop art style, often featuring American comic strips and cars.

At Merode, two artists are represented, although the image above and the two below might lead one to think there were three. The bright tile work, titled Carrelage Cinq or Five Tiles, is by Jean Gilbert; the five refers to the five colors used in the tile and the five different parts of the composition.

Roger Raveel’s work is deceptive. At a distance, the long mural contains puzzling collections of figures moving through the scene, apparently ignoring or not aware of each other; several figures exist only in outline. And it is a mix; Adam and Eve are apparently a reference to a painting by Van Dyck, while the right-hand side refers to James Ensor’s 1889 satirical painting “Christ’s Entry into Brussels,” which features a banner proclaiming “Vive le Sociale!” The portrait above is actually the man at the far right, possibly meant to represent Ensor himself.

At Vandervelde, unlike the attempts at Clemenceau and CERIA to give the impression of being aboveground, Paul de Gobert has emphasized the feeling of being underground—and also shows not what is really above ground, but what might have been, had the area never been urbanized.

At Alma, the question of above ground is no illusion; the station crosses a university campus at ground level. The station and its art play with that—openings through which the outside can be seen, ceilings that suggest they might be umbrellas and pillars that masquerade as tree trunks. There’s a bit of a Gaudi feel to the station.

Saved for last: My favorite at Stockel, where Brussels asserts its reputation as the capital of comic strips. Sketches were drawn by Hergé shortly before his death in 1983 and completed by his studio before installation in the station. The two low reliefs, each 135 metres long, include 140 characters taken from 22 of the Tintin albums. I was fortunate to grab the image above just as it appeared the characters were attempting to stop the train!