Maturity crisis in Brussels

From adulthood, we have fallen back into childhood. This regression can be seen in a multitude of details, with certain injunctions giving us the feeling, perhaps pleasurable for some, of being five years old: "For your health, move more", "Eat five fruit and vegetables a day". And what about the use of the first person singular? On public transportation, for example: "I’m getting on, I’m validating", or road safety messages: "I’m slowing down, I’m moving aside, I’m avoiding the worst".

In Belgium it’s even worse. This return of Western civilisation to the basics should result in a sculpted group entitled... Maturity [1]. The City of Brussels has refused to list Victor Rousseau’s work, installed since 1922 in a triangular square not far from Central Station, on the grounds that "it conveys values that are no longer in phase with those of today’s society [2]". The monument is made up of six marble figures, all or almost all naked, linked together by a garland of flowers and fruit. In the centre, a bearded man sits on a white sheet; to his left, a woman carries a basket of flowers and a kneeling girl inhales their fragrance; to the right, a young couple hold hands while a seated young man turns his back on the other figures.

The Royal Commission for Monuments and Sites (CRMS) had alerted the city to the condition of this sculpted group, which had been soiled by pollution and the passage of time, and damaged by vandalism, as well as by the renovation work on the neighbouring metro station, which led to the dismantling of part of the original balustrade. Construction machinery and barriers regularly obstruct the space (ill. 2); the flowerbeds have been stripped bare, the lawns lawned over and the untended planting has given way to wild vegetation, so that the monument is almost no longer visible. Its condition is alarming, and its conservation threatened, so the CRMS has proposed that the entire square be listed for its artistic, aesthetic, historical, town-planning and landscape interest.

In a decree dated 12 December 2024, the government of the Brussels-Capital Region refused to list the work, and merely initiated a procedure for its inclusion on the conservation list, which will enable it to move the work in due course, to an unspecified location, in order to completely redevelop the square.
The Region admits that this sculpted group is a "masterpiece", certainly, but a masterpiece "of its time". It acknowledges that Victor Rousseau was a great artist - he won the Grand Prix de Sculpture de Rome and was director of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels - but says that the artist occupies too important a place in the city to the detriment of others. The decree lists the works by his hand that can be seen on the façades and in the streets of Brussels, and it would seem that this number justifies the removal of Maturity. One more, one less, what does it matter? ‘The removal of the work Maturity would not lead to a denial of the historical value of the artist, but would avoid excessive glorification of a single creator to the detriment of artistic diversity" and in particular of contemporary creation.

Rousseau’s sculpture does not correspond to "contemporary values of gender equality, power and the family"; on the contrary, it offers "a patriarchal vision of social and family relationships [...], with fixed stereotypes of the family and male power". This work, which does not fit in with the action plan for "gender mainstreaming and equality between women and men [...] highlights the importance of eliminating gender stereotypes inherited from the past and making women’s contribution to material culture and urban history visible. This re-evaluation of public works is necessary to promote a more inclusive and balanced representation of our city’s history..." Either we have to travel back in time to change the past, or we have to destroy and rebuild Brussels.

Will the revaluation of public works also affect museums? It’s high time, in the name of equality between men and women, to clean up public collections, which are overrun with female nudes, goddesses, nymphs and odalisques subjected to what is now known as the "male gaze" (see article on anachronism in museums). And what about the representations of Jupiter, the notorious sex maniac who kidnapped the beautiful Europa, Danae and Leda, not forgetting little Ganymede? Isn’t exhibiting them a celebration of male power, and worse still, an encouragement to rape? In Paris, what about the Eiffel Tower, so phallic, and the Arc de Triomphe, which celebrates a dominant male? And let’s not even mention the Palais de la Porte dorée, whose facades should be covered with a modest veil or even chiselled out in the name of the fight against stereotypes. Comrades, get out your jackhammers!

In addition to its questionable iconography, Maturity is getting in the way of the "Coteaux du Pentagone" urban project, on the North-South axis entrusted since 2020 to the town planner Bas Smets, the same man soon to be at work around Notre-Dame. The aim is to improve the link between the upper and lower parts of the city, to "rethink public space by making it less monofunctional and integrating urban forests into it". We don’t know whether these urban forests will be accompanied by sandy roads and shack-houses, but we hope that the city will offer an ideal setting for playful work and become the setting for a wild civilisation.

It should be remembered that La Maturité is a total work of art, the fruit of close collaboration between the city’s architect, François Malfait, the landscapist Jules Buyssens, Inspector of Plantations and Promenades, and the sculptor Victor Rousseau. The work was indeed acquired by the City of Brussels to be placed in this very square; it forms part of the urban space, with the nearby Rue du Baron Horta, laid out during the same urbanisation campaign in the centre of Brussels, in which Malfait also combined a work of art, Jacques Marin’s Naiad Fountain, with planting.

Let’s hope that the contemporary artist who will be invited to design a work more suited to our times to replace Maturity will feature a capricious little child who tramples all over his toys alongside a rebellious teenager who wants to wipe the slate clean.