2 Brussels: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

ART NOUVEAU

Even before you break through the city’s façade, the diversity of architecture hints at the lives that go on behind it. First you take off the clothes. Then you feel the skin. Slowly you get to know about the spirit that fuels the body. Start with what’s in front of you. The architecture here is anything, but boring. If there is one style that put Brussels on the international map, it’s Art Nouveau.

Unless of course you count phenomena like ‘Bruxellisation’ (haphazard urban planning), façadisme (the destruction of valuable architecture, which leaves only a building’s façade and is unfortunately typical in Brussels) and questionable combinations of various architectural styles that imply a serious gap in conversation.

When Victor Horta realized Hôtel Tassel in 1894, Belgium was the third richest country in the world: A young nation that was full of a confidence displayed in Horta’s revolutionary Art Nouveau approach, also referred to as ‘Vermicelli Style;’ a reference to organic lines that mirrored those of plants and flowers.

Art Nouveau was promoted by a group of progressive intellectuals and industrial magnates such as Ernest Solvay and Émile Tassel. Its arrival met great resistance. The Roman Catholic Church wasn’t enthusiastic about what became the emblem of freethinking liberals keen to integrate Freemason symbols in their buildings, and less pleased with the style’s voluptuous curves and sensual approach to architecture.

ART DECO

Art Deco however, surpassed Art Nouveau as the style most often associated with lasciviousness and luxury. This is a clear reflection of the period in which it boomed, namely the roaring twenties, which are so often portrayed by happy go lucky gals in Charleston dresses, sipping champagne from special coupes in bars, brothels or social clubs. Its heritage is still alive in certain places in Brussels, including the lecherous lifestyle that went with it. Many brothels or rendez-vous hotels were built in Art Deco style, and unlike Goupil Le Fol, some still serve their original purpose. Like 5^th Avenue at the metro station Yser; a shady place where prices are negotiated before punters are led upstairs.

Others have been transformed into more respectable tearooms like L’Espérance, which is a bit hidden near the shopping street Rue Neuve. This hotel/bar was built in 1930 and kept its authentic Art Deco interior and stained glass windows. The transactions that once characterized the place however, have been restricted to sipping coffee or beer and maybe spending a calm night in one the rooms. Calm nights are less common at one of the best-known Art Deco bars in town: L’Archiduc. This is one of the few places where locals and imported Eurocrats mingle. Over the years the place has earned a reputation that led it to also be known as ‘Archifuck,’ and this beautiful spot has welcomed famous musicians like Duke Ellington, David Bowie and many more.

The bar owner has a soft spot for artists, and tended to serve them drinks at reduced prices. This may have been one of the things that made a shy, young painter called Luc Tuymans a regular there while he studied at Sint-Lukas Art Academy.

Years later Tuymans painted the place where he’d spent such a significant amount of time, and years after that this same painting was purchased by Brad Pitt: ‘Archifuck’ went Hollywood.

HÔTEL LE BERGER

Art Deco deca-dence is also wonderfully summed up by the exterior and interior architecture of Hôtel Le Berger. To start with, you aren’t likely to imagine the building is Art Deco from the façade’s wooden beams and modest resemblance to a traditional Alsace house. This deception leaves the passer-by unsuspecting of a design conceived to guarantee pleasure and discretion. Hôtel Le Berger was built in 1935 as a love hotel. It is the Brussels equivalent to Hôtel Amour in Pigalle, and just like its Parisian counterpart, no longer rents rooms by the hour. This defeats the touch of two separate elevators, one to enter the building, and another to leave it; a feature, which was once extremely helpful in the avoidance of embarrassing encounters. Rooms are decorated with charming Art Deco elements, like angular and geometric woodwork, stylish wallpaper and typical Art Deco lamps.

Freddy Martens (89) was the director of the hotel from 1965 – 2009 and is privy to the memories and legends of the place. Martens excelled at his job, absorbing information, learning about his clients and keeping his mouth shut. After nearly 45 years he knows all the tricks of the trade and can pass on information like how the most common excuse for functionaries to spend the night in Le Berger was ‘I missed the last train,’ or the agility it takes to sneak a policeman away from a bed he isn’t supposed to be in after he suffers a rather untimely stroke.

When Martens left the hotel he took his guest book with him and thanked his faithful clients for their unfaithfulness with one of his characteristic bon mot. ‘Je veux remercier mes clients fidèles pour leur infidélité.’

PAUL JAMBERS

There were other ‘meeting places,’ on the street of Hôtel Le Berger, and when a young film student rented a room there, he found his attention moving from his books to the comings and goings outside his front door; the negotiations, flirtations, screams and powerfully faked orgasms that rattled his walls. The young student, Paul Jambers, started making documentaries for public television and spiced these works up in a way that wasn’t always appreciated by his superiors. So, he went his own route, creating documentaries for commercial television in a new style and touchy subject matter: Flemish swingers, transvestites, Gigolo’s, you name it. Kleptomania, alcoholism, every human vice was dealt with, served up for the boob tube and garnished with a generous dollop of sex. Jambers wasn’t afraid of sensationalism and his self-titled program became an enormous success on Dutch television, which changed he way the Dutch looked at their southern neighbors for good.

JAN BUCQUOY

Somebody else who is good at revealing Belgium’s libido and sexual tastes is Jan Bucquoy. Jambers showed a different side of sexuality, and B-movie maker, enfant terrible, and cult hero, Jan Bucquoy helped people digest it.

A typically Belgian character with a dark sense of humor and a penchant for scatological jokes, he is also the man behind the Musée du Slip (Underwear Museum), which boasts donations by artists and politicians including Minister of Foreign Affairs Didier Reynders, one hit wonder Plastic- Ca plane pour moi-Bertrand and Brigitte Lahaie, one of France’s first porn stars. But Bucquoy, full-time provocateur, is best known as a movie director. His films La Vie Sexuelle des Belges and Camping Cosmos became instant cult classics.

The latter featured the large breasted actress Lolo Ferrari and deals with the sexual life of people in a trashy camping ground as it toys with Belgian beer and frites clichés.

Bucquoy liked to shock in a more infantile way and never hesitated to show his disdain for the Belgian monarchy. After the funeral of King Baudoin, he presented an animal’s heart on a TV show, pretending it was the King’s. More convincing was his planned coup d’état. In footage of this action, you can see his one-man campaign where he runs towards the Royal Palace and immediately gets arrested by security.

KING LEOPOLD II

When it comes to Royalty and Sex things always get sticky. King Leopold II was known for his hunger and particular taste for younger girls. This was less controversial, to put it mildly, than much of his regime and his foreign policy in particular. Without going into his Congolese affairs, his impact on city planning in Brussels is undeniably as enormous as whatever appetites he harbored. You can argue the merit of his legacy, but it is much more difficult to reject his massive impact on the city. He had a vision and ambition that was too big for his small country and its inhabitants. ‘Petit pays, petit esprit’, he’d say, indicating frustration about what he regarded as the pettiness of his subjects. He was nicknamed ‘the King Builder’, and cleverly went about leaving his mark, in every corner of town. Every urban project King Builder realized was paid with money generated in Congo, which was after all his ‘private property’ for more than two decades. One of these buildings is the triumphant arch in the Cinquantenaire Park, which was constructed to celebrate the 50^th birthday of the nation. This endeavor was paid out of the king’s ‘own’ pocket and to squash any suspicion about his fortune, Leopold II thanked a list of sponsors who in reality hadn’t contributed a single franc. Besides the huge triumphal arch, he was also involved in the Museum of Middle Africa in Tervuren and the stately avenue that leads from Montgomery Square to this museum in the affluent suburbs.

Being a man of the world, interested in different cultures, he also built a Chinese Pavilion and a Japanese Tower; the latter basically built in the back garden of the Royal Palace in Laeken. If you look closely, you can see a small door at the gate. Rumor has it that this was a secret door, which allowed his mistress to discretely access the building.

SVEN AUGUSTIJNEN

Avenue Louise was another of Leopold II’s projects and runs through one of the most expensive areas in Brussels. When the shops close, you still hear the click-clack of high heals. After sunset, the corners slowly fill up with prostitutes. Today, the majority seem to be from Eastern Europe, but the number of African prostitutes keeps Belgium’s colonialist past as present as the EU’s eastern future. Artist Sven Augustijnen, who traces Belgium’s colonial echoes into present life, dedicated his photo series and publication Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles to these ladies.

At first, the work seems like an interchangeable series of pictures of random prostitutes. However, their locations, and the radius it illustrates are not coincidental. Besides posing on Avenue Louise, Augustijnen’s subjects also pose in front of other monuments or buildings linked to the King’s colonial playground. In the images we also see parts of the Colonial Lottery, the King’s Gardens or the sculpture L’Esclavage repris par les chiens. Other pictures show the women naked in brothels or private apartments, often with leopard skin, exposing how the archetypal black exotic fantasy keeps on working in white men’s minds.

HIV

Congo, the ‘Heart of Darkness’, has often played tricks on the imagination. It led to much fantasy and speculation, often with racist undertones, and has created myths and legends. One of them goes that the HIV-virus was accidentally created in Congo by Belgian scientists who did tests on monkeys but were so clumsy to transmit it to human beings. It was the beginning of a worldwide virus that created a climate of paranoia and fear. The story sounds rather unlikely, but it says a lot about how ‘the Congo’ keeps on stirring our fantasy… and daily life.

TEMPLE OF HUMAN PASSIONS

It isn’t just the buildings, Brussels is awash with statues and memorials that speak to the country’s relationship to Congo. A visitor should try to see the Congo Monument by Thomas Vinçotte in the aforementioned Cinquantenaire Park. It is a big memorial for Belgium’s efforts in Congo and features a quote by Leopold II saying that says these efforts were in the interest of civilization and the good of Belgium.

The memorial (and the sentiments attached to it) requires some imagination from the viewer, as a basin filled with dirty rainwater is meant to represent the river Congo. Behind the memorial, there is another particular building. It seems to be a neoclassical pavilion in the form of a Greek temple. Yet, upon closer inspection, it is not as traditional as it might seem. There is not a single straight line in the building. Some architecture critics see the edifice as the advent of Art Nouveau, which isn’t a tough call since the name of the young architect for who this building was his first official commission was none other than Victor Horta. Horta managed to revisit the classic style of the pavilion and make it more organic with slightly bent walls. The pavilion was designed to serve as a permanent showcase for a large marble relief called Human Passions made by sculptor Jef Lambeaux and commissioned by King Leopold II.

Lambeaux’s proposal caused a scandal, and was described by the journal L’Art Moderne in 1890 as ‘a pile of naked and contorted bodies, muscled wrestlers in delirium.’ The sculptor was dubbed ‘the Michelagelo from the gutter.’ The work is 12 by 8 meters and expresses the theme of human passions from womb to tomb. It is a contorted composition of wrangled naked bodies, flesh, breasts, and nipples, somewhere between a giant orgy and a massive fight. If you look at the details, you can see a hand on somebody’s rear end and grimaces that could express agony, ecstasy and probably both. On its inauguration day, October 1^st 1899, the piece created such a shock that only three days later, because of pressure from public opinion and the authorities, it was closed off with a wooden barricade. In the end, Horta agreed to make a permanent wall to close the pavilion completely. In 1909, the building got this wall but the pavilion has never been finished and to date has rarely been opened. This permanently closed pavilion leaves loads of room for even the most acrobatic imaginations to jump around. Some say it is closed so as not to shock the people going to the mosque, Brussels’ largest, which is just next door, and leads us to another strange story. In 1967, King Baudoin gave the building in leasehold to Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the King of Saudi Arabia. This might not have been his best idea. In his generosity, he also offered the Saudi ruler the neighboring Exhibition Pavilion that currently houses the Great Mosque of Brussels. If you want to have a look at the pavilion with Lambeaux’s relief now, you walk over its staircase where weeds grow and see a massive set of doors. Once you push the rubbish aside and peep through the keyhole, you look straight to a woman’s breast. It is a peephole in the best sense of the word.

CINEMA ABC

There are many more straight forward peepholes however and most corners of the city have their red lights, sex cinemas, swingers clubs, strip bars and whatever Peeping Tom happens to be after.

In Ixelles you find businessmen celebrating new contracts in strip bars, while the red light district of the North Station is much rougher, a paradise for petty thieves and the long term unemployed. It even attracts whoremongers from France who don’t mind driving for five hours to blow off some steam. Nowhere on Trip Advisor was it said, but Cinema ABC is definitely the most beautiful sex cinema in Brussels. It is the kind of cinema you used to have in Paris in the 1970s, with decorative wall paintings of sexy ladies in so-called soft porn style.

‘Cinema Spectacle’ and ‘Striptease sur scène’ are still written in a dated letter type. Brussels has a history of eradicating cultural monuments for corrupt real estate scams with no interest in culture. Hopefully the city has learned something from its past mistakes and will do everything to preserve Cinema ABC, which is a jewel and unique testimony of its time. Opened in 1973, the cinema still projects 400 celluloid films, accompanied by the creaking of the projector, which every now and then is interrupted by the sound of a trousers unzipping and a groan or two. If you happen to be nostalgic for times when Brazilian waxes and landing strips were not yet the norm, this may be a place you want to check out.

ADOLPHE MAX

Cinema ABC is located on Avenue Adolphe Max, a boulevard that used to be thriving with cinemas, music halls and cabarets in the time of ‘Bruxelles bruxellait’, Jacques Brel’s reference to the pre-television times when the city was said to be at its liveliest. The boulevard is named after Adolphe Max, the city’s mayor from 1909 until his death in 1939. When the Germans attacked Belgium, Max refused to work under their rule and was jailed. He managed to escape in 1918, was welcomed home as a hero and returned to office a year later. Mayor Max used to have a dog, and was known to frequent Brussels’ brothels, many of which wouldn’t allow entry to our four legged friends. When this was the case, Max would tie his dog’s leash to a nearby lamppost. When the dog was tied to a lamppost on the street, people knew that their respected mayor was between the sheets. Both the cinema and the story testify to a characteristic Brussels’ ‘live and let live’ attitude. Nobody here worries much about a dog wagging its tail.

LE MIRANO

Not all indiscretions were as ‘innocent’ as those of Adolphe Max seemed to be, and these endeavors were never as evident to public view.

The 1980s appears to be the pinnacle of such activity gaining attention. Those were days of openly corrupt politicians and real estate crooks who evicted significant numbers of residents, destroyed valuable cultural heritage and built eye sores that acted as the Brussels North Administration offices and whatever happens to survive in the area’s own World Trade Center. Many of the players in these stories were also involved in a sex scandal referred to as ‘Ballets Roses.’ Thirty odd years later and this story continues to have hair all over its back, surrounded by secrecy and claims of highly indecent scandals. A former cinema converted into a nightclub called Le Mirano, which is still a popular nightclub, was one of the spots that brought legendary villains together. On any night you might find members of Tueuries du Brabant Wallon (a group that killed 28 people and injured another 40 during extremely aggressive raids in supermarkets) at the bar. The gang never got arrested but was suspected to be part of a circuit of extreme right paratroopers who planned a coup, and not in the Jan Bucquoy sense. Like Bucquoy, some of these characters did become sort of household names. Mention Patrick Haemers and people will say what a handsome fellow he was before they’d tell you that when he wasn’t at Le Mirano he was likely to be jacking money transports. At the club, Pat might have been twisting his cocktail straw next to another regular client Paul Vanden Boeynants, a former butcher who became minister and was mentioned in almost every file in the 1980s that smelled of corruption and black money. Luckily, back then, Vanden Boeynants did not know Haemers, who later kidnapped him demanding approximately 1.5 million euro for his safe return. As if there were not enough criminals in one place, another piece of Le Mirano’s former ‘furniture’ was Michel Nihoul, a friend of serial killer/pedophile Marc Dutroux from Charleroi.

Le Mirano was notorious for sex parties, cocaine and heroine use. But in 1985, when a high placed nobleman died from an overdose, there was a lawsuit, prison penalties and more scrutiny than any underbelly appreciates. Now, Le Mirano is just a normal nightclub. Next door, you’ll find an ordinary looking shop selling shoes and headscarves for Islamic women.

But as you might get by now, you don’t have to look much further for another twist as a small and unremarkable door leads to Le New Cocoon Swingers Club.

ROCK AND ROLL DANS LE CONFITURE

Another notorious club was Le Jonathan in the Maurice Wilmottestraat in the Saint-Gilles district, a meeting where extreme right forces shared beers with cops and other criminals.

People from the gangs of Haemers and Tueurs de Brabant Wallon/were also seen there. In Le Jonathan, women were said to be forced into prostitution and heroine was dealt. One of the events they organized was called ‘Rock and Roll dans le confiture’. Some years ago, some footage was leaked on YouTube, of Jean Bultot, then the director of the prison of Saint-Gilles, with naked women in a bathtub filled with jam and the country saw how literal the event’s title was. The film was secretly shot by Le Jonathan’s owner who obviously wasn’t too embarrassed to blackmail his own clientele. The bank robber Léopold Van Esbrouck, who used to visit the club, described its clients like this: ‘Those who went there were racists, gangsters, sex maniacs, cops, or all of these at the same time.’

MAGRITTE

Things here aren’t always so extreme of course. Take René Magritte, one of the most inspiring artists of the 20^th century. The surrealist painter had an amazing imagination, but his biography is slightly dull. He married his high school sweetheart Georgette, didn’t like to travel, and by all accounts led a fairly conservative life. This is evident in the house he, Georgette and their dog inhabited in the sleepy borough of Jette from 1930 to 1954. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll was clearly a concept Magritte was not familiar with, and he probably imagined less pornographic applications of jams and jellies that Jean Bultot. One of Magritte’s few recorded vices was that he occasionally went to his neighbor’s, a notary, to watch porn movies in his attic. Not so risqué, a bit boring even, but behind the self-cultivated image of the ‘petit bourgeois’ with the bowler hat, there was a true rebel with an awe inspiring imagination. And maybe that pretty much epitomizes what Brussels is all about once you have the patience to look further than that first, very misleading, ‘boring’ layer.