The Belgian Connection: Armand Rassenfosse
Study for ‘The Indecisive’ (Étude pour ‘L’indécis’), 1890s
Oil on cardboard
46.5 × 37 cm
Auctioned in 2019 at Pierre Bergé & Associés, Paris for ca. € 9,000

To look at this raw canvas is to witness a quiet, deliberate mutiny against the loud provocations of the late nineteenth-century art scene. For a long time, the Liège painter and draughtsman Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934) was treated like a footnote, buried under the massive, controversial reputation of his close friend Félicien Rops. Critics loved to obsess over Rops—the legendary “etcher of the kingdom of Satan” who shocked Paris with his aggressive, devil-worshipping erotica. But Rassenfosse was no copycat. While Rops used his art as a loud weapon for sexual provocation, Rassenfosse used his brush like a scalpel to examine the psychological inside world of his subjects.

The connection between the two men was intensely chemical, not just artistic. When Rassenfosse walked into Rops’ Parisian studio in 1888, he was a 26-year-old self-taught painter who had just walked away from his family’s comfortable porcelain business to risk everything for the avant-garde. The two became so obsessed with technical precision that they spent nights in the studio experimenting with acids and groundings, eventually inventing a revolutionary, transparent etching varnish that they officially patented together under the name “Ropsenfosse.” But when Rops died in 1898, Rassenfosse did not stop. He outlived his mentor by more than thirty years, stripping away the demonic theatricality to focus on a heavy, socially grounded reality that anticipated the stark lines of modern expressionism.

Look at the surface of this study for The Indecisive. Rassenfosse did not paint this on a smooth, expensive canvas; he slammed his brush onto rough cardboard. Cardboard is a brutal medium—it violently sucks the oil straight out of the paint, leaving a dry, matte, and schrale texture that gives the woman’s skin a vulnerable, exposed quality. The soft, smoky contours are not there for dromerige elegance; they are there because the figure is literally dissolving into the claustrophobic shadows of the background. The title says it all: this is a study in mental paralysis and inner doubt. She is trapped in her own mind, her body held in a state of suspended friction against the edge of the board.

The women who sat for Rassenfosse in his Liège studio carried the heavy dust of the industrial revolution on their skin. They were the hiercheuses—the young girls who performed back-breaking, hazardous physical labor in the black soot of the Belgian coal mines. The local middle class looked down on these working-class women, routinely treating them like trash or easy sexual prey in the local media. Rassenfosse completely shattered that bourgeois hypocrisy. He did not portray them as exploited proletarian caricatures, nor did he paint them as loose parlor girls. He gave these exhausted mine workers an absolute, almost aristocratic dignity and silent depth. He caught them in moments of heavy, unvarnished presence, transforming their physical weariness into a timeless monument of psychological endurance. Rassenfosse later brought this exact, dark undercurrent to his illustrations for Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, proving that his interest lay entirely in the friction between outer decay and inner truth.

There is a final, cynical friction to this sheet. When it was auctioned in Paris in 2019, it went for just under nine thousand euros. For a definitive, masterfully executed symbolist work from the 1890s, that price is an absolute joke. It exposes how brushed aside Rassenfosse remains by a high-stakes art market that prefers loud names over quiet intensity. But for anyone who values the raw, unfiltered evolution of modernism, that neglect is a hidden gift. Study for ‘The Indecisive’ stands as a poised, fiercely assured witness to a self-taught master who abandoned commercial security to capture the heavy, silent weight of human vulnerability.