Portrait of Fortuna Brulez, ca. 1919

Among the many artists and intellectuals who fled to the Netherlands during the First World War was the philosopher and professor Lucien Brulez and his Romanian wife. The refugees had regular contact with each other and the black-eyed Fortuna Brulez-Mavromati inspired Van den Berghe to paint one of his most expressionistic portraits. The artist made two variants that precede the final portrait. He also made a linocut after one of the portraits. Each variant possesses an independent quality, yet in each subsequent work there is an evolution towards a more solid structure and a greater dynamism. Repeating the same subject until the desired expression is achieved is a working method that Van den Berghe often used. The version from the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent is the first of the two 'preparatory' variants and clearly still has the character of an unfinished study, although the figure itself is almost completely worked out in heavily applied layers of paint. The Fauvist use of colour and the expressive make-up of the face can be traced back to the Russian expressionist Alexej von Jawlensky, while the female portraits of Kees van Dongen and Jan Sluijters have certainly influenced him as well. Like Jawlensky's portraits, this one transcends the simple depiction of a particular individual. It becomes an icon of the unattainable, unfathomable woman. It is the beginning of a recurring theme in which the problematic male-female relationship takes shape. Van den Berghe no longer expresses his essential problems in portraits, but in scenes in which women are depicted naked and often without their heads, sometimes with humour and mild self-mockery, but gradually with a bitterness that does not hide his disillusionment with mankind.