Nocturnal Animals: The Waking Dreams of Leon Spilliaert

Léon Spilliaert,Woman at the Shoreline, 1910

‘I am no good at interpreting other people’s dreams; I have too many of my own.’
Leon Spilliaert

I recently visited a fine exhibition of the art of Leon Spilliaert (The Royal Academy, London - now closed but you can still go on a virtual tour).

Spilliaert was born in 1881 in Ostend on the Belgian coast. He grew up above the family perfume shop, a sickly, reclusive child obsessed with drawing. At 18 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bruges, but, after just a few months, ill health forced him to abandon his studies. He worked as an illustrator for a Brussels publisher and spent some time in Paris. However, he soon returned to Ostend where he felt more at home.

‘My head seems to be sort of filled with mists.’

Spilliaert was frustrated by his lack of recognition. He suffered chronic stomach ache and insomnia. He endeavoured to cope by taking long twilit walks through the empty streets of Ostend. He wandered down gloomy Hofstraat, past the Royal Galleries, to the wide-beached seafront. He watched the fog rolling in over the deserted promenade; the clouds looming over lonely beach huts.

'The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!'
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 'Crime and Punishment’

Léon Spilliaert, Hofstraat, Ostend, 1908

In infinite shades of grey, with just the occasional dash of colour, Spilliaert created images of the solitary signal pole at the end of the pier, the desolate breakwater looking out onto the North Sea. In Indian ink, watercolour, pastel and charcoal, he painted the lighthouse in a storm; the Royal Palace Hotel haunting the far-off skyline. He depicted slender trees reaching for the nightsky, moonlight falling on the mountaintop, the cemetery at dusk. 

'The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.'
John Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’

There’s a man hailing someone in the distance, a lady in a wide-brimmed hat with her back to us on the shoreline. There are young women paddling in the shallows; long robed women waiting - by the clock, by the window, on the jetty. A girl, caught in a gust of wind, holds on for dear life.

Spilliaert paints his bedroom - empty and unadorned. In his glass-roofed studio, amongst the pot plants, he studies his blue sketchbook; scrutinizes his drawing board. He examines himself in the mirror: smartly attired, but with dishevelled hair standing upright in an alarming quiff. There are dark rings around his eyes. 

'Night is the other half of life, and the better half.’
Goethe

Léon Spilliaert, Self-portrait, 3 November, 1908.

Spilliaert was an artist of unease and melancholy, of solitude and silence. He recognised that the night is a time for reflection - when, liberated from the urgent bustle of the day, a settled peace descends, and the world looks and feels different; when profound truths reveal themselves. At night we stand on the threshold between rationality and fantasy, between dreams and reality. It is a time for invention and resolution.

'I love the silent hour of night,
For blissful dreams may then arise,
Revealing to my charmed sight
What may not bless my waking eyes.'
Anne Brontë, ‘Night’

We should all respect and value ‘the wee small hours of the morning.’  We should treasure their creative potential. At night the mind is free to explore untravelled paths, to make uncommon connections. We can come to terms with the problems that we can’t quite solve in the light.

'Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.'
Samuel Johnson

I confess I have for the most part been early to bed and a sound sleeper. I have been robustly conformist. Nonetheless, I have always kept a pen and paper by my bed, so that I can record the random thoughts and recollections that sometimes interrupt my slumber. In the morning I have discovered both lateral insights and meaningless drivel. 

The difficulty is telling one from the other.

'Sunday is gloomy.
My hours are slumberless.
Dearest the shadows
I live with are numberless.'

The Associates, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ (Rezső Seress)

No. 273

Are You a Hedgehog or a Fox? Considering the Monist and Pluralist Views of How Communication Works

In his celebrated 1953 essay on Tolstoy, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox,’ philosopher Isaiah Berlin quotes a fragment attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus:

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’

This line has sometimes been taken to suggest that hedgehogs are superior to foxes, because their singular defensive skill trumps the many and various wiles of the fox. Foxes can run and dart and hide and pounce. A hedgehog just rolls itself up into a very effective spikey ball. Archilochus may, of course, be pointing out the distinction in skills without attributing superior worth. In any case, Berlin employs the analogy of the Hedgehog and the Fox to illuminate two fundamentally different types of thinking:

‘There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.’

 Berlin establishes two camps.

The Hedgehogs are monists, ever in search of overarching laws, panoramic principles, universal theories. Their enthusiasms and enquiries converge, centripetally, on singular visions. To their team he assigns the likes of Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Ibsen.

The Foxes, by contrast, are pluralists. They enjoy exploring the infinite multiplicity of life. Their interests and opinions spin off, centrifugally, in all sorts of different, sometimes conflicting, directions. To them Berlin assigns Herodotus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Pushkin, Joyce and others.

Since the publication of Berlin’s essay, writers have enjoyed categorising novelists, philosophers, economists, musicians, and anyone else you’d care to mention, into singular Hedgehogs and pluralist Foxes.

In the field of business critics have observed that Hedgehog leaders value focus, best practice, order and specialism. By contrast Fox leaders cherish diverse skillsets, complexity, adaptability and speed. Some infer that it’s the Foxes that thrive in the new economy.

When in 2014 the statistician Nate Silver launched his data journalism organization, FiveThirtyEight, he incorporated a fox in the company logo. In a manifesto he explained: 

‘We take a pluralistic approach and we hope to contribute to your understanding of the news in a variety of ways.’

Categorising Hedgehogs and Foxes has become something of an academic parlour game. But the ubiquity of the analogy doesn’t undermine its interest. Inevitably one has to ask: in the field of communications, who are the Hedgehogs and who are the Foxes?

When I came into the advertising profession in the late 1980s I was inducted, by experience and case studies, into a singular model of effectiveness that combined rational and emotional persuasion. Advertising was a sugar-coated pill, an exercise in earned attention, focused messaging and subtle seduction. Our benchmarks were VW and Levi’s, Carling and Courage Best. I guess in those days, in Berlin’s terms, I was a Hedgehog. I believed that all roads led to the same model of persuasion.

But as my career progressed I kept encountering admirable campaigns that didn’t quite fit this model. Radion advertising was brutal and crude, but it clearly precipitated action. Gap commercials lacked a proposition, but their effortless style carried the day. Chanel’s Egoiste was empty, but effective. Cadbury’s Gorilla made little logical sense, but it didn’t seem to matter.

With every passing year and every new exception, my Hedgehog mentality was chipped away. I reflected fondly on the directness of the jingles, slogans and anthropomorphism with which I’d grown up. With the dawn of the social age, I admired the infinite variety of memes, the viral impact of stunts, the authentic transparency of verite, the smart psychology of nudges. Gradually I became an open-minded pluralist; a student of many schools of communication effectiveness. I became a Fox.

In his excellent book, ‘The Anatomy of Humbug’, Paul Feldwick reviews the numerous theories of how advertising works. He explores the various traditions of rational persuasion and unconscious communication, ‘salesmanship’ and ‘seduction’ as he terms them. He also considers the effectiveness of salience and fame, social connection and relationships, PR and showmanship. He concludes that all these approaches have genuine merit:

‘These are not to be understood as rival or mutually exclusive theories – they are all intended as different ways of thinking about the same thing, all of which may have their uses, and each of which alone has its limitations.’

Every generation brings a new theory of how communication works. Every cohort creates new tools and techniques, methods and models. Most of these have some value in illuminating their particular field and broadening our understanding of the art of persuasion. But I have remained sceptical of anyone that preaches a singular gospel; a definitive model; a theory of everything. It’s Fool’s Gold.

And I don’t listen to Hedgehogs any more.

No. 184