Three Primitive Painters

First published in 1905, Three Primitive Painters (Trois primitifs) was J.-K. Huysmans' third and final book of art criticism. Differing radically from its two predecessors, it was devoted solely to art of the Renaissance period, particularly by Flemish painters, and made almost no reference to contemporary artists whatsoever. The book, divided into two major essays, focuses on three painters who were active in the relatively short period between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance: Matthias Grünewald, whose disturbing and iconic Crucifixion had formed the centerpiece of Huysmans' aesthetic conceptions and which he wrote about in his novel Là-bas of 1891, the Master of Flémalle - many of whose works are now attributed to Robert Campin - who produced some of the most exquisite representations of the Virgin Mary of the period, and an anonymous painter of the Florentine school - now considered to be Bartolomeo Veneto - whose idealized depiction of a young Florentine courtesan provoked in Huysmans a profoundly unsettling response, which was perhaps more psychologically revealing of the author than of the artist. As with his fiction, Huysmans' art criticism was radically infused with his psychological concerns and preoccupations, and in Three Primitive Painters his artistic assessments were more clearly than ever shaped by the contradictions of his conflicted emotional life.