Les Petites Filles Modèles, 1950
Rachel Baes (1912-1983)
'Les Petites Filles Modèles' (1950) is one of the more important and revealing paintings from the mature surrealist period of Rachel Baes. The work is an oil on canvas, and a particularly interesting detail is that the title was apparently supplied by Jean Cocteau, whose handwritten inscription identifying the work appeared on the reverse of the painting.
The title refers to Les Petites Filles modèles, the celebrated nineteenth-century children's novel by the Comtesse de Ségur, which presents idealised, well-behaved young girls as moral exemplars. In Baes's hands, however, the phrase assumes a far more ambiguous and unsettling resonance. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, she repeatedly depicted young girls in mysterious interiors and psychologically charged situations. Critics have often described these figures as simultaneously innocent and disturbing, inhabiting dreamlike worlds suspended between childhood memory and adult anxiety.
These elaborately dressed, often old-fashioned young girls recur throughout Baes's oeuvre. Rather than functioning as portraits of actual children, they appear to serve as symbols of memory, lost innocence, desire, solitude, and the artist's inner emotional life. In this painting, two young girls occupy a sparsely furnished interior. One sits in profile holding playing cards, while the other stands behind her, apparently arranging or combing her hair. Their nearly identical dresses, hairstyles, and facial features give them the appearance of sisters, doubles, or perhaps even two versions of the same child.
The act of grooming another person's hair is traditionally associated with intimacy, and childhood. Here, however, it feels strangely ritualistic. The standing girl's wide-eyed expression lends the scene a theatrical intensity, transforming an ordinary domestic gesture into something resembling a ceremony or rite of passage. Such ambiguity is characteristic of Baes's work: she frequently takes familiar domestic activities and renders them psychologically mysterious and emotionally charged. The setting further contributes to the painting's atmosphere of unease. The room is largely empty, save for a dark piano positioned in the background. Beyond it, an open doorway reveals a narrow shaft of bright light, introducing a powerful symbolic element. Within surrealist imagery, doors and windows frequently function as thresholds between inner and outer worlds, consciousness and dream, memory and desire. The doorway here suggests a passage into an unknown psychological space, intensifying the sense that the scene unfolds according to dream logic rather than everyday reality. Rather than relying on overtly fantastical imagery, Baes evokes the uncanny through subtle dislocation and emotional ambiguity.
Rachel Baes (1912-1983)
Rachel Baes (1912-1983) was a Belgian surrealist painter who was the daughter of the artist Émile Baes. She received no formal artistic training but began her career in 1929 when she exhibited works at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris to critical acclaim. Creating dreamlike worlds that evoked surrealism, often depicting lone women in interiors, she quickly became known for her distinctive surrealist style. Baes was of solitary nature. Although her work forms part of the surrealist domain, she refused to commit to the movement: "I am not a surrealist painter, I am a surrealist who paints” she wrote in her diary. A further statement testifies to her freedom- loving disposition: “My art of painting: poetry, rebellion, solitude”. This did not, however, prevent her from frequenting both the surrealist Circle in Brussels, and members of the French group. In the 1930s, she became a member of the surrealist group around René Magritte and counted among her friends André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard but also Max Ernst, Georges Bataille and Irène Hamoir. Between 1936 and 1940, Baes was in a relationship with Joris Van Severen, the leader of the extreme rightist Verdinaso party in Belgium. Van Severen was shot erroneously by French troops in 1940. In 1945, she met Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, whose portrait she painted. The following year, Éluard published a poem in which he described Baes “As a lonely woman, who draws instead of talking”. She first encountered E.L.T Mesens and René Magritte through the poet, and art dealer Herman Toussaint in 1947. That same year, Magritte painted her portrait as Shéhérazade. An extravagant personality, Baes was also to act as his muse for some amateur films. Baes published a biography - Joris Van Severen, une âme - in 1965. From 1961 she retired from public life and lived alone in Bruges. She was buried at Abbeville, alongside Van Severen. In 2002, the Koninklijk Museum in Antwerp featured Baes alongside Jane Graverol in an exhibition: Voor Schone Kunsten.
