Alfons
Annys, glass worker, studies at the Academy for Fine Arts
in Brugge, where he gets the attention of professor Van
Acker. The professor teaches historical compositions and
the knowledge of faces. His education continues on the
Academy and several Schools of Art in Paris. Because of
painter Gustaaf Bernard, Annys gets integrated in the
world of painters.
The Annys family is active
in making glass and father Annys is a respected painter of
portraits. The two parents both die on an early age and so
they can not have made any influence on their son. Though,
the fifteen year old Alfons follows the example of his father
and starts portrait painting. During his stay in the Academy
of Brugge he wins a couple of prizes. He gets the opportunity
to discover and analyze several treasors of art of many
churches and historical buildings in our country.
Especially the glass works
gets the very attention of Annys and it is in this period that
he learns to see and paint the landscape. For the further
education he goes to Paris in France, to studie the masters in
the Louvre. He also gets to other cities of art in France and
he also makes it to Florence in Italy. He starts studying the
mosaic techniques. With all this experience he returns to
Flanders to settle himself as a glass worker.
Glass working is an art which
remembers most of the Middle Ages. Now it is most of the time
only done by order. And it is also only in our churches that
glass windows still remain. Rarely we can find it back in the
modern buildings. Those who hope that the new way of construction
has reserved a place for this type of art, we have to disappoint.
Back in the Middle Ages the glass window was very high praised
and the maker of such jewels was also seen as a very respectable
artist. He only can make it to the richest.
The art of glass burning gets
here in the 18th century. The glass burner, who has in the
beginning just only little pieces of glass available, must in
his drawing take into accounts with these little partitions.
His talent consist of to find the harmony between the colored
glass and the arrangement of many partitions with the marking
in lead. A hundred of various colors are available by mixing
of smashed jewels and metals in the glass mixture. The pieces
of glass be burned in an oven who can reach a very high
temperature. The fact that the glass only frequently gets his
color when it has burned in those fiercest heat, is for the
glass worker an indication that he must dominate the knowledges
of the right temperature and the proportionately mixture.
For Alfons Annys, a many sided
artist and one of the best our glass burners, is doubtless the
glass window his highest meaning of expression. But near it
Alfons is also an architect, decorator, etcher, painter of
fresco's, woodcutter, illustrator of books en magazines, mosaic
worker and painter of portraits and landscapes. Besides he writes
interesting things about art, artists and learned man.
He is also a respected
teacher of talent full students, he gives lectures and appears
as a proposer. All of this activity, with his pithy Flemish
conviction, makes him dignified to be arrested as a dangerous
citizen and his atelier will be destroyed. Paintings be pierced,
glass windows be broken, oven be smashed, hundreds drawings and
projects be burned, expensively books be stolen, the masterly
beautifully series in burned glass ' The Towers of Flanders '
be ...
Alfons Annys is one of the race
you can not eliminate. He is hardly out of prison and he already
goes back to work, even more active as before and with even more
energy. The negativeness he experiences is a benefaction for his
will power personality. It will be a stimulus to carry up his
activity, to sharp and lineup his ideas, even more obstinately
to strive to the purpose that he has put for his own. Annys he
makes his way, orders to orders arrives. In the whole Flanders
you can admire his glass windows, but also in Montreal, Stockholm,
Quebec, in Germany, Britain and France you can find his work back.
From 1920 until 1945 Alfons
Annys stays in Brasschaat, where his studio is established
here at the ' Lage Kaart '. There, he makes two enormous
paintings about Brasschaat. These are made to decorate the
pavilion of the town Brasschaat on the World Exposition in
Antwerp in 1930. At the same time there is an individual
exposition with fifty five paintings in ' Zaal OOR ', a
gallery on the Leopoldstraat in Antwerp, Belgium.
As a glass worker, Annys
establishes windows in 1933 in the church of the Holy Heart in Antwerp
and in 1937/38 in the
church and the
baptistery
of the O.-L.-V. Middelares and the Holy Lodewijk, in Berchem near Antwerp. In 1945,
after placing windows in the church of Saint-Servatius in Ravels, he leaves
Brasschaat. He travels to Dresden in East Germany and becomes professor in
image arts at their Academy.
