To mark the 500th anniversary of Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch in 2016, Het Noordbrabants Museum and the TextielMuseum brought ‘The Elephant’ back to the Netherlands – not as a replica of the original but as a contemporary interpretation of Bosch’s painting by the renowned Belgian artist Jan Fabre.
In around 1530, a remarkable series of five tapestries based on the paintings by Bosch (ca. 1450-1516) was woven in Brussels. Only an incomplete series still remains in the collection of the El Escorial in Spain; ‘The Elephant’ is missing. However, the tapestry’s depiction of a besieged elephant is well known.
In 2016, seven major museums in the province of Brabant presented a contemporary exhibition programme to coincide with ‘Hieronymus Bosch – Visions of a Genius’ (13 February to 8 May 2016) in Het Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch. The museum asked Jan Fabre to design a contemporary interpretation of ‘The Elephant’. The tapestry shows an elephant in front of a castle – a recurring theme in 15th- and 16th-century art and a symbol of (political) power. The elephant is under attack from all sides by figures united by flags and banners. These are the traditional guilds. The composition can be understood as both a battle against those in power and a condemnation of the consequences of impulses and passions, represented by the guilds.
The process from design to production, which examines the differences between the 16th century and today, was the subject of the exhibition ‘Making of “The Return of the Elephant”’ in the TextielMuseum. After production in the TextielLab and the exhibition in the TextielMuseum, the tapestry went on display in Het Noordbrabants Museum in the exhibition ‘Under the spell of Bosch’ from 29 October 2016 to 29 January 2017.
On 11 September 2015, the TextielMuseum officially kicked off the project with Fabre, introducing the artist to the TextielLab’s many technical and material possibilities. Fabre designed and developed the tapestry between December 2015 and the spring of 2016. The museum invited filmmaker Roel van Tour to record the tapestry-making process from design to production, now and in Bosch’s time.
Fabre (1958) is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist, playwright, stage director, choreographer and designer. He studied at the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Through his work, he has created a highly personal world with its own rules and laws as well as its own characters, symbols and recurring motifs. In 1990, he covered an entire building with ballpoint drawings (‘Tivoli’), one of his most famous works. In 2016, he created the controversial exhibition ‘Knight of Despair | Warrior of Beauty’ at The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
