agricultural scenes, and subjects from the Bible. Servaes innovative work helped found Flemish Expressionism. He experimented with different ways to show his personal emotions through his paintings. His pioneering expressionist style used several techniques. The first was a blurring of perspective that was first found in Impressionism. Servaes combined this technique with a use of earth colors to create a gloomy tone in many of his works. An example of this is his 1912 landscape Field of Stubble. Servaes used rough brushstrokes, in simple areas of thickly applied dark earth colours, to create a synthetic image of a banal field of stubble at the edge of a wood. This direct and impulsive way of painting was a major impulse for Constant Permeke to evolve towards Expressionism. Roman Catholic Church Controversy Servaes' 1919 Stations of the Cross of Luithagen was a collection of 14 charcoal drawings depicting religious figures, such as an emaciated Jesus Christ on the cross. These drawings depicted religious scenes in a raw and brutal expressionist style. The Catholic Church disapproved of this manner of depicting these scenes and as a result many of his works were removed from Belgian churches in 1921. In an effort to support and explore Servaes' spiritual vision, Dutch Carmelite friar Titus Brandsma had the images published in Opgang, a Catholic cultural magazine. Alongside each image, Brandsma added his own meditation. The controversy demonstrates how expressionist art was misunderstood at the time as the work was seen as distorting nature so as to lead away from beauty. The fallout of the controversy left Servaes at a crossroads in his painting career. He focused on landscape paintings after the controversy and before World War II began. However, Servaes did not give up his grim exclusively-charcoal technique permanently. When he lived with the monks at Orval Abbey starting in 1927, he drew the residents there using his charcoal-expressionist style. By 1935, the public was more accepting of new art styles, and the monks commissioned Servaes to create a new series of the Stations of the Cross. References External link 1883 births 1966 deaths Belgian Expressionist painters Expressionist painters Belgian collaborators with Nazi Germany