Michel de Ghelderode

Michel de Ghelderode (April 3, 1898 – April 1, 1962) was an avant-garde Belgian dramatist, writing in French.

Career

A prolific writer, he wrote more than 60 plays, a hundred stories, a number of articles on art and folklore and more than 20,000 letters. He is the creator of a fantastic and disturbing, often macabre, grotesque and cruel world filled with mannequins, puppets, devils, masks, skeletons, religious paraphernalia, and mysterious old women. His works create an eerie and unsettling atmosphere although they rarely contain anything explicitly scary.

Ghelderode's influences include puppet theater, Italian commedia dell'arte, the medieval world of Flanders, the Flemish painters Bosch, Bruegel, Jacob Jordaens and the Teniers, along with the Belgian artist James Ensor, painter of the macabre, and the novelist Georges Eekhoud. His works often deal with the extremes of human experience, from death and degradation to religious exaltation. In modern times the animators Brothers Quay cite Ghelderode as an influence upon them.