Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp: after 11 years of closure, let there be light!
About the reopening on 24 September 2022 of the renovated and expanded KMSKA, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.
Let's go to Antwerp! The Royal Museum of Fine Arts has just reopened after eleven years of interior extension work, and it is a dazzling success. Even contemporary art has succeeded in nestling in amongst the fabulous collections of ancient art, on the pretext of lighting for example, such as the chandeliers in the entrance hall designed by Luceplan, a contemporary version of the classic chandelier, or cultural mediation: you have to see the group of plum-coloured stuffed camels, imagined by the Belgian artist and director Christophe Coppens, in resonance with Rubens' Adoration of the Magi, to realise that Belgium really knows how to be bold. And since children can happily climb on the famous camels, after having looked at Marinus Van Reymerswaele's Saint Jerome, for example, to find the hand whose giant reproduction Christophe Coppens makes swing above the painting, needless to say that families can now clearly add a visit to the museum to their leisure time programme!
Commissioned to respond to the need to "prepare the historic building for the future and enlarge it", in the words of Carmen Willems, the museum's director, the architect Dikki Scipio and his agency KAAN Architecten, have succeeded in inserting a luminous space dedicated to the modern collections, i.e. dating from 1880 onwards, into the succession of rooms plunged into semi-darkness dedicated to the graphic collections and the small sculptures. Now, in this historic museum built at the end of the 19th century to exhibit a collection of art spanning seven centuries, which began with the Guild of Saint Luke in 1382, a cathedral-like ground floor, with its blindingly white rooms, resonates with the vast white plateaus on the top floor worthy of the finest art galleries, all linked by a vertiginous staircase, mischievously named Stairway to Heaven. "The solemnity of these large volumes gives them an aura of sacredness, as if to revive the idea of the temple-museum," writes Jean-François Lasnier in his article for the November 2022 issue of Connaissance des arts magazine.
"Our ambition was to create a museum that would satisfy both the visitor looking for calm and contemplation, and the one looking for action and experience," explains Carmen Willems. She consulted the public to rethink the principles of the exhibition from top to bottom with her entire team. "Before the closure, the museum was strictly chronological and that didn't work very well," says Nico Van Hout, director of collections. The museum is now themed, with themes such as Light, Form and Colour. However, there is one exception to the principle: James Ensor (1860-1949). The Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts has the largest collection of his paintings in the world!
Forty paintings by James Ensor are on display, including the famous Oyster Eater and The Intrigue, as well as more than six hundred drawings, not to mention the correspondence... Enough to allow the museum to evoke the life and work of the Belgian painter, engraver and anarchist, an avant-gardist who left a particularly original expressionist work, as well as his exhibitions, the artists who were his contemporaries, his patrons...
The rest of the modern collection is filled with paintings by Magritte, of course, such as Le 16 septembre (1956), Van Rysselberghe, Van de Velde, Permeke, Alechinsky, etc. There is also a wide panorama of the work of Rik Wouters (1882-1916), a painter and sculptor considered to be one of the major figures of Brabant Fauvism, whose career was as short as it was prolific. Just like Jules Schmalzigaug's career.
Did you know that the author of the first Belgian abstract painting was called Jules Schmalzigaug? Of course he belonged in the KMSKA (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen). Born in 1882, the artist took his own life in 1917 after being the only Belgian painter to be fully involved in the adventure of futurism. His meteoric career on the art market, which gave him just enough time to exhibit his paintings in Rome in 1914 alongside those of Kandinsky and Archipenko, made him a rare painter, whose works of art for sale make all the lights flash green as soon as they appear somewhere. The Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts recently acquired this famous 'first Belgian abstract painting' by Jules Schmalzigaug, a welcome addition to its fine collection of the artist's work following the donation by Walter Malgaud in 1928.
Along a route through the historical rooms, structured on one side by the sacred and on the other by the secular, we admire masterpieces by Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memling, Fouquet, Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens, Rembrandt, Hals, Cranach, Clouet, Metsys... Not forgetting the masters of the still life such as Joachim Beuckelaer or Frans Snyders, landscape painters such as Joachim Patinir or Jan van der Heyden, as well as specialists in genre scenes such as Teniers, Brouwer or Van Ostade.
Of course, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) remains the star of the KMSKA. The aptly named 'Master of Antwerp' therefore still has his own room. Although the most Flemish of the 17th century artists was born in Germany while his parents fled Antwerp and the reprisals for their sympathy for the Protestant Reformation, he soon returned to 'his' city, where he trained as a page and then as a painter, first using the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, before moving on to greater clarity and receiving princely commissions right up to his death. His house-studio has of course become his museum, which can be visited in Antwerp, but it goes without saying that the Royal Museum of Fine Arts could not fail to pay tribute to its illustrious artist.
As Jean-François Lasnier writes, "the Rubens room is always the highlight of the visit, with its majestic compositions by the Antwerp master, such as The Adoration of the Magi and The Baptism of Christ. In keeping with the principle of counterpoint used in the modern exhibition, the old rooms make room for recent creations, thus denying the strict watertightness imposed by the architectural approach. It is a way of suggesting that a work of art, past or present, is always contemporary with the viewer.