Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim (c. 1450), Jean Fouquet. Royal Museum of Fantastic Arts Antwerp. Picture: Karin Borghouts
Due to the stripping out of advert hoc components from the Previous Masters a part of the museum and the addition of latest fashionable galleries, the museum’s wall area has elevated by 40 per cent. Not like most museums which have expanded and are keen to indicate extra works general, in Antwerp there was a paring-down. Solely 650 works at the moment are on present, moderately fewer than earlier than. A working example is the big, high-ceilinged room that comprises three of the KMSKA’s most vital works. They’re – hung one to a wall – the small Van Eyck panel, Madonna on the Fountain (1439), which faces Rubens’s The Holy Household with the Parrot (1614–33). The triptych of very totally different Virgins is accomplished by what often is the public face of the museum and is actually probably the most fashionably dressed Madonnas in artwork historical past. Jean Fouquet’s Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim (c. 1450) is half of the Melun diptych, the opposite half of which depicts its commissioner Étienne Chevalier and Saint Stephen and is on the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. The virtually grisaille Madonna with three blue and 6 pink angels got here to the museum in 1841 as a part of a bequest of some 144 Northern Renaissance from Florent van Ertborn, a former mayor of Antwerp with a ardour for the Flemish Primitives that was not broadly shared in his day. On what acts as a fourth wall, however are actually two door posts, are two fashionable works: one by Luc Tuymans, the opposite by Marlene Dumas. They’re a part of a sparse sprinkling of the brand new among the many outdated, mirrored by the insertion of a Bruegel or somesuch within the new galleries – however there’s no heavy-handed try to attract parallels, and the lighting scheme, which is being adjusted as we stroll round, is taking advantage of the Madonnas. The goal, Bulckens says, is ‘to create a sacred area’ for the three stars.
A show of small terracotta modelli, together with Joannes Cardon’s Madonna of 1643 (far proper). Picture: Karin Borghouts
James Ensor is the artist who divides outdated from new by starting the run of the gleaming white galleries. Within the run-up to opening, the museum made a lot of it having created what quantities to a museum inside a museum – and for guests to go round each with out being a lot conscious of the opposite. It wasn’t exaggerating. Within the area separating the construction of 1890 from these of 2022, the architect has carved out a 3rd set of areas. Bulckens calls it ‘a twilight zone’: an ink-blue and slate- gray sequence of galleries designed for sketches, works on paper and small-scale sculptures. The latter consists of an arresting show of modelli, fired-clay figures that have been handled by sculptors virtually as sketches (to be taken up in marble if accepted), though examples corresponding to Joannes Cardon’s breastfeeding Madonna of 1643 could also be too finely detailed to be something however the last product.
A number of purists – the 100 outdated guests of Willems’ creativeness, maybe – could dislike the delicate shaking-up of an internationally important assortment of largely Flemish work; these extra fascinated with fashionable artwork could also be barely unconvinced by these works being organised into three groupings of ‘Mild’, ‘Color’ and ‘Form’, however could make discoveries all the identical. (I feel mine could also be a few of the extra figurative work of Jules Schmalzigaug, the Belgian Futurist who died in 1917.)
In 2008, in his introduction to a historical past of the museum from 1810–2007, its then-director Paul Huvenne, described it as ‘a trendy outdated girl […]. She will not be fashionable or stylish, however she has class and retains her wits about her.’ Willems describes what she discovered when she first joined as ‘a sleeping museum’. At time of writing, nevertheless, it’s extra correct to say that it’s each fashionable and unsleeping.
