Critical issues are being raised concerning the not too long ago reopened Royal Museum of Wonderful Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) in Belgium. Preliminary excessive reward was tempered by consternation over the weird furnishings, together with a seat within the form of a camel, and the white flooring, scuffed after a matter of days in line with numerous Twitter commentators, and reported within the Flemish day by day newspaper De Standaard.
Now—because the backdrop to ongoing protests in opposition to funding cuts for Antwerp’s artwork college students—museum professionals, lecturers, collectors and common guests are involved by issues starting from aesthetic decisions and curatorial choices to administration of workers and funds. The French journalist Didier Rykner declared the museum “a tragic failure” in an excoriating assault in La Tribune de l’Artwork, printed on 4 October. The museum’s management dismisses the criticisms as coming from conservative voices within the museum world.
Wim Van Driessen, an Antwerp resident who has visited the museum 5 occasions because it reopened, was impressed by the structure, the decor and the situation of the work. However, he says, “With a 40% improve in exhibition area, it looks like a missed alternative to maintain so many masterworks in storage. I particularly miss the world of Bruegel, one of the vital necessary painters that ever labored in Antwerp, which has virtually utterly disappeared from view.” Of the 8,400 works within the assortment, greater than 600 are on show.
The absence of star Flemish painters shouldn’t be the one criticism levelled on the new grasp, and the addition of things reminiscent of interactive contact screens have been branded “gimmicks” that “decrease the bar” and present a scarcity of aesthetic sensitivity on the a part of the museum’s senior administration. “It’s the final instance of the ‘infantilisation of society’,” says one senior artwork world determine.
The museum’s new white flooring had been scuffed after a matter of days in line with numerous Twitter commentators © Karin Borghouts/KMSKA
Of the a number of high-profile critics interviewed by The Artwork Newspaper, the Belgian collector Marnix Neerman is exclusive in agreeing to be recognized. He advised us that the museum’s senior administration is responsible of “amateurism, conceitedness and terrible style”. Summarising the inflow of communications from artwork world protagonists that he obtained following the reopening on 24 September, he says: “It’s a playground. It’s all about enjoyable, and selfies. That’s not the duty of a serious museum. It’s vulgar.”
The museum’s director Carmen Willems, who was appointed in November 2020, dismisses such criticisms, which she says come from a conservative ingredient throughout the museum’s viewers. She says that KMSKA welcomed 70,000 guests in its first ten days, and that the response has been enthusiastically optimistic: “On social media, persons are overwhelmed by this museum. And that’s as a result of they study one thing—and typically certainly in a playful means. Why not? It’s not an issue that they study on this means.”
For some, this perceived lack of gravitas throughout the museum shows is a symptom of an absence of scholarly heft throughout the organisation, exemplified by the director herself.
“I might invite you to take an in depth have a look at Carmen Willems’s CV and to match it with that of the administrators of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Nationwide Gallery in London, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and Vienna and so on,” says one nameless supply through electronic mail. “It’s additionally value listening to a few of her statements. She’s a featherweight. The KMSKA deserves significantly better. The general public deserves significantly better.”
Willems refutes accusations that she is a political appointment: “I’m not. I made my profession on this [museum] world.” She educated as an economist, and later grew to become the director of the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren, in jap Belgium, the place she labored for greater than 20 years and which gained the European Museum of the Yr in 2011. In 2017, she grew to become the managing director on the KMSKA and is now the overall director. “There are other ways to organise a museum, and the conservative enthusiastic about a museum of artwork is that the overall director needs to be an artwork historian,” she says. “We work in one other means.”
In March 2020 report by the journalist Geert Sels in De Standaard Carmen Willems revealed quite a few issues at KMSKA that had come to mild following the departure of the creative director Manfred Sellink a month earlier. Sellink’s successor, Jacqueline Grandjean, remained in place for 3 months and left in January 2022 because of “a distinction of opinion”. The museum’s subsequent resolution to do with out an inventive director, and the continued absence of a complete catalogue of the everlasting assortment, has fuelled issues that KMSKA is neglecting its scholarly duties.
An nameless artwork historian based mostly in Brussels factors out that the present catalogue on the museum’s 14th- to Fifteenth-century work was printed in 1985. Nico Van Hout, KMSKA’s head of assortment analysis and curator of Seventeenth-century work, says that work on an up to date catalogue is ongoing, and that his staff of six curators have been totally occupied with engaged on the new presentation of the gathering. Willems says: “The entire assortment is digitised and described within the museum system, which is partially open to the general public. Making it totally accessible to the broad public in an expert means is a piece in progress. All knowledge is, nonetheless, accessible for analysis.”
In Sels’s report, he offered proof of incompetence on the museum and disputes with non-public lenders. Requested why three non-public loans had did not materialise, Van Hout and Willems defined in a joint interview with The Artwork Newspaper that the phrases of the loans had been unacceptable to the museum.
The museum additionally negotiated the long-term mortgage of 16 necessary work and sculptures with Neerman, together with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (1620-25)—a portray he co-owns with a fellow collector. Neerman says that he withdrew these works as a result of “I didn’t belief my assortment within the palms of a director who barely is aware of the distinction between Van Eyck and Van Dyck and a politically appointed Chairman of the museum board who thinks Tintoretto is a pizzeria in his voting constituency”. The works at the moment are on mortgage to a number of establishments, together with London’s Nationwide Gallery and the soon-to-be-reopened Quadreria on the Palazzo Ducale in Venice.
