Photograph: Karin Borghouts/KMSAĪt the same time, a second museum to better showcase the modern collection was built, adding 40% more space. The museum first opened in 1890, its grand neo-classical style modelled on a Greek temple. The facade was given a facelift, rescuing its original pink, orange, grey and blue from 120 years of grime. Fake walls were knocked down, the rich, olive green and Pompeii red colours repainted, and fixtures that had lost their shine re-gilded. The reopening in September was the culmination of a 19-year project to restore the building, which was leaky and falling into disrepair. He added, however, that he hoped specialists would visit and appreciate the restoration of more than 200 works of art. To them, I say, well I couldn’t care less, because I am not only working for art historians,” he said. “They think it is not suitable for a museum of this importance to do these things. Some art historians, too, have been a bit sniffy, suggests Van Hout. One local paper described the crooked hanging as a gimmick. Not everyone is a fan of the new approach.
Brought to life as video, museum-goers can be immersed in an eerie rustling curtain of leaves, or see amber jewels rolling off the walls. Photograph: Jennifer Rankin/The GuardianĪs part of the “slow looking” philosophy, visitors can also stand in a 21-metre long gallery, where tiny details of paintings are projected on four walls 10 metres high. You should look at paintings as paintings and not just as images.”Ī luminous green cat sits menacingly in a cage with the door ajar. We don’t realise enough that these paintings are objects in the first place. “For me personally it is important to look through artists’ eyes. Both artists – the unknown 14th-century master and the modern German sculptor – were playing with light, suggests Van Hout. In the modern gallery, a 14th-century gold-leaf image of Christ on the cross appears alongside Günther Uecker’s Dark Field, a 1979 work where hundreds of nails hammered at different angles into a wooden panel catch the light, creating an illusion of movement. Having to explain a joke means that it is a bad joke, isn’t it?” “Nevertheless, we hope the visitor understands such jokes without explanation. “By presenting the painting crooked, we stress the comic and dynamic aspect of the painting, which was also van Ostade’s intention,” said Nico Van Hout, head of collections at KMSKA. Rembrandt’s portrait of a clergyman in an austere black gown is displayed next to a wild, colourful painting of a mandril by the 20th-century expressionist Oskar Kokoschka – a joke at the expense of the upstanding Dutch burgher.Īnother quirk is found in the slanted hanging of a tavern scene by the Dutch golden age painter Adriaen van Ostade that shows a drunken man falling off his stool. Paintings are grouped by themes – light, colour or form in the modern gallery, suffering, redemption and power in the old. The museum hopes the search to match details in the paintings to the installation will make a visit more engaging for children and their parents.Ĭurators also hope to confound expectations about how art should be displayed.
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The menacing cat comes from Ensor’s Still Life with Chinoiseries, while a plush, ruby-red camel that children are free to clamber over can be found by Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi. One way to slow down comes through 10 art installations by the Belgian artist and opera director Christophe Coppens scattered throughout the museum, each taking a detail from a painting in the same room. The museum has more than 600 works on display.
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