Welcome
The Adventure of Looking

Welcome

The Adventure of Looking

Paintings “are not fully ours,” writes T.J. Clark in The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. They live their own lives with their dark and light, their stillness and movement, their rough and smooth surfaces, their stories and inventions. Even so, we want to appropriate paintings, to make them “our own.” And that applies not only to us museum curators, but also to a wider us: the community of art-loving viewers. How can you present an artwork to the public in such a way that the viewer feels that it is also his or her own? How can you take a museum visitor with you Onbekend objecton the adventure of looking?

Curator's Project
Wire Project

Curator's Project

Wire Project

The 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death in 2019 will be plentifully marked by numerous exhibitions treating various aspects of the artist’s training, production, and reception. The popularity of this multifaceted master seems only to increase, and there is clearly still more to learn and celebrate about Rembrandt’s groundbreaking approach to art.

Curator's Project
Rubens Communicates

Curator's Project

Rubens Communicates

The great Flemish artist and entrepreneur Peter Paul Rubens was famous for dictating letters in one language while having someone read literature to him in another, even as he stood at his easel to paint. This early multitasker foreshadows our own age, not only in the multiplicity of tasks that he was prepared to embrace at once, but also in the abundance of channels through which he communicatedOnbekend objectith a range of interlocutors. Rubens’s visual communications are renowned.

Curator's Collection
Collecting Netherlandish Pr...

Curator's Collection

Collecting Netherlandish Pr...

The permanent collection of the Spencer Museum of Art was founded in 1917 when Kansas City art collector Sallie Casey Thayer offered her collection of nearly 7,500 art objects to the University of Kansas to form a museum "to encourage the study of fine arts in the Middle West." There were no significant prints from the Low Countries in this founding gift but a number of Netherlandish prints, Onbekend objectwhose source is unknown, were presumably already at the university and are now part of the museum’s collection.

Curator's Interview
Micha Leeflang Interviewed

Curator's Interview

Micha Leeflang Interviewed

For this eZine issue, Micha Leeflang, curator of the recent Magical Miniatures exhibition at Museum Catharijneconvent, was interviewed by Sarah Van Ooteghem, Assistant Curator at the Print Room of the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels.

CODART Activities
Focus in Mechelen

CODART Activities

Focus in Mechelen

My participation in the CODARTfocus held in Mechelen in the spring of 2018 was important to me in many ways. Following an extensive, multi-year reconstruction of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, a historic building that first opened to the public in 1906, our permanent exhibitions will be cast in a substantially restructured form. We are reorganizing our collections within a fundamentally new conceptual framework

Curator's Object
Hidden Gems, part I

Curator's Object

Hidden Gems, part I

Oh, that laugh! No less mysterious than the secretive smile of the Mona Lisa, it has preoccupied art historians for decades and never fails to fascinate the viewer. Rembrandt’s self-portrait is one of the best-known paintings in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne. And at the same time it is one of the most enigmatic. I return to it again and again, wondering, marvelling, admiring.

Curator's Object
Hidden Gems, part II

Curator's Object

Hidden Gems, part II

Among the many treasures in the encyclopaedic collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts is a miniature Netherlandish altarpiece deftly executed in boxwood – a hardwood favoured by carvers for its fine grain and remarkable density. Measuring no more than nine inches high, the altarpiece comprises three principal components: a triptych body, a circular winged predella, and an openwork tracery foot. The altarpiece’s exterior is exceedingly plain. It hardly prepares the viewer for the hypertechnical virtuosity of a world rendered in miniature that waits inside.

Friends
Floris van Wanroij Interviewed

Friends

Floris van Wanroij Interviewed

Floris van Wanroij (1981) studied arts and culture at the University of Maastricht and art history at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY (US). Following a brief career at an auction house, he set up his own art dealership, Floris van Wanroij Fine Art exactly 10 years ago, in 2008. He specializes in Dutch and Flemish Old Master Paintings, Early European Sculpture and artworks from the Haute Époque. Van Wanroij became a CODART Patron in 2016.