THE POOR RELATION OF THE ART WORLD

All over Europe traditional figurative art, particularly from the nineteenth century, is being shunted to the corners of museums — and eventually removed from view.

William Cook

A FEW WEEKS AGO, I travelled to Belgium to bid a fond farewell to one of my favourite galleries. Brussels’s wonderful Fin-de-Siècle Museum closes its doors on 3 April, with no date for its reopening. The Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, which manages the museum, has decided to convert the premises into storage space. The closure is a grievous loss — but I doubt that its demise will be much mourned by the modern art establishment. Most of the artworks in this collection are unfashionable, painted in those halcyon decades before the First World War, when artists strove to depict the world around them, rather than gazing at their own navels. The Fin-de-Siècle Museum contains the sort of art the public likes, the art the cognoscenti like to look down…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2023

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