In a previous post, I introduced my recent museum tour in Belgium, in February, and commented on the initial exhibitions for the James Ensor Year. In this post, I take a closer look at the museums I visited, and how Belgian museums have responded to the momentous changes in the global museum world, with the new critical and decolonial museologies, and demands for cultural justice, such as restitution and inclusion.
These questions are most sharply posed at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, near Brussels, which is Belgium’s main colonial museum. The AfricaMuseum, as Belgium’s most controversial museum is now usually known, was established in 1897, during the genocidal Congo Free State episode, and has major holdings of central African art and other historical and natural history artifacts. I last visited the AfricaMuseum in late 2018, a few weeks after it reopened following a major renovation, and wrote a response then. There have been additional changes recently, and formal restitution negotiations with the Democratic Republic of Congo started in 2021, although it is unclear where these have reached. Reflecting on those developments will have to wait for another trip to Belgium, however, as I was not able to make the trek to Tervuren during my recent visit. The question arises, however, whether a museum with such problematic foundations can ever be truly rehabilitated.
Most other public museums in Belgium are nationally focused as there are no “universal survey” museums that take a wider, supposedly global view of artistic and cultural development, such as the Louvre, the Metropolitan, or the British Museum. Most of Belgium’s public museums are therefore not directly embroiled in Belgium’s notorious but comparatively brief colonial history, and restitution questions arise mainly at the AfricaMuseum. Other cultural justice issues arise, however, as Belgium has changed significantly since World War II, when large numbers of migrants came from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Africa. Today, about 7.6 % of Belgium’s population is Muslim while 3.6 % is of African descent, with growing demands for social, cultural, and political representation to reflect these demographic changes. Predictably, racism and xenophobia have been major problems, with significant advances of the extreme right in large cities such as Antwerp. I was curious to see how museums that have been preoccupied with rather narrowly defined notions of Belgianness, or even more localized cultural identities, have responded to these social changes and tensions.
I decided to start in my hometown of Bruges, which has a unique museum infrastructure. The city was a major European harbor in the late Middle Ages but was in significant social and economic decline by the 19th century as the old harbour had silted up. So Bruges was spared the grandiose building and redevelopment campaigns that transformed Belgian cities such as Antwerp and Brussels during that century, of which the large museum buildings in those municipalities were a product. There are therefore no large “beaux arts” museum buildings in Bruges but instead there is a network of smaller municipal and private museums, some thirty in all, that are all within walkable distance of each other in the historic city center. The old city, with its well preserved late medieval buildings, serves as one of Belgium’s main tourism destinations, with about 9 million tourists per year (a staggering contrast with the size of the local population of about 120,000 in the city centre).
I visited four municipal museums, starting with the Groeninge and Old St Jan’s Hospital Museums, which are also major tourist attractions, followed by the quieter and more out of the way Folklore Museum and Lace Centrum. A new municipal museum, the BRUSK, is being built adjoining the Groeninge and will provide larger and more flexible space for changing exhibitions, as this is now lacking in the city.
The Groeninge Museum provides a six-century overview of Flemish and Belgian Art, with a special focus on artists who practiced in Bruges. This starts with Early Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck (c1380/90-1441) and Gerard David (c1460-1523) and moves to modern and contemporary Belgian artists such as René Magritte (1898-1967), Roger Raveel (1921-2013), and Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976). While local historical context is provided in the text panels, there is no evidence of any critical, questioning museologies. The museum is quite simply set up to celebrate masterpieces of Flemish art such as Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Margareta van Eyck (1439) and the Madonna with Canon van der Paele (1436), both of which were painted in Bruges. I must admit that thoroughly enjoyed revisiting these stunningly realist, symbolically laden works in the intimate and inviting setting of the Groeninge. The Groeninge Museum is housed in a modern pavilion, built sometime in the 1960s on the site of an old monastery and in a setting of historical buildings, and will close soon for major renovation. It will be interesting to see if there will be changes to the now quite conventional and conservative curation.
Bruges was probably the “whitest” city in Belgium when I grew up, as there were no major industries in the area to attract labor migration, unlike larger cities such as Ghent, Brussels, and Antwerp, and it should perhaps not surprise us that the sort of critical questions I was looking for were not asked in its museums (although that is, all over the world, quite a recent development). In recent decades, the local population and labor force have become far more diverse and the development of the harbour of Zeebrugge, located on the nearby North Sea coast, has brought a new dynamic to the city, which is accompanied by the expansion of tourism.
The recently renovated Old St Jan’s Hospital Museum, which is just steps away from the Groeninge, responds more actively to the shifting social landscape, which suggests that changes are finally afoot in the local museum culture. In fact, before this museum closed for renovations in 2020, there was an exhibition by the Nigerian-Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga (b1974), titled Underneath the Shade We Lay Grounded, which took the form of an intervention into and response to its the space, its history, and its exhibits, with the large-scale tapestries this artist is known for. It was, to my knowledge, the first time an artist of African descent had an exhibition in a Bruges museum.
The Old St Jan’s Hospital Museum has an interesting history. It was the original home of one of the oldest continuously functioning hospitals in the world, established sometime around 1150 to provide health care to the poor and the transient. The St Jan hospital still exists today, as the main hospital in the region, and was relocated to modern suburban facilities that were built in the late 1970s. The Gothic open hall of the historic hospital, which now houses the museum, served as a ward but part of it also functioned as a chapel in which religious services were held for the benefit of the sick. Healing was thus seen in spiritual as well as physical terms. The museum’s exhibits have always revolved around this history and feature the work of Hans Memling (c1430-1494), another Early Flemish artist who lived and worked in Bruges. His most famous work is the Saint Ursula Shrine (c1489), a carved, gilded, and painted reliquary that was commissioned for the hospital chapel.
The renovated museum is curated around the themes of illness, healing and dying, and care, charity, and hospitality – the word “hospital” is after all related to the word “hospitality.” While most of the exhibits are historical, there are also some poignant contemporary interventions that examine how these values relate to present-day issues and attitudes. One video installation, for instance, comments on the undocumented migrant crisis in Europe, for which the harbour of Zeebrugge serves as a transshipment point, with regular incidents whereby such migrants are found, sometimes dead and almost always in dreadful conditions, in shipping containers. The Old St Jan Hospital renovation is not only thematically moving, but also visually stunning and features, inside the great hall, an ethereal glass building that echoes the shape of the Saint Ursula Shrine and houses most of Memling’s works in the museum collection.
The Folklore Museum in Bruges is not, as such, an art museum although it owns many objects that qualify as art. Instead, it documents daily life in Bruges in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as seen through the lens of the local popular culture. It is located in a suite of adjoining small workers’ houses from the eighteenth century, in the highly recognizable style of the city’s popular neighborhoods (which are now heavily gentrified). Each room lovingly documents a profession, from pharmacist to cooper; a cultural practice, such as puppetry or fancy shop signs; or a particular living or working environment, such as a living room or a classroom; and there is also a traditional community café (which is actually in operation). The displays use actual antique objects, of which the museum has a vast and diverse collection, which are staged into cohesive environments that are brought to life, in several instances, with the addition of mannequins.
For me, the Folklore Museum was full of nostalgic delights, as much of what I saw was still in evidence when I grew up, in the homes of older family members and older establishments in the city. We still used slate writing boards when I was in infant school and there were several old-fashioned pharmacies where the pharmacists still made their own pills and ointments from raw materials that were kept in ceramic or glass jars. Enjoyable and lovingly curated and operated as the Folklore Museum is, however, there is no evidence of any critical museology here. Bruges’ heritage is represented and celebrated as uniform, entirely local, uncontested, and unproblematic. The question of poverty, which was a real issue in Bruges at that time, is largely unacknowledged; nor is much attention paid to how local practices and traditions relate to broader contexts, such as cultural and material developments elsewhere in Europe and the world. The story of tourism, which started in the late nineteenth century, and quickly became an integral part of the city’s development, is also left unaddressed, although this is of what informs the framing of this museum, whereby Bruges was from early on staged as a picturesque attraction, frozen in time.
The Lace Centre, which is located on the same street, provides a slightly different picture. Bruges is well-known for its bobbin lacemaking tradition, along with other Flemish and French cities that have their own styles. My family was part of Bruges’ lacemaking industry, so my visit to the Lace Centre also had personal resonances: my maternal grandmother was a lacemaker who had worked for the lace shop that was owned and operated by her later in-laws, which was one of the main such establishments in the city. That is, in fact, how she met my grandfather.
The museum display at the Lace Centre is mainly didactic, with a large collection of beautiful and rare lace pieces and samples, and ample contextual and technical explanation, but it is presented in an engaging and at times interactive way (samples are, for instance, stored in display drawers, which can be opened by visitors, which adds a sense of discovery). The Centre also has an active program of lacemaking demonstrations and workshops, so there is a lot to engage audiences and to give new, contemporary life to this traditional craft.
Some attention is paid to the social context of Bruges’ lacemaking culture, which is not entirely unproblematic. While it has a much longer history, lacemaking was being positioned around 1900 as a respectable profession for poor women, with the establishment of special schools and training programs in some of the city’s orphanages, while the product was being pitched to the emerging tourist market. It is in one of those training programs that my grandmother, whose parents had died when she was very young, learned her craft.
While lace is a luxury product, it was produced mostly by poor, otherwise uneducated women who worked from home and supplied the big lace retailers who then sold their work to a local and tourist clientele. It was delicate, time-consuming work, that was hard on the fingers and the eyes, and apparently quite poorly paid. The practice of working outdoors in the popular neighborhoods, which became an iconic part of picturesque Bruges’ image, had a lot to do with the lack of space, light and other basic comforts inside the small homes. There is no doubt that there was a level of exploitation in the lace sector and there is in fact a section in the Centre’s display that speaks to labor agitation and organization.
It is also mentioned at the Lace Centre that Belgium’s lacemaking traditions traveled to China, India, and Peru during the colonial era, but it is not acknowledged that there are also related lace-making traditions in the Caribbean. In Puerto Rico there is a well-documented bobbin lace tradition which is known as mundillo (or, evocatively, “little world”) and which is related to the Flemish and Spanish lace traditions. What is now Belgium was under Habsburg rule when the colonization of the Caribbean started, and under Spanish Habsburg rule during Spain’s colonial expansion in the Americas, so there is a shared history and heritage that is only rarely acknowledged.
This post was originally posted, in two parts, in the Monitor Tribune.It is reproduced here with some modifications.
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