Ghent, Flanders, Belgium
I’m not sure if I didn’t go to the art museum in Ghent on my
day trip in 2002 because I didn’t have enough time for it or if it may have
been closed for renovations at the time. Thus, Ghent’s Museum Voor Schone
Kunsten (MSK) was a high priority for my time in Ghent. The art in the museum actually goes up through
the early to mid-twentieth century. The truly modern and contemporary stuff is
another museum across the street called S.M.A.K (not sure what that stands for).
I determined that one to be optional, contemporary art my being my favorite.
The contents of the MSK are almost entirely of Belgian art,
which is fine with me because I like to see local art history when I travel. It’s
not necessarily that of Ghent, though. The museum is laid out well and quite
traditionally in terms of chronology and school, not like a few of the art
museums I encountered last year in the Netherlands where “progressive” curators
juxtaposed works from different styles and eras together on the basis of genre
or them, in my opinion a total mess.
The chronology goes from medieval times through early 20th
century abstraction, so it ends before art really gets ugly (that’s across the
street at S.M.A.K.). I was surprised by what I liked best at the museum,
though. Usually I favor the so-called Flemish primitives on up through the
Baroque art of Rubens and Jordaens, particularly artists like Brueghel and
Bosch who specialized in peasant scenes and a kind of proto-surrealism over the
altarpieces and other traditional religious scenes. What I enjoyed most in the
museum, though, was 19th century realism and Flemish impressionism
on through James Ensor, Flemish expressionists, and the Belgian surrealists,
mostly new stuff for me. In some cases I am familiar with the styles but not
with Belgian artists who worked in them.
That brings me to something I came across at the museum that
I found especially interesting, a Flemish impressionist painter named Albert
Baertsoen. Baertsoen was my grandmother’s
maiden name, and she had a brother named Albert. According to Wikipedia the artist from Ghent lived
from 1866 to 1922 and was born into a family of textile industrialists. There are too many coincidences in this to
merely be a coincidence. The painter is likely my grandmother’s uncle or my
great-great uncle. My great uncle immigrated to the United States in 1913 and
built up a successful textile business. According to my mother he also used to
visit friends in an artistic circle on trips back to Belgium in the years after
WWII. I’m going to have to do some
ancestry research when I get home.
2025-05-22