Brussels, Brussels, Belgium
When in a new city I usually make the art museum a high
priority. Brussels’ Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium is one of Belgium’s
primary collections of art, with concentrations in the Old Masters and the “Fin
de Seicle” or turn of the century art of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The museum
is up the hill from the old lower town with the Grand Place and its maze of
streets on what’s called the Kunstberg or Mont des Arts (the Art Mountain) near
the royal palace and complex of government buildings, a rather elegant
neighborhood with a good view over the city. Yes, there are actually a few low
hills in Brussels.
While the museum has some works by foreign artists from
mostly surrounding countries, like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam the art museum
in Brussels is overwhelmingly comprised of paintings and sculpture from what in
now Belgium, including the second largest collection of Brueghel paintings in
the world after the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. I personally quite like
Bosch and Brueghel with their intricate paintings of the surreal and scenes of Flemish
peasant life.
I usually associate Brueghel with the latter, but his “Fall of
the Rebel Angels” in the museum is very much like Hieonymus Bosch’s paintings filled
with bizarre creatures and gruesome scenes that suggest the end of the world.
That said, though, I like the Flemish primitives of the
1500s as well, triptychs and other religious paintings by Memling, Van Eyck,
Van der Weyden, Metsys, and David among others that display great realism, use
of bright color palette, and mastery of technique. Later on we get to the
Baroque with the art world centered in Antwerp around the same era as the Dutch
“Golden Age” just to the north when Rubens and Jordaens and their studios were
painting fleshy women in both religious scenes and portraiture.
The museum seems to lack much of a collection from the 1700s
but then picks up again with Neo-Classicism around 1800 and Belgian
independence in 1830. As in Ghent, I particularly liked the sections dealing
with late 19th century and early 20th century art in
Belgium – social realism, impressionism, neo-impressionism, expressionism, and
the hard-to-categorize James Ensor.
The Magritte Museum is housed in a separate building that
can be seen on a combined ticket or a separate one. I determined that in my rainy morning at the
museum I wouldn’t have enough time to also see Magritte if I was going to make
it to the Meyboom procession by 2:00 in the afternoon. It was a good choice; I
felt a bit rushed already. The surrealist Magritte will have to wait for the
next time I’m in Brussels, which hopefully won’t be another 33 years as it was
since the last time I was in the city.
2025-05-22