Kim Oosterlinck, a professor of finance, took over this month as director of the Royal Museums of High quality Arts in Brussels (MRBAB) amid hopes he’ll assist to set the six-museum establishment on a brand new path because it emerges from deep disaster.
In April 2023 his predecessor Michel Draguet, who had been within the publish since 2005, stepped down after allegations of dangerous administration and harassment of workers, set out in an open letter from a gaggle of workers to Thomas Dermine, the Belgian authorities official who oversees museums. In interviews, Draguet fought again in opposition to the allegations, arguing that he had confronted a lot of exterior crises, such because the pandemic, throughout his time period in workplace and stating that customer numbers had elevated dramatically in that point.
The problem for Oosterlinck will likely be “to develop a brand new imaginative and prescient, each within the scientific analysis performed by the museums and in how the collections are introduced to the general public”, Dermine stated in a press release in April.
The MRBAB oversees the Previous Masters Museum, the Magritte Museum, the Fin-de-Siècle Museum, the Fashionable Museum, the Wiertz Museum, and the Meunier Museum. Since Draguet’s departure, the establishment has been managed by Sara Lammens as interim director.
Among the many criticisms of Draguet’s administration was that he scheduled exhibitions on the final minute with out giving curators time to organize them—together with one present dedicated to Prune Nourry that was added to the programme three weeks earlier than it was on account of open, in response to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.
Streamlined programme
Lammens says she has streamlined the museum’s programme and cancelled tasks in order that curators may deal with two exhibitions: one on Surrealism, known as IMAGINE!: 100 Years of Worldwide Surrealism on the Magritte Museum (till 21 July), and Drafts: From Rubens to Khnopff, opening on 11 October on the Previous Masters Museum.
Oosterlinck’s background is in academia fairly than day-to-day museum administration: he has served as a professor of finance at Solvay Brussels College of Economics and because the vice-rector of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His foremost areas of analysis are monetary historical past and the artwork market, and he has printed work on forgeries, artwork sellers’ methods, European artwork markets in the course of the Second World Warfare and banks’ artwork collections.
On the finish of June, Oosterlinck met with the 220 members of the RMFAB workers and was symbolically handed the keys to the establishment by his predecessor. On the assembly Oosterlinck stated: “The strategic imaginative and prescient wherein I suggest to border the museums will reaffirm their societal mission, paying specific consideration to problems with variety, equality, inclusion, accessibility and sustainability. ”
Including to Oosterlinck’s hefty to-do listing is a €30m renovation challenge that started 20 years in the past. The subsequent stage is to renovate a three-storey constructing, a challenge for which an architectural agency has but to be chosen. The goal date for completion is 2030, coinciding with Belgium’s bicentenary. It might later home Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century artwork, filling a niche left by the closure of the Fashionable Museum in 2011.
And there may be nonetheless fallout from Draguet’s tenure to be anticipated. The MRBAB workers’ group, which joined forces with commerce unions in opposition to Draguet, requested Empreva, the central organisation liable for helping authorities in sustaining the well-being, security and well being of their workers, to conduct two investigations.
