Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions
Museum Leuven, until 6 December
Musée Hergé
Louvain-la-Neuve
When I was a child in Belgium, architecture was a dirty word — angry drivers would wind down their windows and yell, ‘Architecte!’ The insult dated back to the 19th century, when the megalomaniac architect Joseph Poelaert imposed the enormity of the Palais de Justice on Brussels, forcing large numbers of residents from their homes.
Times change and memory fades; architects are back in favour in Belgium. Last week saw the inauguration of Santiago Calatrava’s new birdcage-roofed station at Liège-Guillemins, hailed as a destination in itself — not a description you’d use, unfortunately, of the Eurostar terminal at Bruxelles Midi. In June, two new museums to famous Belgians opened, both designed by Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc: the Musée Magritte inside the gutted Hôtel Altenloh in Place Royale, just up the road from Poelaert’s Palais, and the Musée Hergé, 20 miles south of Brussels in the French-speaking new university town of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Last Sunday a third new museum building joined the throng in the Dutch-speaking medieval university town of Leuven, where Belgian architect Stéphane Beel has expanded the 19th-century Vander Kelen-Mertens museum into a cuboid white travertine and glass extension. Anything further from the stone lacework of Leuven’s late-Gothic Town Hall would be hard to imagine. From behind the neoclassical peristyle of the library it replaces, Leuven’s reinvented museum — rechristened ‘M’ — makes the blunt unequivocal statement, ‘the white box has landed’. The plan was to create a museum space where ancient and modern could meet on equal terms. It faces a major test in its first exhibition, Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions.
Despite his name, Rogier van der Weyden was not a famous Belgian. He was born Roger de la Pasture in Tournai in 1400 and only acquired his Flemish moniker after settling in Brussels in 1435. He never lived in Leuven, but it was the city’s Great Guild of Crossbowmen that was responsible, in the 1430s, for commissioning his greatest masterpiece, ‘The Descent from the Cross’ — now in the Prado thanks to Philip II’s acquisitive aunt Mary of Hungary, who in 1548 persuaded the Crossbowmen to trade it in for an expensive new church organ.
Like other originals too fragile to travel, ‘The Descent’ is represented in the show by a contemporary copy — of which, thanks to a minor 15th-century industry of Rogier-copying, there is no shortage. The copies and workshop paintings plug gaps in the story, but also serve as proof that Rogier was inimitable. No other artist could paint what one contemporary Italian called his ‘breathing faces’ or achieve the hair-trigger poise of compositions like ‘The Descent’ in which the animation appears suspended.
Authenticated works by the master in the exhibition include an exquisite ‘Portrait of Philippe de Croy’ from Antwerp, a heartbreaking Pietà from Brussels and a tender Virgin and Child from Houston, plus our own National Gallery’s ‘Mary Magdalene Reading’, whose attendant St Joseph has been reunited with his head from Lisbon. Bookish women obviously appealed to Rogier: another one appears on the right wing of ‘The Seven Sacraments’ from Antwerp, leaning her back against the triptych’s central panel.
Seeing this spectacular work in solitary glory on the end wall of the final gallery, I realised how rarely in exhibitions great works of art are given room to breathe. Museum Leuven’s galleries are not beautiful, but their generous size allows pictures to be viewed in splendid isolation. They are also capable of accommodating large sculptures, like the marvellous set of six contemporary carved wooden angels and a stone ‘Entombment’, which demonstrate how Rogier’s fluttering draperies and weeping figures could be translated fluently into 3-D.
It may be sacrilege to mention Hergé in the same review as Rogier — the advice of one fellow critic was ‘Don’t’ — but as a child weaned on Tintin I couldn’t resist taking the stopping train from Leuven to Louvain-la-Neuve. There, on the leafy outskirts of the new town, the unlikely white bulk of the Musée Hergé rises from among the trees like a liner run aground. These days every second museum claims to be a work of art in itself, but this one comes close. It’s funny, surprising and actually quite beautiful, inside and out — crazy enough to house the work of an artist who was in his way as surreal as Magritte.
Financed entirely by Hergé’s second wife and one-time studio colourist Fanny, the Musée Hergé is a testament to what can be achieved away from the tyranny of government funding. With the vast archive of the Hergé Foundation to draw on — he threw nothing away — it’s an equal delight to children, students and grown-up fans of an artist who, in his devotion to ‘la ligne claire’, sang from the same basic hymn book as the Flemish Primitives. ‘Since I was young, I have been fascinated by the kind of painting or sculpture which doesn’t shout at you, but which radiates human warmth,’ he once told an interviewer. He could have been talking about Rogier.
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