In memoriam Paul Huvenne (1949–2026)
Paul Huvenne liked folding origami figures. While you were talking, a small paper creature would appear, giving time and lightness to thought. That, too, is something we may remember him by. It created an intimacy in conversations with him, and made them something truthful, looking together at situations that always have many sides. Sound knowledge went hand in hand with a sharp eye for observation; large, structural challenges went together with a love of the small intensities of human endeavour. He brought to the table what, in his view, deserved attention in order to help move a situation forward together.
He was a volunteer at the Sfinks festival in Boechout, but also a member of the Bizot Group, the organisation that brings together the fifty most important museum directors in the world and to which one can belong only by invitation and in a personal capacity. Publicly, he is best known as director of the KMSKA, where he was director-general from 1997 to 2014. During those seventeen years, he brought the museum from the early twentieth century – where it had remained stuck – into the twenty-first century. He did so through many large and small steps forward, left and right, visible and invisible, unspectacular, allowing his colleagues to choose their own place while at the same time asking McKinsey to carry out structural analyses. And he valued content; content was central, the only public collection of fine and modern art in Flanders able to stand alongside Europe’s leading museums.
It is difficult now to grasp the situation in which he began, in a Flanders whose museums had remained stuck in the nineteenth century. He studied in Ghent, at the Higher Institute of Art History and Archaeology, where he completed a doctorate on the sixteenth-century Bruges painter and cartographer Pieter Pourbus. He then became a researcher at the Rubinianum, the only art-historical research institute in Flanders. When someone was needed in 1984 to lead the Rubenshuis, he became that person. ‘Conservator’ was the term then, not yet director. Huvenne is one of those people who brought museums in Flanders out of a deadlock, more or less single-handedly, because there was as yet no museum decree, hardly any expectations, and hardly any expertise. Museums are there for learning and enjoyment, he used to say; for him, museums were the hinge between the depth of art and the breadth of a public-facing operation.
As director of the KMSKA, Paul Huvenne worked intensively with M HKA. Anselm Kiefer – one of those artists for whom the spaces in the current M HKA building are simply too low – was shown at the KMSKA in collaboration; a Jef Geys exhibition from M HKA and works from its collection were welcome there; KMSKA and M HKA jointly set up the ‘Homo Faber’ project, in which Fabre entered into dialogue through his visual work with the KMSKA collection – then still an innovative approach – while at M HKA Fabre’s early work was shown, with a focus on his performances. When M HKA proposed making an ambitious exhibition for Singapore and Shanghai, bringing innovative art in Flanders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into confrontation with that of the second half of the twentieth century, Paul Huvenne joined in enthusiastically. And when the MAS later lacked an opening exhibition, he suggested making it a remake of this project. ‘Beelddenken – Vijf eeuwen beeld in Antwerpen’ is the title of the accompanying book, although for marketing reasons the exhibition had to be called ‘Meesters in het MAS’.
‘Beelddenken’ was for him a key concept: the capacity to think without words that has always made the visual arts in Flanders so distinctive. He not only prepared the KMSKA to move from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century, but also saw all art as something that links yesterday to tomorrow and in that way gives added value to society.
Let us simply carry Paul Huvenne with us. He was wrie wijs, to use the Ghent dialect to which he liked to refer, and thus also wise in the sense of standard Dutch.
Bart De Baere
Photographer: Jesse Willems – KMSKA
