Antwerp deserves a Museum for Contemporary Art
28 November 2025 - 4:32 pm – OpinionIn this brief history of 100 years of Antwerp art, artist Danny Devos outlines why the Flemish government must still decide to keep the Museum of Contemporary Art in the city.
Looking back 100 years in Antwerp, we come across Boem Paukeslag by Paul Van Ostaijen, who formed an “artistic society” with his mates Paul Joostens, the Jespers brothers and composer Jef van Hoof. Since then, countless avant-garde movements have found their origins in Antwerp. Almost every movement also strayed from the beaten artistic path and had an impact on society.
Thanks to the G58 movement, the attic of the Hessenhuis became a platform for exhibitions, theatre and dance, poetry, lectures and debates.
Not long after, the happenings of Panamarenko and Hugo Heyrman grew into a social movement that liberated the city centre from cars and gave it back to the residents.
Later still, the artists' association VAGA occupied the Royal Museum of Fine Arts to campaign for a Museum of Contemporary Art. The direct result was that King Baudouin gave the Royal Palace on the Meir a cultural purpose, for the benefit of artists.
Twenty-five years ago, a group of artists occupied that same Royal Palace with demands for exhibition spaces, artists' studios, and a statute for the social protection of artists. Consultations with the then Minister and Aldermen of Culture resulted in the NICC arts centre - run by artists, a studio policy for Antwerp, and a federal Artists' Statute for all artists.
Those 100 years of fervent artistic activity in Antwerp ensured that Antwerp became the cultural hotspot of Belgium and later Flanders. Nowhere else is the artist population as large and active as in Antwerp. Nowhere else is the gallery scene as exciting as in Antwerp. Nowhere else is the emergence of artist initiatives and breeding grounds as fruitful as in Antwerp. Nowhere else has the establishment of a Museum for Contemporary Art had such an impact on a neighbourhood, on a city, as in Antwerp. Nowhere else have artists, gallery owners, collectors, art lovers, but also café owners, restaurant owners, design shops, coffee and cocktail bars joined forces to transform a district from a rough desert into a lively amalgam of social activity in no time at all.
Sooner or later, all this artistic creativity culminates in the place where it belongs: in a Museum for Contemporary Art. Just as Rubens' works ended up in permanent churches, cathedrals and museums, just as Plantin and Moretus' printed works are carefully preserved in a Plantin and Moretus Museum, just as the folkloric history of Antwerp is preserved in a Museum aan de Stroom, just as Antwerp's literary history is preserved in a Letterenhuis, just as Antwerp's influential fashion history is preserved in a Fashion Museum, the important history of contemporary art also deserves to be preserved in a museum. In a Museum for Contemporary Art that collects, preserves, displays, historically researches and shares that history with contemporary society. And not only for Antwerp, for Flanders, for Belgium, but for the whole world!
By preserving that Museum for Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Caroline Gennez can, in a courageous moment of reconsideration, carve her Ministry of Culture into history.
Danny Devos
Artist in Antwerp
This text appeared as an opinion piece on knack.
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