CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Born in 1976 in Leuven, Stijn Alsteens studied Slavic Studies and Art History at the Universities of Leuven and Amsterdam. After two internships at the Frits Lugt Collection in the late 1990s, Alsteens joined the institution as a curator in 2001. Between 2006 and 2016, he held the position of Curator of Northern Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. From 2016 until recently, he was the International Head of Old Master Drawings at Christie’s, based in Paris. On 1 April, Alsteens returned to the Frits Lugt Collection as the new Director of the Fondation Custodia. He succeeds Ger Luijten, who passed away suddenly in December 2022. A renowned connoisseur and scholar of Dutch and Flemish old master drawings, Alsteens has published widely in this field, and has curated and co-curated several landmark exhibitions, including those on Jan Gossaert (2010), Pieter Coecke van Aelst (2014) and the portraits of Anthony van Dyck (2016).

You have had a long history with the Frits Lugt Collection. Can you take us back to the very beginning? How has this institution shaped you and what has it meant to you over the years?

In December 1997, I read a long article in the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland by Ella Reitsma about the Frits Lugt Collection and the eighteenth-century building, the Hôtel Turgot, in which it is housed. It immediately sparked my attention, and when I visited Paris shortly thereafter as part of a university course on architecture, I convinced our professor to include the house in the itinerary, although it has been much altered over the course of the centuries. We had a rather unforgettable visit during which we were received by the then director, Mària van Berge-Gerbaud, and curator Hans Buijs. We were invited to apply for internships – and I did. After a short stint working at the library, I returned for a second internship during which I put my knowledge of the Russian language to use: I worked on a collection of Russian drawings, prints and letters that had been donated to the institution by the artist Dimitri Bouchène under the directorship of Carlos van Hasselt, who had retired in 1994. Eventually this research resulted in the 2005 exhibition Mélange russe. Besides that, I started working on Lambert Doomer, Willem Schellinks and other Dutch and Flemish artists active in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, which would eventually lead to my biggest exhibition project as a curator at the Frits Lugt Collection: the 2006 show Tour de France 1646, co-curated with Hans Buijs, and the subsequently published Paysages de France dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles (2008).

It is difficult to describe the genius loci of the Frits Lugt Collection and the Hôtel Turgot. In some ways it has a spirit similar to that of other institutions housed in residential homes rather than museum buildings, such as (on a smaller scale) the Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam or (on a bigger scale) the Frick Collection in New York. But there is something else that permeates the premises of the collection as well, and this has everything to do with Frits Lugt as its founder. His intellectual influence, if you want, is felt in the institution’s entire set-up, its program, the interests of the people who work there, the attention to provenance and connoisseurship and other traditional virtues of our métier that Lugt held dear. All of this feels quite tangible and alive at the Hôtel Turgot. In that inspiring environment I think I recognized something that I could aspire to and develop. Certainly, my time there formed me as a young student and shaped me as an art historian.

Before you came to art history, you were studying Russian. Can you tell us something about why you decided to embark on a new field?

After studying Russian in my native city Leuven for a couple of years, I felt that I needed a change of perspective and I moved to Amsterdam to continue my studies there. Soon after my move, I started visiting the museums there and especially the Rijksmuseum and the Rijksprentenkabinet, which still had its own entrance and exhibition space with inspiring exhibitions organized by Peter Schatborn and his curatorial team. There was a lot happening in the field of works on paper at the Rijksmuseum, but also in the rest of the country, certainly compared to Belgium. I am thinking for example of the permanent display of Rembrandt prints at the Rembrandt House Museum, and attractive exhibitions at Teylers Museum or Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. I found this energy in Dutch museums, and in particular the Rijksmuseum, very appealing. After deciding to pursue a second degree in art history, which felt very natural to me, I remember visiting the Rijksprentenkabinet with a class and being received by Ger Luijten. He showed us drawings and prints – I recall him bringing out a Rembrandt and Ferdinand Bol which he used to get us talking about their differences – and, as anyone who ever encountered Ger can understand, we were all stimulated by his energy and enthusiasm. It was this kind of encounter that made works on paper look and feel very exciting and essential.

In 2006, you moved to New York, where you spent ten years as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What kinds of perspectives did working in the United States bring you?

One of the things that hugely attracted me from my first visit to the U.S. is something one could call American professionalism. I felt there was something strongly appealing about that combination of seriousness, drive, and optimism in the way many Americans and American institutions work. I encountered this in many places there and in the first place at the Metropolitan – among my colleagues, and particularly in the department I joined, not in the least in its then head, George Goldner, who had initiated an impressive series of acquisitions and exhibitions placing the department again at the very center of drawings and prints scholarship. This professionalism was very inspiring to me. As much as I think I was shaped as an art historian by my five years at the Frits Lugt Collection, as a museum professional I really feel it was my years at the Metropolitan Museum that shaped me.

Lugt started his career at auction house Frederik Muller at age 17 and worked on the art market for a number of years. You worked as the International Head of Old Master Drawings at Christie’s for seven years. Could you reflect on this parallel? What do you expect your experience with the art market will bring to your directorship at the Fondation Custodia?

Lugt certainly had an innate taste for history and attractive and interesting objects, but he gained his knowledge of art history from his time in the auction world. The experience helped him of course throughout his career as a collector and gentleman-dealer. He had a real nose for finding exceptional things, for striking a deal, for bidding, all of which enabled him to build his superb collection and fund much of his early activity by selling works of art as well. In some ways, the art market is a monster with many heads, and it is often to one’s benefit to know at least a number of those heads. My time at Christie’s has been incredibly enriching (as well as exhausting at times)! You get to know a lot of people, including discreet collectors who may not be very well known sometimes even to curators. What I also really appreciated is that these years forced me to work on whatever came my way and was worth investigating – unlike my time as a curator, when I had the luxury of choosing to work on whatever I was interested in. So even though I got to work at Christie’s on drawings by a few ‘old friends’, like Lucas van Leyden, Rubens and recently Van Dyck, I was also brought to work on Leonardo, Michelangelo, Correggio, Giandomenico Tiepolo, Goya and many others.

You officially started on the 1^st of April as the Director of the Fondation Custodia. Can you tell us something about your plans and dreams for this institution?

At the Met, I really appreciated that George Goldner and the director Philippe de Montebello saw the collection as well as the staff, especially the curatorial staff, as the core of the institution. This is not true for all museums. I, too, strongly believe in the essential role curators play in bringing alive a collection or a topic. I want our program of acquisitions, exhibitions and publications very much to be carried by the team of curators, and the scale and set-up of the institution is such that the director can be considered one of them, as primus inter pares. I also have the impression that, although Paris offers a very rich exhibition calendar, fewer and fewer of these exhibitions focus on old masters, and even fewer on works on paper, despite the high concentration in the city of public collections in that field. I feel we are well placed to fill at least part of that void. This will mean looking closer at what is the core of our collection, and to what Lugt was most interested in: European drawings, and to a lesser degree prints, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Without excluding anything outside this scope, this is the direction I will steer our program towards. But the collection is not limited to drawings and prints: there are paintings, the rich collection of manuscripts and artists’ letters, and so much more. Together with the curators, I want our institution to offer an exciting and rich program, rooted in the depth, variety and quality of our collection.

I imagine that for you, as for everyone, it is a time to reflect on Ger Luijten and his legacy and what he has meant for the Fondation Custodia.

Although Ger was behind a great number of exhibitions and acquisitions during his directorship (a selection of which was showcased in the exhibition A Passionate Eye. Twelve Years of Acquisitions by Ger Luijten this past spring), I think the biggest challenges he faced was the closing of the Institut Néerlandais in 2013, a sister institution also created by Lugt and for which he and his wife, Jacoba Lugt-Klever, purchased the Hôtel Lévis-Mirepoix, a nineteenth-century building adjacent to the Hôtel Turgot.  Ger coped brilliantly with this enormous change, and made something positive from what seemed at first a great loss. The closing suddenly meant that we became ourselves responsible for all sorts of tasks that had been carried out before by the Institut, such as the organization of the logistics of exhibitions, marketing, press, security, and so forth. Ger quickly found ways to incorporate those tasks within our own organization, and do better. With his enormous energy and charm, he found and encouraged the right people, all of whom are still with us today, and reconfigured part of the Hôtel Lévis-Mirepoix, completely renovating our library, among other things, and greatly improving our visibility within Paris and beyond. The streamlining of such a big change at the core of the organization could easily have gone wrong, but Ger shepherded the Fondation Custodia through one of the most critical moments in its history.

You are known as one of the renowned connoisseurs and scholar of Dutch and Flemish drawings. What was it about that medium that attracted you?

What I think drew me to the medium is that it can be so many things, in contrast to a print or a painting or a sculpture, which most often are finished works of art. A drawing can be an autonomous work itself, but it can also be a sketch, a purely practical object, and so many other things. I like the fact that the medium exists along the margins of what most people think art is, but at the same time stands at the very center of artistic practice. Drawings force you to look in many directions, and push you to be interested in many other art forms –paintings, prints, sculpture, architecture, etc. – as well as in the creative process. Drawings scholars enjoy the best view – or at least that’s how I experience it.

Stijn Alsteens is Director of the Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection in Paris.  He was a member of CODART from 2004 to 2016, and since 2024. Ilona van Tuinen is Head of the Print Room of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She has been a member of CODART since 2012.