The Board of the Fondation Custodia announced today the appointment of Stijn Alsteens as its new director. In the spring of 2024, he will succeed Ger Luijten, who died suddenly in December 2022.

Stijn Alsteens is a leading expert of old master drawings, especially those from the Low Countries, and currently head of the department of Old Master Drawings at Christie’s. Previously, he was a curator at the Fondation Custodia in Paris (2001-2006) and at the Department of Drawings and Prints of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2006-2016).

According to Board of the Fondation Custodia, Alsteens’s knowledge and broad experience, his international career and his enthusiasm for old master drawings and prints make him ideally suited to pursue the work of Frits Lugt and his successors at its customary high level. Expanding the collection, facilitating its access to researchers and sharing it with the widest possible audience will continue to be paramount objectives.

Alsteens studied Russian and art history in Leuven and Amsterdam. He published numerous scholarly articles and reviews and participated in exhibitions in European and American museums. Among his most important publications are Paysages de France dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles (2008); his contributions to the catalogues of Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasures. Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (2010), Dürer and Beyond. Central European Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400-1700 (2012), and Grand Design. Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry (2014), all three accompanying exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; to Pleasure and Piety. The Art of Joachim Wtewael (2015), an exhibition in Utrecht, Washington and Houston; and to Dürer’s Journeys. Travels of a Renaissance Artist (2021), in London and Aachen. In addition, he was responsible for Van Dyck. The Anatomy of Portraiture, an exhibition at The Frick Collection in New York (2016). At Christie’s, auctions organized under his direction included Lucas van Leyden’s Young Man Standing (2018), Leonardo da Vinci’s Head of a Bear (2019), Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Young Woman Dozing (2021), Michelangelo’s Nude Man and Two Figures behind (2022) and Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Album of Illustrations for the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (2023), which set world records for these artists.