During a stay in the Netherlands, art historian Ger Luijten, director of the Fondation Custodia in Paris. He died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 66. The Fondation Custodia announced this on Tuesday. Luijten has been in charge of the institution since 2010, which manages and presents the world-famous art collection of the Dutch collector Frits Lugt (1884-1970).
Under Luijten’s directorship, the Fondation Custodia changed over the past decade from a fairly closed study collection into a very accessible ‘house for art on paper’, as he himself called it.
At the moment, the exhibition rooms on Rue de Lille are hosting two exhibitions initiated by him, a selection of nineteenth-century French drawings from his own collection and an overview of the drawings and watercolors of Léon Bonvin (1834–1866), a relatively unknown French artist who, thanks to the efforts of Luijten and his curators, is now firmly on the art history map. A catalog raisonné of Bonvin’s work was also published to accompany the last exhibition.
Acquisitions
The current exhibitions are indicative of what Luijten, whose great knowledge was accompanied by a rare contagious enthusiasm, regarded as the task of the Fondation Custodia: to conduct thorough art-historical research and then present that research to a wide audience in attractive exhibitions and books.
When the Institut Néerlandais – the Dutch cultural institute in France that had been housed in a Fondation building for more than fifty years – was closed at the end of 2013, Luijten decided not to give the vacant space near the Assemblée Nationale to the government or an embassy for a lot of money. rent it out, but continue to use it for art, henceforth under the flag of the Fondation Custodia itself. He thoroughly renovated and modernized both the exhibition building on the street side and the eighteenth-century accommodation of the Frits Lugt Collection behind it.
The exhibition program was always in line with the collection: for example, old drawings from the collection were combined with related drawings from other museums or, in the exhibition Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt (2016), with the paintings for which they were a study.
Because drawings of the caliber that Frits Lugt collected in the first half of the twentieth century – the Rembrandts and Michelangelos – are now priceless, Luijten decided to take a different direction when expanding the collection. In recent years he managed to add many beautiful acquisitions to the sub-collection of nineteenth-century oil sketches.
Oil studies in the nineteenth century fulfilled the same function as drawings in the centuries before: they preceded the official works of art and therefore provide insight into the thinking and trying out of an artist. A selection from the rapidly growing collection of oil sketches – which, thanks to Luijten, now includes works by Constable, Degas, Delacroix and Corot, among others – was shown in Paris last winter in combination with comparable oil studies from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Boijmans and Rijksmuseum
Such prestigious exhibitions would have been inconceivable without Luijten’s many good, often friendly contacts in the international museum world. His directorate in Paris was the crowning achievement of an already impressive record. In the 1980s he worked at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and from 1990 to 2010 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where from 2001 he was head of the Rijksprentenkabinet, the art on paper department.
There he generously acquired Dutch art from after the Second World War, which the Rijksmuseum had previously collected until about 1940. Luijten thought that twentieth-century printmaking and drawing should be acquired ‘not monotonously’, but ‘in the full breadth’: Mondrian and Armando should be represented, but lesser-known figurative artists should be represented as well. And illustrators such as Peter van Straaten and Dick Bruna.
“Do not take sides, as the city museums do for modern art, but collect the best generously, from all directions,” he summarized the policy in 2010 NRC. “So that future generations can determine again and again what they find most interesting or important.”
Parallel to exhibitions of old art on paper, Luijten also regularly showed work by contemporary draftsmen and graphic artists at the Fondation Custodia, to emphasize that work continues to this day in the tradition of the old masters that Frits Lugt collected. Luijten hoped to stay on as director until after his seventieth birthday. His head was still full of plans for exhibitions and books. He lived with art and generously allowed others to share in that life.
He lived with his wife and young son in the director’s house above the Fondation and everyone who was in the area – friends, acquaintances and even friends of friends – could count on a personal tour of the exhibitions and the museum if he was at home and available. drawings depot and the walls with oil sketches. Also on Sunday. Frits Lugt would have been delighted with such a dedicated successor. It will now be a difficult task for the Fondation Custodia to find a successor for Ger Luijten.
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