Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

During the months of July and August, the day-to-day running of the AACB will be temporarily put on hold in favour of in-depth work on the collection. Thank you for your understanding. We would also like to remind you that the reading room will be closed for the year in July and August and will reopen on Tuesday 3 September. In the meantime, a search on the www.opac-archibald.be database may prove useful in certain cases. Your e-mails will not be read or forwarded. For all requests for information, reproductions and consultation, please contact us again from 1 September.

Its rich collections, closely related to the collections of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, are composed of artists' personal archives (Emile Claus, Henri Evenepoel, James Ensor, Constantin Meunier, René Magritte, Oscar Jespers, Marcel Broodthaers, Jacques Charlier, Marc Mendelson, Jean-Pierre Ransonnet, ....), and those of artistic circles (Les XX, La Libre Esthetique La Jeune Peinture Belge, ...), journals (Het Overzicht, Variétés, Plus Moins Zéro, ...), galleries (Le Centaur, Apollo, Les Contemporains, MTL, Cogeime, Ad Libitum, Lou Cosyn ...), collectors (Arthur Boite, Max Janlet ...), critics (René Lyr, Léon-Louis Sosset, Luk Lambrecht, ...), and also other figures who played a leading role in the cultural landscape (Paul Haesaerts, Paul-Gustave Van Hecke, Emile Langui ...). Artistic movements such as Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Conceptual Art and Cobra are widely represented.

More than 6,000 documentary files, alongside funds that increase in size each year, contain items of various types: letters, sometimes unpublished manuscripts, personal diaries, travelogues, exhibition guest books, official or accounting documents, photos and negatives, invitation cards, posters, music scores, films and sound archives. A separate section contains more than one million press clippings.