RMFAB-Getty Paper Project Curatorial Fellowship

2020 > 2022

Promotor(s) : Dr. Inga Rossi-Schrimpf

Researcher(s) : Willemijn Stammis (Curatorial Fellow)

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In January of 2018, the Getty Foundation launched The Paper Project: Prints and Drawings Curatorship in the 21st Century, an initiative to strengthen curatorial practice in the graphic arts field internationally. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts joined the Paper Project in 2020.

Prints and drawings provide extraordinary insights into the artistic process of some of Western art history's most celebrated artists and are often important works of art in their own right. The Paper Project was conceived to help prints and drawings curators navigate the demands of the 21st century museum, both by preserving traditional skills that have been passed down through generations of specialists, and by making their collections accessible to today's museum audiences. Since then numerous grants have been awarded and various museums and collections from all over the world have joined the Paper Projet, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in London, the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Musée d’Art décoratif in Paris and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts joined the Paper Project in 2020 and offer a Curatorial Fellowship in their section for works on paper modern art which comprises mainly drawings, pastels and watercolors, as well as photographs and prints from artists born 1748 and later. The strengths of the collection are late 19th century Belgian art, Belgian abstract art of the 1920s as well as the young generation after 1945 with ‘La Jeune Peinture Belge’ and CoBrA. Highlights are large collections of works by Fernand Khnopff, James Ensor, Léon Spilliaert, Jean Delville, Rik Wouters, Jozef Peeters, Felix De Boeck, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Pierre Alechinsky, Gaston Bertrand, Marcel Broodthaers and main works by foreign artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Odilon Redon and Marc Chagall. They are currently shown to the public through temporary exhibitions and rotating displays in the Magritte and Fin-de-Siècle Museum.

The two-years-fellowship related to this ‘fin-de-siècle’-collection will provide broad-based curatorial training in areas such as cataloguing, collections management, research, exhibitions, and acquisitions. It will especially focus on historical and iconographic research in preparation for the rotations in the Fin-de-Siècle Museum and to prepare a publication on (the collection of) Belgian drawings, pastels and watercolors of the period 1868 to the First World War. It will equally support accessibility within the online catalogue.

 

Contact: Paperproject@fine-arts-museum.be

 

The Paper Project
The Fin-de-Siècle Museum