2024-04-17 15:32:57
Since April 13 and until August 18, the Museum of Fine Arts (BAM) in Mons is hosting the exhibition “Rodin. A modern renaissance”, a total of some 200 works from public and private collections. It also benefits from exceptional loans from the largest European museums, including the Royal Museums of Brussels, the Orsay, Louvre, Decorative Arts Museums, the Petit Palais and the Rodin Museum in Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
A feat, or almost, for a city like Mons, which has certainly been the European capital of culture but which, despite everything, has “only” 100,000 inhabitants. “There is a lot of audacity, an ability to convince and strengthen the cultural strategy carried out in Mons over the last ten years. It is a very powerful bias but it pays off: many large cities, sometimes candidates for the title of European Capital of Culture, envy us and try to find out more “, underlines Natacha Vandenberghe, director of the tourism and culture department of the city of Mons.
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If the Cité du Doudou succeeds today in hosting such exhibitions, it is in particular thanks to the relationships built over time by Xavier Rolland, director of the BAM. “This is the man behind these successes. The city can benefit from its meetings, its valuable contacts with commissioners, museums, art galleries, the BAM having acquired their trust and Xavier Rolland having this ability to highlight the city and what has already been there organized.”
If the city of Mons has no reason to be ashamed of its successes, the organization of such an exhibition, put together from scratch by the teams from the museum center, nonetheless remains a real challenge. “We also experience loan refusals, we are sometimes overcome by doubt. But we are picking ourselves up, we are relaunching loan requests and we are trying, as much as possible, to maintain the common thread and the coherence necessary for a good understanding of the exposure in question.”
And Natacha Vandenberghe added: “I think that the key to success also lies in promoting the works of internationally recognized artists while anchoring them locally.” For Rodin for example, the common thread is Rodin’s treatment of the body throughout his career, his view of the Renaissance, crystallized during his long stay in Belgium, and the invention in a new way, in the shadow works of antiquity.
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Echoing this, the works of Rodin are placed in resonance at the Sainte-Waudru collegiate church in Mons with the sculptures of Jacques Du Broeucq, one of the major artists of the High Renaissance of the southern Netherlands and whose works are there preserved. The exhibition also opens up to contemporary sculpture, represented by one of the most important current Belgian artists, Berlinde de Bruyckere, and the view she has on Rodin.
”It generally takes between a year and three years of exchanges, meetings and reflection to succeed in organizing these exhibitions. It depends on the type of exhibition planned but also on the opportunities. For the Plensa exhibition for example, the artist came to Mons in December 2022 while the exhibition was scheduled for July 2023. The artist fell under the spell of the historic city and wanted to offer a real exposure. So we went from one or two works on the square to something much bigger, more complete.”
A winning bet since the exhibition (organized exclusively in the open air, the BAM being then in full renovation) had largely contributed to the “exceptional” tourist record for the summer of 2023: according to the city, some 423,000 visitors passed through Mons, including 281,000 in museums.
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