The opening on 20 September is under royal patronage, with Princess Mathilde of Belgium and Princess Máxima of the Netherlands lending the initials of their names to the official ceremony. This entire week, the city hosts a festival of music and arts, culminating in a circus performance at the museum.
This reflects the broad contribution that curator Veronique Vandekerchove hopes Museum M will make to city life. “It is the biggest cultural house in the city,” she says. “We can offer a wonderful building, a lot of public space that is very nice to wander around in, and, of course, we have the heritage of the city, which is rich, and I think not that well known, even among people from Leuven.”
The building, by the Stéphane Beel firm of architects from Ghent, is quite a change from what was there before. A series of massive white cubes connects the former museum on Savoyestraat to the old Academy of Fine Arts on Leopold Vanderkelenstraat, in places towering over the narrow streets. The main entrance is now through the columns of a neo-classical portico that has been dramatically grafted onto the new building, while within the complex, space has been made for a garden.
From the outside, Museum M does not hide that it is made up of buildings from different eras and with distinctive styles. Inside, however, there is a coherent arrangement of floors running through the whole complex.
Pride of place on the ground floor goes to the permanent collection, 500 items from around 46,000 that have come into the hands of the city over the years. The first room, with locally- produced sculpture from the 15th and 16th centuries, immediately brings home how the new design shows off the art.
Rows of figures carved in wood form an aisle, leading up to a tall altarpiece depicting the life of Mary and Jesus in 12 carved alabaster panels. Originally in a Leuven monastery, the fragile panels have now been restored and re-assembled. “It’s the first time that we’ve had a space big enough to show it,” says Vandekerchove.
Leuven’s significant production of stained glass and textiles during this period is explored in the next room, before attention turns to paintings. Two highlights are a Trinity from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden and a painted calendar that was made as a sort of advertisement for a local clock maker.
“It represents the 12 months of the year, but it was also a clock,” Vandekerchove explains. “You have the 24 hours of the day, and there used to be an arrow indicating the hours, but not the minutes. There was also an instrument that indicated the situation of the planets.” The calendar is the only known example of its kind. “You have it in manuscripts, in ‘books of hours’, but it’s the only one that we have where all 12 months are gathered on one panel.”
What is most striking here, though, is the collection of paintings depicting the Passion of Christ, the events leading up to the crucifixion. “People liked to identify themselves with his misery, with his pain, and so these images were very popular,” Vandekerchove says. “They were in homes, in private chapels, in churches and in monasteries, and they were really objects of veneration.”
The permanent collection then jumps to the 19th century. There are two rooms devoted to the faces of Leuven – both people and cityscapes – and a significant collection of work by the Belgian painter and sculptor Constantin Meunier. “He lived and worked in Leuven for 10 years, which is why we have a lot of plasters from his workshop,” explains Vandekerchove. Having been tucked away in city hall, this is the first time they are being publicly exhibited.”
It was in Leuven that Meunier lost both of his sons, and it is easy to read his sorrow into works created here, such as a statue of the prodigal son. Meunier’s sombre paintings of workers and farmers are complemented with more romantic visions of 19th-century Flanders painted by Frans van Leemputten.
Meunier is also the subject of the museum’s first “dossier” exhibition, where one work is selected from the collection and displayed with documents that tell its story. In this case it’s a picture called “The Flood of Leuven”, which Meunier painted in return for workshop space from the city. “He didn’t really want to paint it, and you can tell,” says Vandekerchove. “It took him 10 years to finish, and we have lots of correspondence from the city asking when it would be done, and from Meunier complaining that his workshop was flooded.”
The collection is rich with stories like this, and further impressions of 19th century life can be seen in the rooms of the old museum, which are being restored to their period decoration and will house a selection of silver, ceramics and textiles.
With its temporary exhibitions, Museum M intends to mix ancient and modern. “We will always try to combine old art and new art because our experience is that contemporary artists like to be inspired by their predecessors,” says Vandekerchove.
So alongside the van der Weyden exhibition are existing and new works by the Flemish artist Jan Vercruysse. “We think that his work makes a nice dialogue with the work of van der Weyden,” she says. “Vercruysse combines things that are not really part of everyday life and gives them a new meaning.”
20 September- 6 December
Museum M
Leopold Vanderkelenstraat 28
Leuven
Rogier van der Weyden was born in Tournai around 1400 and in 1435 was appointed city painter in Brussels. But it was for Leuven’s Crossbow Guild that he produced “The Descent from the Cross”, a masterpiece which is now among the most prized possessions of the Prado in Madrid. It is an astonishing work, with a sensation of depth and palpable emotion that was revolutionary at the time and still stops people in their tracks.
“With van der Weyden, theatricality is very important,” explains Lien De Keukelaere, who coordinated the first temporary exhibition at Leuven’s Museum M alongside curator Jan Van der Stock. “It’s the first time that real figures show emotions. You see them weeping.”
This is a significant difference from Jan van Eyck, the other major Flemish painter of the time, and proved popular with contemporary artists and their patrons. “You see that the work of van der Weyden is picked up far more, and that this emotion and these themes that he created were copied a lot more than those of van Eyck. This lived on through the entire 16th century.”
One of the aims of Rogier van der Weyden: Master of Passions is to draw out these connections and show how the painter’s work started trends and was copied, first through his own studio and then by other artists. Sometimes subjects are reproduced, such as images of St Luke drawing the Madonna or a particular staging of the crucifixion. In other cases, it is the arrangement of figures or their postures, such as the swooning Madonna from “The Descent” held up by the people gathered at the foot of the cross.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this exhibition is the way in which it makes links between the painted work for which van der Weyden is most famous and media such as sculpture and textile. Some of the most striking pieces on show are wooden carvings, of exceptional quality, which take on themes from the paintings or are thought to have been produced to van der Weyden’s designs.
“The Descent” is too valuable to be moved from the Prado, so the Leuven exhibition has had to find other ways of including it. A video installation by Walter Verdin explores the dynamics of the original, and there is also a 15th-century copy that remained behind in Leuven when the original left for Spain in the 16th century.
Other requests to borrow work have been more successful, and the exhibition reunites altarpieces whose component panels have been scattered for decades. One particularly fine example involved borrowing five panels from four different collections around the world.
The most spectacular items open and close the exhibition. The first is a massive tapestry, copied from wall paintings van der Weyden designed for the Brussels town hall, which were destroyed by French bombardment of the city in 1695. The tapestry copies have not left Switzerland for centuries. And at the end of the exhibition is the newly restored “Seven Sacraments” altarpiece that belongs to the Fine Arts Museum in Antwerp.
Flanders Today is a 
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