Art & History Museum will open 2 new exhibits next week
Plus: Fran Lebowitz, Anne Carson and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are all coming to Brussels this Fall.
Reading time: about 3 minutes.
Next week the Art & History Museum, one of Belgium’s most expansive museums, will open two new galleries in its building at Cinquantenaire Park:
One dedicated to decorative art in the 19th century,
The second showing Art Nouveau and Art Deco elements, from the early 20th century.
Both exhibits will feature furniture and an assortment of decorative trinkets the fancy people of yore might have had lying around their homes.
To celebrate the opening, the museum is allowing visitors to see the new galleries for free all weekend, from June 13th to the 15th. Bring your stampede shoes.
The building overall is quite big, so it can probably withstand a significant number of visitors at once. The press release the museum sent out proudly proclaims the two new galleries will cover “an area of 1200 square meters.” If you have any sense of what means, please advise.
Art Nouveau and Art Deco are two styles that reshaped Brussels in the early 20th century. They went beyond architecture to encompass interior design and visual arts as well. While their names are similar, the styles themselves are quite distinct — and easy to pin-point with this handy cheatsheet.
This museum overall is a kind of hybrid between a natural history and an art museum, with a wide chronological and geographical scope. It’s quite distinguishable from the other museums in Brussels in that it provides more anthropological, as opposed to strictly historical, lessons.
Stop the presses
Schuman Show favorite Barry McKeon is set to star in the Brussels Light Opera Company’s summer show.
The Gondoliers, a comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, follows the story of two gondoliers after they’re told one of them is a long-lost king — but not which one.
Go for Barry, stay for “the surrealism of watching a group made up mostly of EU bureaucrats sing English-language political satire set in 19th century Venice.” Sounds like a magical evening to me.
It’s taking place June 19-22 at the Bosuil Cultural Center, about 100 meters outside of the Brussels border, into Flanders — so you can technically count going as a day trip.
What else is going on?
Also in Cinquantenaire, the live music festival Fête de la Musique is taking place June 20-21,
Art Lab Brussels is a contemporary art showcase currently on display in the center. Their goal is to provide a different kind of art viewing experience: “Every visit offers a new perspective, an immersive encounter, and a bold challenge to how contemporary art is seen and experienced.” So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Brussels’ opera house La Monnaie is currently putting on Bizet’s Carmen, and while tickets sold out months ago there are some on Ticketswap for tomorrow evening’s performance.
This coming Fall, several well-known authors (and favorites of yours truly) are coming to Brussels. I’m mentioning these now because I expect these to sell out fast:
Anne Carson, the Canadian classicist who dissected the ancient Greek concept of eros as a bittersweet experience, is coming to Brussels on a new book tour in September.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning Nigerian author known for her novels that explore identity, gender, and post-colonialism, will be speaking at the Bozar in October.
Fran Lebowitz, the famously New York-based author, is also touring for some reason. She hasn’t published a new book since the 80s but has been an entertaining public speaker ever since and a self described lazy person. You can see her iconic blazer in person in September.
That’s it for this week. Speak soon,
Ana