Monday, November 4, 2013

Tervuren Museum closes, to re-open in 2017

The Tervuren Museum, that edifice to Belgian darkly imperial adventure in the Congo is set to close this month, and hopes to reemerge a better, less jaded institution in 2017. It will have a monumental task re-framing the murderous, mean enterprise King Leopold called his personal property, and which the Belgian government later ran in such a way that, as far as I know, sowed the seeds for the interminable tragedy that became the independent country of Congo after 1960. Which is why the ghost of Patrice Lumumba still haunts the marbled space inside that museum. How to look at the refurbished museum--and its amazing collection of stuff from central Africa--after 2017 and not feel totally oppressed and depressed by this history, is a job for which I do not envy the museum's officials and their consultants. But it can be done. We wait.

Here is a story about the planned refurbishment, published by ArtDaily.

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