After 11 years of operation, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp has opened and welcomes the public. This is one of the little wonders of architecture and renovation of museum spaces in Europe. The museum, with its extremely valuable collections, including important works by Rubens and Van Eyck, shines like a marvelous 19th-century building, while inside it has acquired another building, a pale white cubist gallery, in a unique combination of historical and modern architecture. This dialogue is achieved through balance, as well as the courage with which the architects moved, office KAAN Architecten. This grandiose project, worth more than 100 million euros, not only updated the museum’s infrastructure and its duration over time, but also left behind an impressive 40% increase in exhibition space (by comparison, however, the renewal of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam cost 375 million euros). Of the 8,400 works of art in the Antwerp Museum’s collection, 600 can now be on permanent display. The museum houses, among other things, the world’s largest collection of works by the Belgian Expressionist painter James Ensor. In 2003, when the prospect of saving the museum from decay arose, it was necessary to restore the building and connect it to the 21st century (demolition was also considered). The building was old and not properly maintained. It was built in the period 1884–1890 and designed by the architects Jean-Jacques Winters (1849–1936) and Frans van Dyck (1853–1939), and from the very beginning the project included a museum that would be illuminated by natural light. The new building, the white cube, with its clinical sanctity, contains works from early modern art and from all currents of the 20th century. In the white rooms, the public has been seeing art since 1880. The old building, with its Victorian aesthetic, showcases the great masters and all the arts from before 1880. Natural lighting also remains a key feature of the transformed museum. The new halls absorb light through openings in the ceiling, and the whiteness frees the curators for innovative exhibitions.

Views of the world

STOCKHOLM
Christer Strömholm
The great Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (1918-2002) is honored with an exhibition of his work. The exhibition is on display at the National Museum of Sweden and brings together around 200 photographs taken in Paris in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Most of the photographs are portraits of artists and writers (André Breton, Francois Mauriac, etc.), but there are also shots from lesser-known parts of Paris.

BATH
Fashion Museum
The world famous Fashion Museum in Bath, England, will be temporarily closed due to relocation. This development means the development of collections, but also more extroversion. It is a £37 million development project that is scheduled to open in a few years. The museum will be housed in a former post office in the city center and is expected to boost the economy.

LAUSANNE
Joseph Kundelka
The Élysée Museum of Photography in Lausanne presents an exhibition of the Czech photographer Josef Kundelka, who became famous for his international presence after his escape to the West. The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Kundelk Foundation, is a large retrospective of the period 1960-2012, which is also based on unpublished material. Kundelka was born in Moravia in 1938 and has been a French citizen since 1987.

LONDON
Amy Sherald
49-year-old artist Amy Sherald has gained a reputation in the US as a portrait artist, somewhere between realism and pop art. Her new exhibition in London, at the Hauser & Wirth Art Gallery, is her first solo exhibition in Europe. Amy Sherald mainly uses ordinary African Americans as her models, contributing, she says, to their social visibility. The exhibition will run until 23 December.

ATHENS
Photographers of the South
The identity of the American South through the work of American photographers is on display in a new exhibit at the Georgia Museum of Art. Introducing a collection sponsored by Alan Rothschild for the Do Good Fund, which captures the South in a narrative way through signature photographs of great artists from the 1950s to the present day.