Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp

KMSKA's real strength is continuity across seven centuries in one collection, not a single trophy room: Flemish Primitives such as van Eyck and the van Ertborn bequest, an altarpiece-scale run of Rubens and Van Dyck, and then, on the other side of the Ensor hinge, the world's largest holdings of both James Ensor and Rik Wouters. That last pairing is unusual for a museum built around Old Masters; because Ensor and Wouters are shown as the natural extension of the older galleries rather than a separate modern annex, the collection reads as one continuous Antwerp art history rather than two museums under one roof. The 2022 rebuild reinforced that with architecture rather than argument: the new galleries were built into the old building's own courtyards, invisible from outside.

The museum that reopened in Antwerp in September 2022 looks, from the street, almost exactly like the one that closed at the end of 2011. That is the point. The Dutch firm KAAN Architecten won an international competition for the rebuild in 2004 and had a master plan in place by 2006, and its solution was to insert an entirely new set of galleries into the four internal courtyards of the 1890 building, plus a further gallery along the roofline, all of it invisible from outside the museum. The historic Neoclassical facade, with its bronze reliefs of past masters and Thomas Vincotte's sculptural chariots on the roof, was restored rather than altered.

The work took eleven years and cost more than 100 million euros, considerably longer and more than first budgeted. Unforeseen asbestos contamination inside the old structure, a full replacement of the climate-control system, and delays in political funding all pushed the reopening back repeatedly. What the extra time bought was a 40 percent increase in wall space: new white-cube galleries built into the courtyards and topped by four lightwells that bring daylight down through the building, alongside darkened rooms for the works on paper and small sculpture that cannot tolerate the light the paintings can.

The museum's roots run back to 1382, when Antwerp's painters organized themselves into the Guild of Saint Luke and began decorating their own meeting chamber with members' work; Rubens and Frans Floris were both guild painters in their turn. An academy grew out of the guild in 1663 under David Teniers the Younger, and it was this academy's own holdings that Napoleon formalized into a public museum by decree on 5 May 1810, housed at first in a former Franciscan monastery. Twenty-six Rubens paintings, looted by French forces and returned to Antwerp on 5 December 1815 after Waterloo, anchored a collection that had grown to 127 catalogued items by 1817.

The collection's character changed again in 1840, when the collector Florent van Ertborn left the museum 144 paintings on his death, including work by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden that pulled the holdings back from a bias toward 16th- and 17th-century painting toward the medieval Flemish Primitives the museum is now equally known for. By the 1870s the academy building had been outgrown, and the city commissioned the architects Jean-Jacques Winders and Frans Van Dijk to build a museum purpose-made for the collection; it opened to the public on 11 August 1890. The building has not always been safe: during both world wars, staff lowered paintings into a bomb-proof basement, and a V-bomb strike on 13 October 1944 damaged the structure badly enough to need years of repair. The 1976-77 Rubens Year exhibition, held after an earlier modernization, drew 625,000 visitors and is still cited as the moment the museum became a mass destination rather than a specialist's stop.

The reopened museum is organized around a single working idea: everything painted before 1880 sits in the restored 19th-century rooms, and everything after 1880 sits in the new construction, with the two halves deliberately made to feel like different buildings inside the same one. The pre-1880 rooms include the Rubens and Van Dyck Galleries, built for the museum's altarpieces, and a suite the museum itself calls the Salon: three consecutive rooms hung floor to cornice in the dense manner of the 19th-century Paris exhibitions the works were painted for. Further back are the medieval and early Netherlandish holdings, including Jan van Eyck's Saint Barbara of 1437 and the van Ertborn bequest material, arranged through shifting thematic and chronological groupings rather than one fixed timeline.

James Ensor's work is the hinge between the two halves of the building; the museum describes him as the bridge between the narrative art that came before 1880 and the material experiments that came after it, and gives him rooms the museum calls the world's biggest and most varied Ensor collection anywhere. Past that hinge, the modern galleries organize post-1880 work around three themes, colour, light and form, rather than by school or date, and hold what the museum says is the world's largest collection of work by the Belgian modernist Rik Wouters. A rotating Print Room shows works on paper a few at a time, and darkened rooms nearby hold small sculpture and terracotta that cannot take the light the paintings get.

Architecture critics were largely won over by the concealment trick itself: an entire new museum built inside a 132-year-old shell without disturbing its face on the square. The response from within the Belgian art world was considerably rougher. By December 2022, three months after the reopening, the collector Marnix Neerman accused the museum's administration of amateurism, arrogance and awful taste, and the French critic Didier Rykner called the reopening a sad failure in La Tribune de l'Art. Neerman's criticism was not academic: he withdrew a long-term loan of sixteen works, saying he no longer trusted the museum's leadership with his collection, and moved the pictures to the National Gallery in London and the Palazzo Ducale in Venice instead.

The specific complaints, made by museum professionals, academics and senior figures speaking both on and off the record, ran from the aesthetic to the structural. Furniture choices, including a camel-shaped seat, and white gallery floors that scuffed within days of opening drew ridicule; interactive touchscreens were dismissed by one senior figure as the infantilisation of the museum experience. More seriously, critics noted that only around 600 to 650 of the roughly 8,400 to 9,780 works the museum holds are on display despite the 40 percent increase in space, that star works by Bruegel were absent from the reopening hang, and that the museum had gone without an artistic director since the two who oversaw the reopening both left their posts in the months before it opened. The museum's reference catalogue for its own 14th- and 15th-century paintings, critics pointed out, still dated to 1985.

Director Carmen Willems has described the pre-2011 museum as a sleeping museum and framed the rebuild as an attempt to wake it up for a city she says the institution had stopped speaking to. The storytelling approach behind the new hang leans on volunteers as much as scholarship: a project called the Finest Hundred asked residents to help choose the museum's hundred core works, paired with a hundred more selected by museum staff, and the results shape parts of the display. Smaller, playful interventions run through the galleries too, including sculptures by Christophe Coppens tucked among the paintings that reference details in specific pictures, meant to give younger visitors something to look for without talking down to them.

That approach is exactly what critics of the reopening object to. Apollo Magazine's review of the rebuild judged the architectural solution itself a success, and credited the museum with resisting heavy-handed didactic parallels when it interspersed contemporary painters such as Luc Tuymans and Marlene Dumas among the historical galleries. But the same review noted that the thematic, non-chronological hang of the modern collection will frustrate visitors expecting an art-historical sequence, and the sharper criticism recorded above, over staffing, cataloguing and what stayed in storage, comes from people the museum itself would ordinarily count among its natural audience.

KMSKA sits at Leopold de Waelplaats in Antwerp's Zuid district, a short tram ride from the center: line 4 stops directly outside at the Museum stop, and buses 1 and 10 stop at Bres, about 500 meters away. The museum opens daily at 10:00, closing at 17:00 on most weekdays, 22:00 on Thursdays under a program it calls KMSKA LATE (with shorter hours restored during summer and Christmas school holidays), and 18:00 on weekends, public holidays and Flemish school breaks; it closes only on 25 December and 1 January, with a shortened 10:00-16:00 day on 24 and 31 December.

Admission is 20 euros for an adult, 10 euros for visitors under 26 and for holders of Antwerp's A-card, and free for anyone under 18, for ICOM, Museumpass and Friends of KMSKA cardholders, and for visitors with disabilities and school groups. A free timed-entry slot must be booked online or at the ticket machine regardless of ticket price. The building is built to be accessible: elevators reach every floor, most halls take a wheelchair or a buggy without difficulty, and a free, unguarded cloakroom with electronic-lock lockers holds coats and bags too large for the galleries. Photography without flash is allowed throughout, handheld only; a restaurant, a coffee bar and the KMSKA Shop operate on site. The museum's own description of its ground floor calls the garden in front of the building the first museum room, and the rebuild added a new side entrance that spreads visitor flow away from the original staircase under the pediment.

The 2022 reopening split opinion sharply along a line between how the building was rebuilt and how it has been run since. The architectural solution itself, an entirely new set of galleries concealed inside the historic courtyards without altering the 1890 facade, was widely admired. What followed inside it drew sustained criticism from within the Belgian art world over curatorial choices, staffing and a lack of scholarly infrastructure, criticism serious enough that one major lender withdrew a long-term loan. General visitors on aggregate review platforms are considerably more positive, rating the museum well and singling out the quality of the collection on view over any of the management questions raised by critics.