A Passionate Eye. Ger Luijten and Twelve Years of Acquisitions

Rarely has a personality in the art world been so unanimously acclaimed. Ger Luijten, who died suddenly a year and a half ago (see news item of 20/12/22), was a curator like we love: passionate, exciting, and eager to enrich the collections in his care. He spoke to us several times in our columns: the first time in 2011 in a written interview, shortly after his appointment as head of the Fondation Custodia, the second time in a video programme that had only a few issues (but we are thinking of returning to this type of format one day), and finally in 2014 in one of our podcasts.
We found it difficult to talk about all his acquisitions. In fact, we were a long way from doing so. The exhibition that pays tribute to him today can only show a tiny fraction of the additions made to the institution under his supervision. And with good reason: no fewer than 10,000 works have entered his collections in just over twelve years. That’s an average of just over two works a day!

While we do not, with a few exceptions and for lack of time, write about acquisitions of prints and autographs, nor about contemporary art, which is outside our scope (it has also acquired in this area), even the number of drawings and paintings prevented us from being exhaustive.
A number of exhibitions have already featured works that have entered the collections, notably True to Nature. Open-air Painting 1780-1870 (see article), which showed how a very rich group of nineteenth-century landscapes had been brought together to complete an initial nucleus due to a bequest from Carlos van Hasselt and Andrzej Niewęgłowski, and another display of acquisitions of graphic art (see article) in 2018. This tribute to Ger Luijten cannot therefore be exhaustive, of course, but it does endeavour to show all the areas in which the Fondation Custodia has acquired in recent years. We have been promised that the catalogue will soon be published in hard copy; in the meantime, its publication in French on the internet [1] provides a link to the relevant entry for each work.

1. Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904)
A Corner of the Studio, 1861
Oil on canvas – 24 × 41.5 cm
Paris, Fondation Custodia
Photo: Fondation Custodia

See the image in its page

Of course, the oil sketches, mainly landscapes, but not exclusively - a recent acquisition by Fantin-Latour that we cited but did not reproduce (ill. 1) demonstrates this [2] - are given pride of place. We can admire that of John Constable, one of the most important of this group, which we had already seen in the 2020 exhibition and about which we had already spoken, but also works that are being shown here for the first time.
Here are a few examples (all of which will eventually appear in our acquisitions database):

Simon Denis (1755-1813)
The Cascatelles of Tivoli, with Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun Drawing, 1790
Oil on panel - 48.3 × 62.1 cm
Paris, Fondation Custodia
Photo: Fondation Custodia

See the image in its page

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