T Magazine: Art Market | Big in Belgium

With cheap spaces, a friendly scene and a thoughtful audience, the once sleepy Brussels arts scene is making some noise.

"It's really hard to put your finger on it," Katerina Gregos told me. We were sitting in a coffee shop in a residential neighborhood on the south side of Brussels; it was an overcast Sunday afternoon. Gregos, a Greek woman with a British education, is the new artistic director of Art Brussels, the city's contemporary art fair, and she was struggling to explain the specific appeal of her adoptive city. Outside, the streets were empty. On my way to meet her I had passed blocks that looked like a two-thirds scale model of Paris, and others that looked as Dutch as Amsterdam. "You can't really describe what Brussels is, because Brussels doesn't announce itself with an image," she said. "It's a place where things are quite hidden. It's a city that's in a perpetual state of becoming."

Still, what the place is becoming, and especially what its art world is becoming, is, as she pointed out, curiously difficult to say. It is not becoming New York or London or Paris or Berlin. Brussels exists in defiance of the hype and gaudiness of those cities, not to mention the cost; Paris, several people told me, with evident satisfaction, is three times as expensive to live in. The art fair that Gregos guides is changing (she wants it to be less of a yard sale and more coherent), but it isn't growing. The collectors are buying, but mostly work by younger, more difficult artists. It's not a celebrity scene: a Jeff Koons show at Almine Rech Gallery last year (his first solo exhibition in town since 1992) was met with amusement and slight puzzlement, not because the work wasn't good, but because the market ambition of such an extravaganza was so out of keeping with the spirit of the city. Young people are moving in, but more, it seems, to avoid a scene than to make one. The kids have their bars and parties, but for anyone who's reached the age where work starts to solidify, Brussels offers the very opposite: cheap space, solitude and a thoughtful audience. I asked Jan Mot, who's had a small gallery in town since 1996, if a community of artists had started to come together. "No. No. No," he said, cheerfully. "The atmosphere is very amicable, but it's still a group of a lot of individuals."

Just so: It's a mostly French city (technically, Walloon) within a Dutch region (technically, Flemish); proud of its eccentricities but unsure of its own identity, which is so undefined that there's no single word for "someone who lives in Brussels." It is a private place, resistant and rather matter-of-fact in its demeanor, perfectly happy to get along with whatever might come along, and to do without whatever doesn't — a Bartleby of a city. It's also home to a brainy, theoretical art scene with little matching press to express the artists' thoughts, or critics to evaluate the results. There are galleries and exhibition spaces, and family collections open to the public, but a paucity of first-rate museums.

At the same time, the place is gaining cultural power. As the center of German art moved east, from Cologne and Düsseldorf to Berlin and Leipzig, a kind of vacuum appeared in the region. Low rent, wealthy collectors and accessibility to the rest of the continent has induced Brussels to fill it, though more or less by default: it's a city in the middle of everything and at the center of nothing. Almine Rech-Picasso (she's married to one of the artist's grandsons) moved from Paris in 2006, bringing with her a branch of her deluxe and well-established gallery. A couple of years later, Barbara Gladstone, one of the most formidable of New York dealers, opened up a space in a converted town house. Both have used their spaces to showcase lesser-known artists — Matthias Bitzer, R. H. Quaytman — as well as established figures like Franz West and Marisa Merz. Both seem to have been brought to Brussels as much by convenience as by the possibility of staking a claim in a new land. "The Belgium system is more flexible than the French," Rech-Picasso told me. "It's a more easygoing city than many cities in Europe." But there was a sense of slowing down and gathering in, too. "If you had asked me 15 years ago if I would move to Brussels, I would have said you were crazy," she said. "It's a very strange time. Europe is psychoanalyzing itself: What should we do? Which way should we go?" In fact, a number of wealthy French families are going to Brussels, where taxes on investment income are very low — and nonexistent on profits made from flipping artworks.

Rech-Picasso and Gladstone arrived in a city with a pack of established galleries, some large and some small: Jan Mot, Catherine Bastide, Xavier Hufkens, Rodolphe Janssen, each of which shows an easy mix of American and European artists. At the same time, a collection of younger, more experimental spaces has opened. Rodolphe's younger brother, Sébastien, opened a storefront installation space — essentially a window-display-size cube with a tiny gallery behind it — called Sorry We're Closed, with a program as eccentric as its name. Galerie VidalCuglietta opened in the trendy Dansaert district, featuring emerging international artists like Emily Sundblad and Amy Granat; the Brooklyn gallery Clearing added a satellite on Brussels's grand boulevard, Avenue Louise. Why? For one thing, Paris, London and Berlin are only an hour or two away: during the five days I spent in Brussels, half the people I wanted to speak to were either leaving for or arriving from one or the other. For another, Belgian collectors are exceptionally well regarded. "They stay interested from a really young age to an end of an artist's career," Clearing's co-director Barthélémy Schöller told me. "You have good conversation with them, they know their history, and they know their art. They aren't just interested in Belgian art. They're really international — they'll buy Fred Sandback alongside Luc Tuymans and Michael Borremans. They'll go for Thai artists, French ones." Moreover, it's an unusually convivial scene. One morning I met Sébastien Janssen at his brother's gallery, and we spent the day together, chatting over lunch, driving around to a few other galleries, then to his own, and then to Gladstone's. It was only when we were midway through the afternoon that I noticed how relaxed and amiable things were.

Even the collectors, it turned out, have their own collective, a large, airy space called Maison Particulière. It was established by the couple Myriam and Amaury de Solages, wealthy Parisians who moved to Brussels five years ago, and wanted to create a more social context in which to show their art. Three times a year, they establish a theme — when I visited, it was "Sex, Money and Power" — and invite a pool of five or six fellow collectors to contribute whatever art they think might fit. "There's no pressure," Myriam told me. "You're among friends, people who share the same passion. You're not interested in their business, what is interesting is what you love." And her husband said, "We don't think of ourselves as collectors. We're more like amateurs, lovers of art."

A few days later I stopped in at Wiels, the city's first contemporary art center, which opened in 2007 in a converted brewery on the western, industrial side of town. It is, by most accounts, the most important thing to happen in town in some time, and its program — artists residencies, community outreach, talks, screenings and the like — is ambitious and altruistic: it is currently presenting a survey of work by Thomas Bayrle, an overlooked German Pop artist. It's the kind of scrappy, multiform institution that every city needs; the surprise is that it took so long for Brussels to get one.

These are striking signs of life, but they're forming around a glaringly empty space. Everyone in the Brussels art world mentions it almost immediately, with slightly embarrassed resignation: the city, alone among similarly cultured European capitals, has no museum of contemporary or even 20th-century art. In fact, and somewhat scandalously, Brussels's Museum of Modern Art closed its doors in early 2011, in order to make way for a new museum focused on the turn of the century; it hasn't been heard from since.

Brussels is home to fantastic collections in private hands, many drawn from Belgium's traditions of intellectual, contrary and difficult art: James Ensor and Magritte, along with lesser-known movements like Les XX and Cobra, and prominent conceptualists like Marcel Broodthaers. But there's no permanent collection in town to take them, no way for the city to inherit its own riches.

A few years ago, when the great local collector Herman Daled decided it was time to show the main body of the works he and his wife

had accumulated during the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition was mounted in Munich and eventually acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a significant portion of Brussels's artistic patrimony was shipped overseas.

Maybe this is tragic, and maybe it isn't. An artistic heritage is a fine thing, but art itself chafes at borders. There's a certain deliberate neglect at work in Brussels, a disinclination to promote, brand, gentrify, boast. "It's not a patriotic country," Jan Mot said. "A national museum would be an outdated sign of something nostalgic, in the eyes of many." That attitude is both the city's strong suit and its weak point; it makes the place worldly but keeps it from being world-class.

"Brussels is a little bit awkward," Katerina Gregos said, a little bit awkwardly. "Sometimes the lack of ambition pisses me off, but it's also keeping the place sane."

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