Walk-in tour - The KMSKA during World War II

In the footsteps of Museum Director Arthur Cornette

In January 1945, chief curator Arthur Cornette passed away. Eighty years later, museum guide and historian Koen Cools takes you on a journey through the museum’s wartime past. Recent scholarly research forms the basis of the tour.

Cornette’s wartime diaries, written while he remained at the museum during the occupation, serve as the guiding thread throughout this tour full of tension, emotion, and nuance. You will learn why the Nazis considered certain works to be “Entartete Kunst” and how some of those paintings ended up at the KMSKA. Expect a tour full of stories: from the activities organized by the German occupiers in the museum, to the safeguarding of the collection in the bomb-proof storage and in a castle in the heart of the Ardennes, to the postwar search for looted art by the American Monuments Men.