page_title: Jan Vanriet
section_title: Closing the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Vanriet / Closing the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
context_page_description: Jan Vanriet, real name Jan Louis Lucien Vanriet, is a Belgian painter and poet.
context_section_description: In the mid-1990s, Vanriet finished a series of 50 portraits as well as Volgens Johannes, 35 large works on Korean hanji paper, inspired by the Gospel of John, for which Dutch poet Benno Barnard wrote an epic text. An exhibition was held at the Veranneman Foundation in Kruishoutem, together with a show by French abstract painter Pierre Soulages.
  Meanwhile, Jan Vanriet renewed his partnership with De Zwarte Panter Gallery in Antwerp.  New works were collected by the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, and by Deutsche Bank, Royal Belge, Crédit Lyonnais and Zürich Insurance. The Stedelijk Prentenkabinet at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp also procured preparatory studies for Johannes.
  In 2001 he received the Van Acker Prize in Bruges (previous laureats: Hugo Claus, Frans Masereel, Roger Raveel).
  In May 2004, the Lippisches Landesmuseum in Detmold (Germany) exhibited Transport, paintings 1999-2004, many of them inspired by the tragic events in World War II.  For Vanriet this is not an unusual theme; his parents and other members of his family engaged in the resistance against Nazi invaders, but they were made prisoner and deported to the concentration camps of Mauthausen and Ravensbrück.
  A year later, in 2005, Vanriet travelled to Israel for the hanging of his triptych Nathan the Wise in the historical building of the Jerusalem International YMCA, designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon. The Flemish Government and other governmental institutions donated Vanriet's work as their official present on the occasion of the state visits of Jorge Sampaio, President of Portugal, Viktor Yushchenko, President of Ukraine, Romano Prodi and José Manuel Barroso, both Presidents of the European Commission, Jack Lang, French Minister of Culture and more.
  In 2010, Paul Huvenne, the director of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp invited Jan Vanriet to ‘close’ the museum, where enormous works of renovation were to start. With the exhibition Closing Time he proposed a selection of 170 masterpieces from the collection, including works by Rubens, Van Eyck, Van Dyck, Titian, Cranach, Ensor and Modigliani in confrontation with a retrospective selection of his own work.  88,000 visitors attended.
  That same year, Vanriet painted the official portrait of the departing cardinal Godfried Danneels for the Archbishop's palace in Malines. In 2013, the public was stunned by Vanriet's series of Jewish deportees from Belgium to Auschwitz. The exhibition Losing Face was shown at the Museum Kazerne Dossin in Malines. Belgian press proclaimed Losing Face as one of Europe's major exhibitions.  The prominent Flemish author Stefan Hertmans and the Hungarian novelist György Konrád contributed to the accompanying publication.
caption: Moszek, 2011, watercolour, coll. British Museum London
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