Walking in, the museum immediately feels calm and intimate. The galleries are beautifully arranged,…read moreand the scale works perfectly -- spacious enough to move comfortably, but small enough that you're always aware of how close you are to the art and the people around you. It's the kind of place where you don't want to be that person blocking a painting, and the layout naturally encourages everyone to share the space respectfully.
There's a complimentary coat and bag check, and it's absolutely worth using. Being able to wander without a backpack or jacket makes the whole visit feel lighter and lets you focus entirely on the works in front of you.
The collection itself is exceptional -- beautifully curated, full of pieces that genuinely deserve the attention they get. But then you hit the large Stephan Vanfleteren photographs scattered throughout the rooms, and the tone shifts hard. These oversized portraits have the dull, overprocessed look of something you could snap on a smartphone that's been dropped repeatedly and still somehow limps along. They feel completely disconnected from the surrounding masterpieces, like filler chosen because a wall needed something on it. The contrast is so jarring that it pulls you out of the experience, and after a few rooms, it starts to feel less like an artistic choice and more like an intrusion. It's baffling that a museum with such a refined collection would wedge in work that looks this flat, this mismatched, and this unworthy of the space it occupies.
By the time you finish, the memory of the classical works is still there, but so is the irritation -- those photographs linger in the worst way, leaving the overall experience feeling uneven and not nearly as polished as it should be.
