At home with an M-art patron: The collection of Pieter and Martine

At home with an M-art patron

The collection of Pieter and Martine

Pieter Vereertbrugghen (65) and Martine Peleman (56) are partners in business and life. Together they run a communications agency and over the years they have built up a highly diverse art collection. Though they themselves see it differently: “I wouldn’t say we were collectors, but yes, we do have art at home.”

In the meantime, we’ve learned that showing art is not enough to make people think more freely.

Martine Peleman, M-cenas

Martine: “Our first purchases date back to the 1990s. That was mainly Japanese and classic Chinese ceramics, and modern photography: Bovis, Bissinger, Boubat, Marchal. Things picked up when Cypres, our communications agency, also opened a gallery.”

Pieter: “We’ve always been interested in art, so we thought: What if we invited young artists to exhibit in our space? Maybe that would help us and our staff to depart from the beaten track and find new, different paths. After all, the basis of art is always freedom. This is how Cypres Galerie came into being at our company address in Vaartstraat in Leuven. Our specialty: contemporary art. One of our biggest projects was ‘5025’: every fortnight we introduced another young Belgian artist. Twenty-five new exhibitions in one year. In that period, we bought quite a few works: Peter De Meyer, Nele Tas, Quinten Ingelaere, Joachim Devillé, Eva Corluy …”

Martine: “We hoped that we and our staff would come into closer contact with what I call the ‘creative moment’. But in the meantime, we have learned that showing art is not enough to make people think more freely. The encounter with the artist’s gesture – the creation process of the work – is much more important in that respect”

SERIOUSLY?!

Pieter: “Love of photography runs like a red thread throughout our private collection. Our first important acquisition, around the year 2000, were military aerial photographs from the First World War. The Germans and the Allies took hundreds of thousands of them to map out each other’s positions. In the beginning they used pigeons – they already had cameras that weighed less than seventy grams – but they were too unpredictable. Then they switched to balloons and zeppelins, but those were too vulnerable. From 1916 onwards, most of the photos were taken from aeroplanes. Our collection comes from the good guys, the Allies (laughs).”

Martine: “These photographs are actually horrific images – because it’s war – but with a high aesthetic value. They show reality, but at the same time they seem very abstract. Such images raise the question: What is realism? Can you be figurative and yet abstract? By the way, aerial photographs of the front were also a source of inspiration for the Russian painter Malevich.”

LIGHT IS EVERYTHING

Pieter: “We have gradually begun to delve further into the history of photography. That’s how, through my friend Xavier Debeerst and his gallery Anamorphosis, we arrived at Pictorialism. This was the first movement in art photography; it was very popular from the end of the 19th century to around 1920. The Pictorialists were mostly amateur photographers. They saw their world destroyed by industrialisation – paradise lost. There is a resemblance to what is happening today. Depicting reality literally did not interest them; they wanted to capture their dream world and provoke an emotional reaction. Light was everything. In this, they leaned a bit towards the Impressionists.”

“At the same time, they wanted to turn photography into an art form on equal footing with painting and sculpture. They explored what they could achieve with lenses, printing paper, manipulations in the darkroom, the products they used to develop negatives ….”

“In the 1920s, Pictorialism was wiped out by modernism. But it remains a very interesting period, with very interesting works. Just look them up: Stieglitz, Steichen, Demachy, Käsebier … in Belgium: Marissiaux, Misonne, Lemaître ….”

SQUARE

Martine: “We also buy modern photography, especially the ‘Square Print’ series from the photo agency Magnum. Twice a year, it asks photographers for images around a particular theme – just to give an example: solidarity. You have one week to reserve what you like, and your photos are then printed in a square format. The largest are 15 by 15 centimetres. One photo costs 100 euros; quite affordable. We have about 80 of them, of which 35 are hanging at home. We change regularly, so it stays fresh.”

OLD AND NEW

Pieter: “Art is important for a city. A city that pays attention to art stays in motion. The role of a museum in all this is to preserve, restore, take stock, exhibit … M does that extremely well.”

“It is a fine museum, and also quite unique because you can literally see old and contemporary art side by side. You feel that they want to go far in that. Contemporary artists are invited to involve the M collection in their exhibitions. And the museum staff think for themselves about how you can present contemporary and old art together. Take your time is a good example: quite a fascinating exhibition, precisely because it was conceived and built around that confrontation.”

Martine: “Two more things: the renewed approach to the collection in St Peter’s Church is downright magnificent. And what we also appreciate as a communications agency: they communicate broadly enough. For example, we found the first issue of the new magazine very successful.”

Pieter: “For all these reasons, we became M-art patrons. Voilà.”