"Personal taste, national representativeness and international competition: The collector as a cultural model in Belgium c. 1900"

The turn of the twentieth century was characterized by an increasingly personalized approach to private art collecting, a growing emphasis on the subjectivity of taste and the widespread popularity of the idea of collecting as an expression of individuality and creativity. Simultaneously, the period was shaped by an increasingly international competition in political, cultural and artistic terms, as aspects of national identity and representativeness gained a new prominence in public discourse. In this presentation I will explore how the ideals of individualism and Aestheticism related to the considerable reaffirmation of the private collector’s public image as an important cultural agent in Belgium around 1900. This trend is illustrated by the discourse surrounding the Brussels artist, collector, connoisseur and aesthete Charles-Léon Cardon (1850-1920), a leading figure in the Belgian art and museum world. In analyzing the reception of Cardon’s persona and collection in contemporary published sources, I will shed new light on the ways that public and private were interrelated in the cultural and artistic life of fin-de-siècle Belgium. I will demonstrate that the idea of private collecting as a highly personalized and aestheticizing practice was not incongruous with a collector’s prominence in the public debate on art, taste and national culture. In fact, the collector’s subjectivity and individualism made him an effective cultural role model in the public discourse and turned his collection into a prototype of taste, worthy of emulation by other private as well as public collectors.