Brussels government buys Citroen building for €20.5 million

The government of the Brussels-Capital Region has concluded the purchase of the Citroen building for the price of €20.5 million. The region intends to create a new museum of contemporary art in the building.

According to minister-president Rudi Vervoort, who closed the sale on Thursday, the museum will open in 2018 or 2019, taking up 15,000 to 18,000 square metres of the former Citroen building on Leopold II-laan, which backs on to the canal at Akenkaai. The rest of the site, which measures 45,000 square metres in total, is earmarked for housing.

“Brussels plays an important role in the contemporary art scene and attracts the attention of collectors from around the world,” Vervoort said. “It is a must for us to have a suitable shop-window here.”

The collection of any future museum, however, remain a mystery. Elke Sleurs is state secretary of science policy, a portfolio that covers the functioning of the Royal Library, the Jubelpark complex and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, among others. She stated earlier this year that the government intends to house its modern art collection in the existing Fine Arts Museum complex on Regentschapsstraat.

That collection went into storage when that section of the complex closed for repairs in 2011. Since then, the Capital-Region has been working on a plan for a new museum. But, according to Sleurs, the federal government’s plan has always been to return the collection to its original home in the Fine Arts Museum.

An alternative is the Art Nouveau collection donated by the Gillon-Crowet family to the city in lieu of inheritance tax, which is currently housed in the Fin de Siècle Museum on Kunstberg.

Photo courtesy De Standaard