Germaine Rimbout is currently the subject of Poetry. Color. Movement at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, running until 18 October 2026.
The exhibition describes her as a figure who remained in the shadows for a long time.
Born in 1894, Rimbout worked through influences from Cubism and Fauvism before moving after the Second World War toward freer abstraction and increasingly adventurous colour.
The rediscovery itself interests me because museum history can give us a distorted impression of how artistic importance works.
We walk through permanent collections and easily assume that the artists on the walls were always the obvious ones.
They were not.
Collections are edited histories.
Visibility can depend on gender, geography, institutions, collectors and which works happened to survive inside accessible archives.
Rimbout’s drawings and paintings did not suddenly acquire colour in 2026.
What changed was attention.
There is something useful in that for anyone making art.
Recognition and artistic development operate on completely different clocks.
A work can be finished while its audience is still decades away.
The current Brussels presentation is therefore not simply retrospective.
It is another reminder that art history remains unfinished because someone can always reopen the storage room and discover that the story was missing a chapter.
https://fine-arts-museum.be/en/exhibitions/germaine-rimbout-poetry-color-movement
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