THE ORIGINS

In 1949 the Centre national de recherches ‘Primitifs flamands’/Nationaal Centrum voor de Navorsingen over Vlaamse Primitieven was established in Brussels. It now bears the rather grand name of Centre international d’etude de la peinture medievale des bassins de l’Escaut et de la Meuse/Internationaal Studiecentrum voor de Middeleeuwse Schilderkunst in het Schelde en Maasbekken. The Center is allied with the Royal Institute of Cultural Heritage, which was established in 1946 under the name Archives centrales iconographiques d’art national et du Laboratoire central des Musees de Belgique, or ACL.

The foundation of both the ACL and the Centre national should be seen against the background of the pressure that existed in Western Europe just after World War II to reorganize the scholarly study of works of art along new, American lines, whose key concepts were teamwork and interdisciplinarity. The management committee of the Center was initially formed by a core of three scholars: Paul Coremans, director of the ACL, Herman Bouchery, professor at the University of Ghent, and Jacques Lavalleye, professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. Already before the end of the Center's first year the group was expanded by Paul Bonenfant, professor at the University of Brussels, and Paul Fierens, professor at the University of Liege. This meant that all four of the Belgian university institutes of art history and archeology were represented on the Committee.

The Center's mission, as formulated by Coremans in a memorandum entitled Plan de travail, and dated November 29, 1951, was tripartite:

• 1 The formation of a library (‘the acquisition of all publications related to the ‘Flemish Primitives’ and thus to create the most complete library in the field’).

• 2 The collection of a photographic archive, consisting of both prints of negatives in the ACL and photographs obtained directly from museums, private collectors, and so forth. The photographs would show details as well as entire works.

• 3 The compilation of an inventory of all the works by southern Netherlandish painters of the fifteenth century, arranged in three categories: geographical, alphabetical by the name of the artist, and systematical according to their subject.