Liesbeth Brandt Corstius will be remembered above all as director of Museum Arnhem, which she led for eighteen years. From her arrival there in 1982 she did something completely innovative: she decided to purchase and display work by as many female and male artists. She was way ahead of her time with that. ’50 percent art, 50 percent women’, the museum was mockingly said.
Brandt Corstius comes from what she herself described as a ‘left-wing family’. Her father was a professor of Dutch literature. She grew up in Utrecht with two older brothers, including Hugo Brandt Corstius, who later became a writer and scientist. Politics and literature were discussed at the table, and at the weekend walks in the Veluwe with a visit to the Kröller-Müller Museum were on the program.
When Museum Arnhem reopened this spring after a thorough renovation, Brandt Corstius looked with de Volkskrant back to her involvement in the emancipation of female artists. After her art history studies, she worked as a curator of modern art at the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum. The art world was a man’s world, and that was self-evident for Brandt Corstius at the time. In the Rotterdam museum she only made exhibitions with men. She only became aware of it later, when she and her friend Josine de Bruyn Kops (director of the Stedelijk Museum Gouda from 1976 to 1986) visited a major exhibition of ‘young art’ in Paris.
Together they were amazed: those young artists were all men. ‘Did we actually know female artists, we wondered. No. We had studied art history and worked in the art world, but couldn’t name just one.’ To change that, they founded the Women in the Visual Arts Foundation (SVBK) in 1978. Brandt Corstius made the exhibitions under the SVBK flag Feminist Art International (1979) and The art of motherhood (1981).
In 1982 Brandt Corstius became director of the Gemeentemuseum Arnhem, which she renamed the Museum of Modern Art Arnhem and which is now called Museum Arnhem. At the time, a museum director who is a woman was still a rarity. In Arnhem she bought work by Marlene Dumas and Rebecca Horn at an early stage. In 1994 Brandt Corstius received the Aletta Jacobs Prize for her commitment to female artists.
After retiring in 2000, she was associated with the TV show art tin. The book was published earlier this year You can’t write everything like thisa selection of letters from the Second World War that Brandt Corstius had compiled with historian Margreet Wagenaar-Fischer.
The reactions to her death show that Brandt Corstius has not only meant a lot to women who make art, but also to women who work as curators or museum directors. “You paved the way for us women in the art world,” writes Hester Alberdingk Thijm, the director of AkzoNobel Art Foundation, in a comment on Instagram. Mariette Dölle, director of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, says she remembers Brandt Corstius as ‘wonderfully sharp of mind and witty of tongue’.