By all accounts, Jan Hoet was a force of nature, glamorous, smart, complex and powerful, a man who loved God and women in equal measure. He may have been a firebrand and an enfant terrible, but he was wholly dedicated to the curation and exhibition of modern art, and the promotion of those artists whose work he loved.
There are of course there are flip-sides to this. If one was to find oneself on the wrong side of Hoet, he could be a formidable opponent, and hence he made many enemies. Another flipside is altogether more surprising in terms of its purity and in its reflection of the man’s innate religiosity. Hoet’s calling may have been towards modernism, but at the very core of his artistic sensibilities was the classical 15th Century Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan van Eyck, which resides in the Flemish town of Ghent, and near which Hoet built the S.M.A.K. Contemporary Art Museum. Van Eyck’s enormous and masterly altarpiece was created in triptych form and comprises fourteen religious panels.
Hans Everaert, producer of Luc Vrydaghs’s Jan Hoet: Thank God for the Gift, is also an artist and knew Hoet before the curator’s untimely death in 2014. Everaert recalls how even a packed room would go silent when Hoet would enter, such was his charisma and the power he exuded. What’s more, his approach to the craft of curation was incorruptible.
“As a curator, it was very different to how most curators today operate today, with their kind of clean, calculated, rational approach,” Everaert observes. “With Jan Hoet, it was from the gut. It was a physical kind of experience.”
Director Vrydaghs agrees. Not only did Hoet have a great eye, he had progressive proletarian tendencies, and was determined to bring the art to the people as much as have it contained within stuffy museums and galleries. “He was the man who worked from this gut feeling and had a very good nose for art. He could smell a good piece of art from a distance,” Vrydaghs says.
Hoet’s international reputation was equally formidable. When, in 1992, he curated the ninth Documenta exhibition of contemporary art in Kassel, Germany, he “raised it to another level,” says producer Everaert. “It became more engaging and important with the addition of Jan Hoet.” He also raised to “another level” the profiles of artists such as Luc Tyman, Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys and Panamarenko, as he assumed near papal status in the art world. In 1992 he was awarded the Goethe Medal, such was his renown in Germany.
But always at the heart of his artistic sensibilities was Van Eyck’s masterpiece The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, whose fractured, triptych structure is applied in the film. “The altarpiece is a mosaic of biblical stories and characters. It is full of mysticism and symbolism and sins and virtues, a lot of the elements and contrasts you also find in the life of Jan Hoet,” says director Vrydaghs of its thematic significance. “Therefore, the painting [takes] a very important role in this film…not only by making visual associations, but also blending or contrasting his details.”
“For him, the altarpiece was the basis of all art,” adds Everaert. “The reason why there should be a museum for modern art in Ghent was, for him, the existence of the Sacred Lamb. Because, for him, this was the first work.”
“Jan Hoet was non-conventional in that you wouldn’t expect him to be so religious because he was also a free mind,” the producer adds of Hoet’s at times libertarian approach to life. “But he was very religious, he really believed in God. And so this strange mixture in his personality also reflects in the panels of the Sacred lamb. You can actually use the different panels of the Sacred Lamb as a way of explaining Jan, which we are doing in a loose way.”
The 80-minute film will be ready for delivery in early 2024 and Everaert is looking for an international festival premiere before its Belgian release in late February. Right now, several sales companies are showing significant interest in representing the film. What’s more, 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of Jan Hoet’s death, an occasion that is bound to be acknowledged and commemorated far beyond Belgian borders.
