80 years: not fifty or a hundred, but four score: 80 reasons to make a declaration of youth. A declaration that has its roots in the very genesis of
the Centre for Fine Arts: as Adolphe Max, one of its three founding fathers, along with Henry Le Boeuf and Émile Vinck, observed when the undertaking
met with initial rejection: “Dead artists are magnifi cently housed and living artists are put out on the streets.”
It was their intention that the Centre would always be alive, as it would host artists who were very much alive. Just imagine the impact on 18 May 1928, just two weeks after its inauguration, of discovering the dancers of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the Horta Hall, intertwined with bodies of marble and bronze - or of coming face to face, two weeks later, with 218 works by Bourdelle, the greatest sculptor since Rodin.
Today, we find it quite normal to see, in rapid succession, Jan Fabre's company with its naked bodies and the reinvention of the visual arts by Luc Tuymans. What was the most innovative and daring cultural undertaking of its day must remain ahead of its time in our own modern era.
To celebrate the 80th birthday of the Centre for Fine Arts, my team and I have come up with 80 events, open to the world, to be savoured over the ten
months separating the inauguration of the exhibition spaces from that of the great concert hall. So many living artists...

Paul Dujardin
Director-general

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