Wolfgang Cortjaens has recently joined our museum team: since 1 April, 2016, he is the new head of our archive and library. He will look after the extensive museum collection, which includes a systematic and digital cataloging of our inventory, in order to create a general database. Additionally, he will help curate exhibitions, including the new permanent exhibition of the SMU*.

Cortjaens, who is of German-Dutch origin, has a PhD in art history and the history of architecture. He was scientific assistant at the Staatliche Museen Berlin; after that he was curatorial assistant at the Nationalgalerie for the exhibition “Views on Europe. Europe and German Painting in the 19th Century” (2006 in Brussels and Munich), as well as “Reinhold Begas – Monuments for the German Empire” (2010/11 at the Deutsches Historisches Museum). From 2011 to 2015 he was curator and co-director of the BEGAS HAUS in Heinsberg, an institution he helped to establish.

Since 2004, Cortjaens has been a free-lance scientific fellow of KADOC/University of Leuven, one of the largest Catholic archives and documentation centers in Belgium. There, he has initiated and advised various art and church history research projects.