In 1949 the mayor of Antwerp, Lode Craeybeckx, visited an open-air sculpture exhibition in Arnhem and came home wanting a permanent one. The first show in Middelheim park opened on 6 June 1950, organised by Frans Baudouin: 167 sculptures by 121 artists, seen by about 150,000 people. A year later it became the Openluchtmuseum voor Beeldhouwkunst Middelheim, and it has not charged a cent for admission since. Seventy-five years on, the Middelheim Museum at Middelheimlaan 61 holds about 440 sculptures, 600 drawings and 300 medals, with roughly 215 sculptures out in about 30 hectares of park.

It is a museum without a door. Visitor numbers are estimates, because nobody passes a turnstile: about 660,000 in 2017, its best year, about 535,000 in 2022, and more than 350,000 between May and September 2025 alone.

An estate before a museum

The land is older than the art. A written source first mentions Middelheim in 1342. In 1645 Jan van Weerden, then mayor of Antwerp, bought the estate, and his son planted the avenue of lime trees that became the Middelheimlaan. In 1761 it passed to Petrus Franciscus Gisbertus van Schorel, lord of Wilrijk, who had the architect Barnabé Guimard remodel the castle and brought in an art collection that included works by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. In the early nineteenth century the owner was Édouard Parthon de Von, a keen horticulturalist who wrote some 200 fables, published in 1843. The Le Grelle family took over in 1842 and turned the formal garden into an early landscape park.

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The city bought it, with two neighbouring estates, in 1910, and in 1911 they opened together as the Nachtegalenpark. The castle became a restaurant in 1912, after a renovation by Emiel Van Averbeke. In the 1920s the Koloniale Hogeschool, the colonial college, was built on the eastern side of the park; its buildings later went to the state university and now belong to the University of Antwerp and its Middelheim campus. The park’s Floraliënhal hosted the fencing at the 1920 Olympic Games, and the Jazz Middelheim festival, founded in 1969 by Elias Gistelinck, still carries its name.

Twenty biennials

For four decades the collection grew through exhibitions. Twenty biennials were held between 1951 and 1989, each drawing between 70,000 and 100,000 visitors, and the collection grew with them: 46 sculptures in 1952, 184 works by 1967, 220 sculptures by 1975. Middelheim-Laag, the six-hectare lower park, opened as an exhibition ground in 1963. There was no biennial in 1991, and in 1993 the formula was dropped. Works by more than 1,300 artists have been shown in the park since 1950.

The first work made specifically for Middelheim was Jesús Rafael Soto‘s Double Progression Vert et Blanc, built on site by museum staff for the tenth biennial in 1969. Two years later Renaat Braem‘s pavilion opened at the eleventh, built for the sculptures too fragile to stand outside; it has been a protected monument since 2001. The collection’s best-known pieces arrived along the way: Auguste Rodin‘s Balzac, Henry Moore‘s King and Queen, Alexander Calder‘s The Dog and Rik Wouters‘s Het zotte geweld of 1912. In 2009 Chris Burden staged Beam Drop Middelheimmuseum, dropping 118 steel beams from more than 40 metres into wet concrete. The only tree in the collection, a Japanese walnut by Roel Jacobs, was planted in 2010.

Flanders keeps a list of protected masterpieces, and Middelheim has 25 on it: seven recognised in 2007 and eighteen more added on 17 November 2022, among them Barbara Hepworth‘s Cantate Domino and Lynn Chadwick‘s Encounter VIII. The best story belongs to Aristide Maillol‘s La Rivière of 1939 to 1943. Maillol had first made a figure called The Mountain as a memorial to the writer Henri Barbusse; when the money ran out he took back the rights and sawed it down into La Rivière. A group of five sculptures by Arturo Martini from the early 1930s is the largest ensemble of his work outside Italy.

The 2012 reopening

Menno Meewis, director from 1993, led the museum through its first big overhaul. It reopened in May 2012 with a larger site and new buildings. Hortiflora, a former flower garden of about five hectares that had belonged to Vogelzang, was added to the lower park, and in it Robbrecht en Daem built Het Huis, a half-open pavilion five metres high, which opened with sculpture by Thomas Schütte. New commissions came from Roman Signer, Philippe Van Snick and Ai Weiwei, whose The Bridge Without a Name reuses a small footbridge with planks laid out in the shape of China. Meewis died unexpectedly shortly after the reopening. Sara Weyns, who had started at Middelheim at 23, was acting director for a year and took over in January 2014.

Four themes and an open depot

Under Weyns the whole park was rearranged. Over eighteen months to April 2024 more than 200 works were moved, around 80 per cent of the sculptures, into four themed zones partly drawn from the landscape: Movements, Human Nature, Urban Wilderness and Fusion. “Vroeger was de beslissing heel gemakkelijk,” she said of the old layout. “Wat buiten kon staan, stelde men op.” It used to be simple: whatever could stand outside was put outside. The museum stayed open throughout; visitors, Weyns told VRT NWS, sometimes walked “letterlijk tussen kranen en restauratoren”, literally between cranes and restorers.

The result is easier to read. A visitor pavilion by B-bis Architects, between the main entrance and the castle, is where tours start, with a shop and lockers. An open-air depot, built with Lapis Arte and TAK Landscape Architects, shows works temporarily out of the collection display and lets visitors watch restorers at work. Large areas were depaved and planted, large water tanks were added, some grass is left unmown, and a new walking loop is lined with bulbs. The works carry QR codes. A new entrance from the car park on the Beukenlaan makes the place easier to reach by car. Middelheim was also the only Antwerp museum that stayed open during the pandemic, largely because it is outdoors.

Free entry, for 75 years, is the best decision Antwerp has made about this park, and it should never be reopened for discussion. “Omdat iedereen gratis kan binnenstappen in het museum, is het heel laagdrempelig voor inwoners van de stad en toeristen,” said Nabilla Ait Daouad, then alderman for culture, in 2024. Because anyone can walk in for free, the threshold is low. In practice it means that 25 Flemish masterpieces stand in grass that anyone may walk across on any open day, and that is the point of them.

Seventy-five, and a salamander

The 75th anniversary in 2025 came without a blockbuster. Instead the museum offered new ways into the collection it already had: an audio tour by thirteen writers, put together by Uschi Cop, an open drawing studio in the Braem pavilion, a poetry festival by Dennis Tyfus, and loans from Phyllida Barlow, Zanele Muholi and others. On 6 November 2025 the city poet, Esohe Weyden, presented a new poem in the park, Tijdslijn.

In 2026 the British artist Monster Chetwynd made her first open-air exhibition and her first museum solo show in Belgium here: A Friends Making Machine, from 16 May to 11 October, with Pieter Boons as curator and installations such as Tears, which visitors entered through a rolling tear, and Thunder, Crackle and Magic. “I want my art to be generative; that it galvanizes, ignites and inspires!” Chetwynd said. “Monster Chetwynd teaches us to be generous and not afraid to do things our own way,” said Weyns. The Middelheim Museum’s own website lists the next exhibitions in the park and the seasonal opening hours.

The exhibition has closed; its gate has not. The Salamander Portal, a new permanent entrance on the east side of the park, was made with children and young people from UKJA, the child and adolescent psychiatry unit of the neighbouring ZAS Middelheim hospital, in stone with their carved drawings. It connects the museum with the hospital and the university campus beside it. “Salamanders live both in water and on land, moving effortlessly between two worlds,” said Boons. The castle that Guimard remodelled in the eighteenth century now sits between the visitor pavilion and the exhibition zone, which is where a park designed for one family has ended up: in the middle of a hospital, a university and a sculpture collection, with the gates open.

Weyns’s own favourite of the past twenty years is Germaine Richier‘s bronze Praying Mantis of 1946. It has never needed a ticket either.