The collection of Roger and Josette Vanthournout: ‘a reflection of two people’s passion to live with the objects that spoke to them’

Roger Vanthournout was renowned for the notes he made and the photographs he took when he and his wife Josette visited art galleries, dealers or auction houses together. He would also ask questions, and sometimes even take measurements — all in the name of research and preparation for adding a particular work to their collection.

The Belgian couple’s considerations extended beyond just liking an item, to appraising where best it might be shown in the carefully curated display of pieces at their home.

Lovingly and diligently put together over six decades, the Vanthournouts’ collection offers a rich overview of the course of modern and contemporary art. It covers a range of movements, styles and media — painting and sculpture most notably, but also works on paper and photography, spanning more than 100 years of artistic creation.

Highlights include works by the likes of René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Henry Moore, as well as Yayoi Kusama, Bruce Nauman, Thomas Schütte and Tracey Emin.

The collection is being offered by Christie’s across a trio of dedicated auctions, collectively titled Modern Visionaries — The Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection: an Evening Sale on 5 March 2026, a Day Sale on 6 March — both in London — and an Online Sale running from 25 February to 12 March.

‘Each acquisition Roger and Josette made was a reflection of their shared vision and values,’ says Olivier Camu, Christie’s deputy chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art. ‘Their collection was built on curiosity and a passion for art, and shaped by a sense of discovery and thoughtful decision-making.’

Roger Vanthournout studied interior design as a young man, before embarking on a successful career running a furniture business in the city of Izegem in Flanders. Josette was a painter, and the couple began collecting art together from the early days of their marriage, in the mid-1950s.

Their initial interests included Chinese ceramics and Flemish Expressionism, though the collection as we know it today started to take shape when the Vanthournouts turned to Surrealism — in many cases buying work by their compatriots, such as Paul Delvaux and Magritte.

The latter painted two of the top lots in ‘Modern Visionaries’. La plaine de l’air (1940) features a tree, in the form of a giant leaf atop a small trunk, which looks out over an empty mountain landscape — reflecting the unease that engulfed Europe at the start of the Second World War. Le lieu-dit (1955) is a nocturnal scene, with a blazing orange fire in the foreground that emits just enough light for the viewer to see a mysterious eagle-shaped mountain in the distance.

Roger and Josette’s taste expanded and evolved over the decades — a growing interest in Minimalism, for instance, resulting in the acquisition of works by Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt. They also kept up to speed with the postwar avant-garde, collecting standout pieces by Kusama and Lucio Fontana.

Kusama’s Infinity Nets (1960), from her landmark series of paintings of the same name, consists of an expanse of small, looping strokes in crimson and white, which reveal the black ground beneath as if through a mesh.

Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese (1964) is one of the Italian artist’s signature knife-slashed canvases, with 10 near-calligraphic incisions upon a deep blue backdrop.

Over the passing years, as his furniture business flourished, Roger had the opportunity to travel with Josette across Europe, visiting museums and broadening their artistic horizons in the process. Occasionally, they even met, and acquired works directly from, artists themselves — as happened with Lynn Chadwick, whose 1959 bronze sculpture Stranger III, found a place in the gardens of the couple’s home in Izegem.

The Vanthournouts embodied a longstanding Belgian tradition of looking outwards, beyond their geographic borders, harking back to the prominence of Flanders in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the region ranked alongside Venice, Genoa and Amsterdam as a hub of European trade.

An attraction to British sculpture led to the purchase of works by artists such as Moore, Lynn Chadwick and Antony Gormley. In Moore’s Goslar Warrior (1973-74), a wounded soldier lies prostrate on the floor with his shield at his feet. The figure simultaneously alludes to the pathos of fallen heroes in classical antiquity and the devastating conflicts of the 20th century.

Other works in the collection are more playful — for example, François-Xavier Lalanne’s frog-shaped water fountain, ‘Grenouille Fontaine’ (circa 1982); and Barry Flanagan’s anthropomorphic hare in the pose of a cricket player, The Bowler (1990). Likewise, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Tre Uomini in Grigio (1974), in which images of three Arte Povera artists — Giuseppe Penone, Giovanni Anselmo and Gilberto Zorio — are silkscreened onto a sheet of highly polished stainless steel. Viewers become an active part of the scene through their reflection in that sheet.

‘Roger and Josette’s home in Izegem became a gesamtkunstwerk,’ says Camu, ‘a total work of art in which architecture, design and fine art existed in constant dialogue.’

The Vanthournouts revelled in generating unexpected connections between artists from different eras and genres, placing works alongside one another to accentuate their parallels and differences. As guests wandered through the house, they were confronted by intriguing interactions, their eyes drawn from one space to the next in a dynamic succession of mises-en-scène. These spaces included the gardens, visible through the sizeable windows, where large-scale sculptural works — such as Germaine Richier’s twin bronzes from the late 1940s, L’Orage (The Storm) and L’Ouragane (The Hurricane) — were placed.

Inside, the trio of figures in Tre Uomini in Grigio, for instance, were echoed by the three geometric shapes dominating Ben Nicholson’s abstract painting 1969 (green black), which hung on the wall next to it.

Roger Vanthournout passed away in 2005. Josette continued to occupy the couple’s home for the following two decades, making occasional additions to the art collection — such as Emin’s A certain degree of anger (2016), a painting of a female nude with her face veiled, looming large before a castle tower.

Josette passed away in 2025. The treasures kept in her and Roger’s house in a corner of Flanders are now being offered to the world.

Select works from The Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection will go on tour to Christie’s in New York (10-13 February) and Paris (18-20 February)

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online, 25 February to 19 March 2026. Explore the global tour, preview exhibition and sales