Collection Dr. Hubert & Marie-Thérèse Peeters

“In the 1960s, the Collection Peeters was one of the first pop art collections in Europe – and it grew into one of the most important. Hubert Peeters (1919-2015) was a doctor and medical biologist from Bruges who taught at the Catholic University of Leuven and Northwestern University in Chicago. He was also founder and director of the Simon Stevin Institute for scientific research in Bruges. Peeters frequently travelled to New York, London and Paris to attend congresses and conduct lab research. On each trip he took the opportunity to visit art galleries and artists, and subsequently built up a pioneering pop art collection that comprised some 150 works.

Regarding his motivation to buy art, Peeters considered two things to be important: a personal connection with the work of art and the artist, and the idea that the art was future-oriented. In 1968 he wrote in an exhibition catalogue [of the exhibition Three Blind Mice] that he hoped ‘that for you these works would become an image of what humans long for in our age. These works present my consciousness of the future.’”[1]

The artists’ books and catalogues on display present a small sample of a donation of several hundred books from the collection of Dr. Hubert Peeters. Many of them are signed by the artists and contain personal inscriptions to the doctor and his wife.

They were donated in 2024 to the Library of Sint-Lukas by Agnès Peeters-Rammant, daughter of Marie-Thérèse and Hubert Peeters.