The first issue of Documents & Arguments, the - new! - magazine on the history of the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art (S.M.A.K.) is devoted to the founding of the Association for the Museum of Contemporary Art (V.M.H.K.) - the driving force behind the establishment of the Museum of Contemporary Art, now the S.M.A.K. - and its first chairman, Karel J. Geirlandt (1919-1989). How did he get the idea to found the V.M.H.K. in 1957? In order to answer this question, it proved necessary to put Geirlandt's largely unwritten biography down on paper. Starting from the observation that the V.M.H.K. almost from the very beginning served not only local interests, but was an organisation with a national agenda, we also look at numerous other initiatives that were set up in Belgium in the second half of the 1950s: G 58, The Modernist Centre and the National Centre for Modern Art, co-founded by the V.M.H.K. in 1959.
