Jan Hoet, the Belgian-born curator and founding director of Ghent’s contemporary art museum SMAK was a charismatic curator and keen amateur boxer. He also stood unsuccessfully for the European parliament. “Art has given me an understanding of what politics should be,” he said. He died Thursday, aged 77, at a Ghent hospital after a long illness.

When he had to retire as director of SMAK, the railway station turned casino turned contemporary art gallery, aged 60, he received a call from the mayor of Herford, near Hannover in Germany, to run Marta, a museum it had commissioned Frank Gehry to design. Although the only Herfords he knew where a breed of cow, Hoet leapt at the chance to create the new institution. this meant curbing Gehry’s love of curving walls. The Belgian flew to the architect’s Santa Monica studio and they both agreed that while the roofs of the brick-clad structure could swoop and curve, the walls would be straight enough for the curator to hang what he wanted and where. The inaugural show in 2005 called “My Private Heroes” was typically Hoetian, an eclectic mix of works by artists including Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, Gavin Turk, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joseph Beuys as well as history paintings, ephemera and a yellow jersey worn by a Tour de France winner.

At the news of his death today, the Belgian prime minister tweeted that the Belgian art world “loses a father”.