Luxembourg gives pride of place to a new collection

The dispute was never over I.M. Pei's elegant geometric design for Luxembourg's new Museum of Modern Art. Rather, it was that for the best part of the past 17 years, this tiny, conservative Grand Duchy simply found it hard to accept the need for such a museum.

After all, what could Modern art add to a country that has long prospered as a tax haven for wealthy Europeans?

Jacques Santer, Luxembourg's prime minister when the museum was first proposed in 1989, had an answer: It would be good for the country's image. As one of the six founding members of what is now the 25-nation European Union, Luxembourg should demonstrate its belief that Europe was about culture as well as about money.

The dream of Santer and his fellow proselytizers was finally realized in June with the inauguration of the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art, already referred to familiarly as Mudam. Standing beside Christian de Portzamparc's new concert hall, the $100 million museum proclaims that money and culture can go hand in hand.

Still, this striking symbol of modernity is not quite what its name implies. Because Luxembourg owned virtually no Modern art, and the museum could hardly afford to start building a collection of works by, say, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Dalm, Miro and the like, this is really a museum of contemporary art.

For the past 10 years and notably since Marie-Claude Beaud became its director in 2000, the museum has been acquiring post-1980 art. And by the time it opened, it boasted a permanent collection of 230 works by about 100 international artists, including Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Julian Schnabel, Thomas Struth and Daniel Buren. An inaugural show called "Eldorado" displays about 60 of their works, along with a few on loan for the occasion. Nonetheless, the size and sober grandeur of Pei's building still suggests a museum awaiting a collection. But at least the museum exists, something that at times seemed less than certain.

"Stop, start, stop, start," Pei, 89, said good-naturedly of the journey he began when he first visited Luxembourg in 1989.

The debate over Modern-versus-contemporary bubbled on for years, but the Grand Duchy's politicians were also divided over the museum's location, with the Draei Eechelen Park district finally chosen after much haggling. When it was decided to erect the museum on the ruins of one abandoned fortress and beside another, fresh disputes erupted over what to do with the fortresses. Finally, in 1997, it was agreed that the museum of Modern art should be built over Fort Thuengen and linked to a new Fortress Museum created next door. And this is what Pei's design reflected when construction began in 1999.

But the museum's troubles were still not over. A dispute over the stone to be used at the museum Pei insisted on a honey-colored French stone led to a four-year legal wrangle and further delays.

Then, late in the day, the director of the new Fortress Museum said he did not want it to be connected to the museum of Modern art.

"The original idea was to go from the old into the new," Pei noted, explaining how he imagined visitors entering his building's sun-splashed atrium. "Instead, we had to turn things round and make the entrance at what was meant to be the back."

In truth, the museum has not suffered enormously, since gardens and a plaza now lead to an entrance beneath the intersection of two dramatic stone-faced walls. Something resembling a moat around the building also highlights the ruins of the old 18th-century fortress.

If from some angles the museum's exterior itself evokes a fortress, it is one topped by an angular glass cupola 30 meters, or 100 feet, high. As a result, the main floor is full of light. A lower floor has an auditorium and two small galleries, while larger galleries on the second floor are top-lighted. Pei has also designed wonderfully sculptured stone staircases and added an octagonal glass pavilion reached along a passage leading into the gardens.

Yet, for all the museum's welcoming mood, it may take time for contemporary art, with its emphasis on conceptual and video art, to feel at home in a building as classically modern as this.

Cai Guo-Qiang's installation "The Net" makes a brave effort at occupying the atrium's floor: It comprises an overturned boat punctured with golden arrows and held up at one end by a pole, as if it were an animal trap; a rope connects it to a large bird cage filled with chattering canaries. Nari Ward's installation of hanging bottles, "Bottle Messenger," also looks good in the pavilion.

Among works commissioned by the museum is "Studio," by Tobias Putrih and Sancho Silva, in which the artists have filled a gallery with furniture made of plywood sections that can be attached and detached to make chairs, tables, beds, cupboards and the like. So visitors are invited to make their own furniture.

Perhaps most impressive, though, is Wim Delvoye's "Chapel," an installation that fills a small gallery with iron pillars, Gothic arches and seemingly abstract stained-glass windows. Close inspection of the windows reveals not religious images, but an array of X-rays of body parts, including the heads or, rather skulls of two people kissing, seen from different angles.

With the building completed, the museum itself is very much a work in progress. Preferring not to look back at art the museum cannot afford, Beaud describes it as a museum for the 21st century. But next year it will already have a new role to play. In 2007 Luxembourg will hold the rotating title of Cultural Capital of Europe. With its new museum, the Grand Duchy will now have something to show off.

(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved