Word: luxembourger
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...That Burgundy Passport Remember the days when your passport got scrutinized by some suspicious official on even the most straightforward trip from Innsbruck to Bolzano? Some of us do. But since the signing of the Schengen Agreement in Luxembourg in 1985, the free movement of people has become more than an aspiration - and an attribute of modern Europe, remarkably, that has survived the struggle against terrorism of the last decade...
...chosen as the architect nearly a decade before the matter was settled, and he has produced a temple of culture even a banker could love. Sitting on a plain high above the rest of Luxembourg City, the museum is laid out like an arrowhead, echoing the old, arrow-shaped Thüngen Fortress next door (soon to be a museum itself). Mudam's exterior is sheathed in French "Louvre" limestone that radiates the honeyed glow of its Parisian namesake. The interior - bright, airy and playful - is well-suited to the occasional zaniness of the art on display. Even the museum...
...however, Mudam may have a winner, a show that does justice to its elegant new quarters and tickles the imagination as well. The exhibition, open until May 7, features that rarest of commodities, a Luxembourg-born artist: Michel Majerus, who in an intense, tragically shortened career fused Pop, Minimalism and other genres with a punk sense of fun. Majerus was more a painter than a video or installation artist, so most of the 250 works in the show are canvases - big ones, some the size of billboards, all throbbing with color, text and images purloined from comic books and advertising...
...That could almost describe the museum. Mudam has been in the works for nearly two decades, slowed by squabbling among city fathers over its site, design, materials and even whether Luxembourg - a hardheaded realm of financiers and Eurocrats - needed such an extravagance. Jacques Santer, the country's former Prime Minister and a European Commission President, helped convince them to seek repute as a cultural capital instead of a mere tax haven...
...then, Majerus was dividing his time between Los Angeles and his large eastern Berlin studio. On Nov. 6, 2002, the artist boarded a Luxair flight from Berlin to Luxembourg. It crashed in heavy fog 10 km from its destination, killing him and 19 others. He was 35 years old. Five years later, Michel Majerus' bold, outsize talent has returned to the country of his birth, to a museum that may help gain for Luxembourg the artistic glory that was once within his grasp...