Word: mudam
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...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's café, with its indoor canopy of heat-formed textile tiles by Erwan...
...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...
...Rothko or even Henri Matisse. For years, critics have been mentioning Majerus in the same sentence as contemporary giants like Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol - if only because he stole shamelessly from them. Majerus "quotes, spits out and recycles modernism," enthuses Mudam director Marie-Claude Beaud. "His painting seems to be cultivated, sensitive and trashy all at the same time...
...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...
...works and growing, includes such delights as Wim Delvoye's interior of a gothic chapel, made of metal and punctuated by stained-glass windows depicting body parts, and Tobias Putrih and Sancho Silva's plywood shapes that can be assembled by museumgoers into furniture of their own design. Mudam has purchased a few Majerus paintings, though nearly all those on display have been lent by other museums. The artist remains a favorite of curators worldwide, from London's Tate Modern to Mexico City's Jumex Collection...