Mudam Luxembourg

Mudam's collection is that of a museum built after its building rather than around an inherited one: more than 800 works, the great majority acquired since 1989, organised around international contemporary practice rather than a historical survey. Its clearest distinguishing feature is the 54 works commissioned specifically for I.M. Pei's architecture, which exist nowhere else and cannot be understood apart from the rooms they were made for. Its clearest departure from that focus is the Aalto Paimio Sanatorium furniture, an early-twentieth-century design holding acquired deliberately outside the collection's usual period.

Mudam's building was designed by the Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei, working with the Luxembourg architect Georges Reuter, and was constructed between 1999 and 2006 under Pei's firm Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, with Tim Culbert as the architect responsible for the design's development on site. Pei set the museum on a spearhead-shaped plan that encircles the remains of Fort Thungen, the star-shaped inner fortress that once stood on the site. The building is faced in a honey-coloured Burgundy limestone known as Magny Dore, chosen, in the museum's own description, for the way it changes under shifting light and shadow through the day and the seasons.

The building is topped with skylights that Pei designed to recall the Trois Glands, the three towers of the old fort, and the Spanish-style watchtowers built during the period of Spanish rule that preceded French occupation of the fortress. The large central glazed pinnacle over the entrance hall is described by the Kirchberg development authority that oversaw the site as reminiscent of Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris. Inside, the museum offers 4,000 square metres of exhibition space across three levels, out of a total project footprint of about 10,500 square metres.

The museum's setting was completed by Park Drai Eechelen, designed by the French landscape architect Michel Desvigne, which won the Luxembourg Prize for Architecture in 2011. The park slopes from the urban Place de l'Europe down toward the older, uneven ground of the fort, and is used for outdoor sculpture and installations as well as for public access around the building.

Fort Thungen was constructed in 1732 and 1733 and named for the military commander Adam Sigmund von Thungen. It was enlarged and reinforced in 1836 and again between 1859 and 1860, as Luxembourg's fortifications grew into one of the most extensive in Europe. The Treaty of London of 1867 mandated the demolition of Luxembourg City's fortifications; most of Fort Thungen was pulled down as a result, and only three towers, since known as the Trois Glands or Drei Eechelen, and the foundations of the rest of the fort survived.

The site was rebuilt through the 1990s and 2000s in parallel with the construction of Mudam next to it, and the reconstructed fort reopened to the public in 2012 as the Musee Drai Eechelen. That is a separate history museum, devoted to the fortress and to Luxembourg's history as a fortified city, run independently of Mudam even though the two sit in the same park and share the towers' name. A photograph of the towers, or a ticket to that museum, is not a photograph of or a ticket to Mudam, and this record treats them as the two distinct institutions that they are.

Mudam was first proposed in 1989 and championed by the then Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jacques Santer. Disagreement over where to put it delayed the project for years; the question was resolved in 1997, when the decision was taken to build on Park Drai Eechelen and to integrate the museum with the remains of Fort Thungen rather than build on a cleared site elsewhere. The Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean Foundation, which runs the museum, was established the following year, in 1998, and acquisitions for the future collection began around the same time even though the building itself would not open for another eight years.

Construction ran from 1999 to 2006 at a cost of around 100 million US dollars. The museum was inaugurated on 1 July 2006 and opened to the public the next day, drawing more than 115,000 visitors in its first year under its founding director, Marie-Claude Beaud. Visitor numbers have fluctuated since; 2018, for instance, is recorded at around 134,000. The museum's board is currently chaired by Grand Duchess Stephanie of Luxembourg, and its collection and exhibition programme is directed by Bettina Steinbrugge, who also chairs the scientific committee that guides the museum's acquisitions alongside directors and curators from other international institutions.

Mudam's own description of its holdings puts the collection at more than 800 works in all media, by more than 600 artists working in Luxembourg and internationally. The great majority of the collection dates from 1989 onward, with the 1960s treated as a historical reference point for the contemporary work the museum actually collects rather than a period it collects in depth. The clearest exception is a set of furniture Alvar Aalto designed between 1930 and 1933 for his Paimio Sanatorium in Finland, acquired by the museum in 2000, which sits well outside the collection's usual date range and its usual medium.

A distinctive strand of the collection, 54 works in total, was made to order for Mudam's own building rather than acquired ready-made. Daniel Buren has contributed to that strand twice: Architecture, Contre-Architecture: Transposition, a 2010 commission acquired into the collection in 2011, and Croisements, travail situe, an earlier 1987 work using display cases, ceramics and fabric that entered the collection by donation in 2018 and that addresses, in Buren's own terms, how a museum stages and gives value to the things it shows. Elsewhere in the collection, three Cindy Sherman prints, Untitled #120, #318 and #322, were bought in 1996 through the FOCUNA acquisition fund, and Marina Abramovic's Video Portrait Gallery, a fourteen-video installation drawn from performances made between 1975 and 1998, entered the collection in 2001.

Mudam holds a rating of 4.0 out of 5 on TripAdvisor from 596 reviews, and the platform lists a typical visit at one to two hours. Read closely, those reviews return again and again to the same split: praise for Pei's building and its park, set against disappointment in what is being shown inside it. One visitor, reviewing under the name Luigi, called the architecture the work of a master specialist in museum buildings and said in the same review that the exhibitions were not up to that standard, adding that conceptual art was not to his taste and that this had spoiled an otherwise beautiful visit. Another review noted that the exhibition space runs across three levels but that most of it is given to temporary shows rather than a fixed display, and a third described a visit built around very few artists, with rooms that felt close to empty of both art and other visitors. More than one review also singled out a heavy, visibly stationed security presence, following visitors from room to room, as something that made an already quiet museum feel less welcoming rather than more secure.

The same tension shows up outside the visitor-review platforms. Writing in ArtReview in April 2024, the critic J.J. Charlesworth reviewed Mudam's exhibition A Model and credited it with staging a genuinely self-aware critique of what a contemporary art museum is for, tracing a postcolonial thread through the show's pairing of historical and contemporary work inside Pei's glass-and-steel atrium. He stopped short of calling that critique resolved, concluding that what the museum's own questioning of itself would actually lead to next was something the museum could not yet show. Taken together, the ordinary visitor reviews and the specialist press notice reach a similar place: a building whose ambition is not seriously disputed, and a exhibition programme whose ability to match it is argued over every time it changes.

Visitor reviews consistently single out I.M. Pei's building and the surrounding Park Drai Eechelen as the reason to visit, praising the honey-toned stone, the glass canopy and the light inside the galleries. The recurring complaint runs the other way: more than one reviewer says the temporary exhibitions do not match the scale or ambition of the architecture, describing shows built around very few artists in largely empty rooms, and several single out a visibly heavy security presence and brusque desk or cafe staff as souring the visit.