The Living Room Museum

The Living Room Museum

The Living Room Museum

The exhibition showcases a collection of works by 20th-century Luxembourg artists, representative in more ways than one, which was compiled between the 1950s and the 1980s by a Luxembourg City resident.

The collection comprises 55 works, including two sculptures. In a first instance, it is a reflection of the development of art in Luxembourg from the turn of the century to the late 1960s. The collector owned works from the three successive waves that characterised art creation in Luxembourg: the paintings by Frantz Seimetz and Jean-Pierre Beckius are examples of the late Impressionist period, which dominated for a long time. Following the First World War, young Munich-schooled painters broke with the academism of their predecessors and started exploring modern art. The collection includes works by Nico Klopp, Joseph Kutter, Jean Schaack, Jean Noerdinger and Auguste Trémont, the main representatives of this “secession”. Abstract art did not come into its own in Luxembourg until after the Second World War, in the form of the Iconomaques (“iconoclasts”) collective. Their non-figurative style is represented in this collection with an early work by Michel Stoffel and works by Joseph Probst, François Gillen, Théo Kerg and sculptor Lucien Wercollier.

The ensemble is typical for a small country, in which a private collector still has the opportunity to put together a compendium of “national” art. Here aesthetic passion is accompanied by a sense of patriotism mirrored in the fact that the collection features Luxembourg artists only.

The collector acquired his works from art dealers and gallery owners, at auctions or directly from the artists or their families. Over time, oil paintings, drawings, watercolours and gouaches came to decorate a residential house, occupying their place amidst pieces of furniture and other objects, the “natural” environment they had been created for. As a result, the works are being showcased not in a classical museum setting, but rather a more private ambience.

The acquisition of the collection was made possible through the financial support of the Amis des Musées d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg.