A bulky collection

With 2,500 works of art on display, Modert could no longer expand his home. With the housing crisis also wreaking havoc on the art world, the collector is currently transferring his pieces to Germany, for lack of a permanent solution on Luxembourg soil. The catalogue is impressive: Pages and pages of contemporary art, mainly paintings, but not only. Marc Modert receives visitors in his office in the station district, where it is difficult to find a place between the piles of files and his magazines dedicated to art. In the basement, he regularly organises exhibitions for artists friends, because for him art must be accessible to all. Modert is currently in the process of transferring his estate to Germany, as he has not found a suitable place for his collection in a museum or gallery in the Grand Duchy. The collector has amassed many works by Luxembourg artists that he would have liked to see remain in the country.

Frenzy collector

The story begins in Beggen. The Moderts' family home was built on a hillside while the area was still uninhabited before the Second World War. Marc Modert's father was a civil servant, but he was also an art lover and bought paintings that adorned the walls of the house: "He went to public auctions, he was an art lover. He wrote books and there are 80 quotes from him in the National Library. He gave us total freedom." His aunt was herself an amateur artist, a student of the Luxembourg artist Frantz Seimetz, and the family discovered his paintings in the house when he died. However, Marc Modert believes that he did not grow up in a family of artists. The virus certainly took hold, because as an adult, the lawyer began to collect artworks frantically. "As I became more interested in art, my eyes became sharper and I became more sensitive to things", he says.