Facts of the Day (2/3/21)

Sometimes if a place is small enough, I can knock off all of its famous people in a single blog entry.  I can't quite do that with Luxembourg, but I can try....

1. Edward Steichen (1879-1973) came to the US via his Luxembourgish parents as an infant in 1880 and became a naturalized US citizen in 1900.  He later decamped to France, where he pioneered what is now called fashion photography, and then returned after WW1.  In the 1920s he drew a huge salary heading photography operations at the company of our old friend Condé Nast.

By the early 1930s he had grown tired of his medium and retired to a Connecticut farm to raise Delphinium flowering plants.  In 1936 — and pay attention, because this is really wild — he was the focus of the one and only flower show in the history of MoMA: Edward Steichen's Delphiniums.

WW2 brought Steichen back to work as chief of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit; it was in this capacity that he directed the Oscar-winning documentary The Fighting Lady (1944).  After the war MoMA picked him to run its photography division, a choice so controversial it led to the resignation of respected curator Beaumont Newhall (1908-93).  But Steichen got everyone talking with the landmark exhibition The Family of Man (1955), featuring written commentary by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) — who, not coincidentally, was married to Steichen's sister.  The title was taken from a line in Sandburg's 1944 poem "The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany."

Family was sent around the world by MoMA, making stops in 36 countries on 6 continents and getting viewed by an estimated 9 million people.  It was even part of the same 1959 exhibition in Moscow that hosted our old friend the "Kitchen Debate."  By the 1990s, it found a permanent home within the Steichen-themed museum at Clervaux Castle in ... you guessed it, his birth nation of Luxembourg.

2. Luxembourg's connections to photography run deep.  Its first Nobel Prize winner — and, alongside Jules A. Hoffmann (1941- ), one of the country's only two laureates — was Gabriel Lippmann (1845-1921), who earned the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering a color photography process based on wave interference (although it was soon rendered obsolete by the Autochrome Lumière).

This was created by Lippmann in the 1890s (!) without pigment or dye

3. Luxembourg's only Olympic gold medalist — one of its four medalists overall — was Josy Barthel (1927-92), who came out of nowhere to triumph in the 1500m at the 1952 Helsinki Games.  He also served between 1977 and 1984 as Luxembourg's Minister for Energy, Minister for Transport, and Minister for the Environment, which are apparently three separate jobs that he held down simultaneously.  (I guess it really is a microstate.)

Fun fact: Both Barthel's predecessor and his successor as Minister for the Environment, respectively Émile Krieps (1920-98) and Robert Krieps (1922-90), share a surname.  I couldn't find any evidence the two Kriepses were related to each other — I guess it's like their "Rasmussen" — but Robert grandfathered Luxembourg's most prominent international movie star, Vicky Krieps (1983- ).