A long, thin sliver of Holland extends southwards, squeezed between Belgium and Germany. At its center, minutes from Aachen, is the town of Maastricht, population of 125,000. Declaring itself with some justification the oldest urban enclave in the Netherlands, it was, to the Romans, Mosae Trajectum (“Maas Crossing”). Strategically straddling the river Maas, the town has experienced an astonishing total of nineteen sieges—by Austria, Spain, and France—all in the course of the religious and territorial disputes that marked the transformation of the medieval Duchy of Brabant into the modern United Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Despite this turbulent history, the industrious townfolk of Maastricht managed to build two splendid Romanesque basilicas and to maintain a thriving textile and ceramics industry. Art, however, seems always to have remained a marginal pursuit, certainly in comparison to the privileged status it occupied in neighboring centers such as Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges. In-deed, in recent memory, Maastricht’s only brush with great artistic achievement came during World War II as Rembrandt’s Night Watch found refuge in the caves of St. Pietersberg, on Maastricht’s outskirts.
By the late 1980s, the Maastricht artistic environment experienced a decided improvement as a group of local art dealers began holding yearly fairs, at first in a downtown hall and, since 1993, in the so-called MECC.[1]This is a sprawling conference and exhibition facility at the core of a “Eurocity” on the edge of the old town; that it was the setting for the Maastricht Treaty signing appears
