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Economist: Mr Gulbenkian Was Not At Home

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  • Economist: Mr Gulbenkian Was Not At Home

    MR GULBENKIAN WAS NOT AT HOME
    by Charlemagne

    Economist
    http://www.economist.com/bl ogs/charlemagne/2010/03/rich_men_and_good_museums
    March 22 2010

    THIS promises to be a week full of crunchy economics, what with
    Thursday and Friday's EU summit that may or may not be devoted to
    bail outs and the euro zone. So if readers will forgive me, this
    posting is heading off topic, just to get us all over Monday.

    Before leaving Lisbon, I managed to fit in a visit to the Calouste
    Gulbenkian museum, home to more than 6,000 works of art and
    antiquity collected by the eponymous oil tycoon. The visit fulfilled a
    long-standing ambition. Mr Gulbenkian lived a complicated, remarkable
    life, attracting respect and awe but not always admiration. He was
    born and lived as an outsider (he was born to an Armenian family
    in Istanbul, became a British citizen, lived in France then finally
    retired to Lisbon), and despite the rise and fall of empires and two
    world wars, he managed to amass a huge fortune in a Middle East that
    was being fought over by the great powers of the day. His legacy is
    no less remarkable. Decades after his death, his foundation pays for
    everything from high-end scientific research to cultural projects. His
    foundation's Lisbon home, built after his death, places a museum,
    modern art centre and foundation headquarters in a campus of modernist
    concrete architecture, set in lush, almost tropical-feeling gardens.

    And then, when I finally visited, I did not like it. Or rather,
    I admired many of the objects contained within the museum, but felt
    oddly oppressed. Instead of a collection animated by the mind of an
    extraordinary man, I felt I was touring the contents of a dead man's
    house, now decanted into a series of plain museum galleries. Do
    not get me wrong, there was no doubting the quality of his eye,
    especially when it comes to the Islamic art collection that was
    his own speciality, or the eyes of the experts who advised him on
    other areas and periods, from Ancient Greece to French painting. But
    there was something about the range of the collection--a room full
    of exquisite Egyptian reliefs and sculptures, followed by a room
    of Persian carpets, then a wall full of European silver, then a
    collection of Louis XV furniture--that inspired unease. Then there
    was the sheer number of the objects on display: a wall cabinet filled
    with not just a few Graeco-Roman coins, but lines and lines of them,
    and all the highest quality, with their details finely incised and
    preserved. It felt like an overwhelming display of buying power.

    Unexpectedly, a vision from "The Great Gatsby" sprang to mind, when
    Gatsby begins throwing heaped up shirts on his bed in a moment of
    mania: dozens and dozens of the finest shirts sent out each season by
    his man in England. Or the packing cases full of treasures arriving
    for Citizen Kane. I felt like I was in the presence of something almost
    compulsive. I could picture dealers coming across some unusually fine
    treasure and reserving it for the interest of Mr Gulbenkian, a gleam
    of greed in their eyes. But perhaps I am being very unfair. Perhaps
    such great collections cannot be separated from the need for an avid,
    wealthy collector behind them: that edge of mania is part of their
    legacy.

    The gardens calmed me down. They reminded me of Macau, one of my very
    favourite places on earth: a mixture of Portugal and the tropics. And
    the entrance to the museum is over a pebbled pond filled with croaking
    frogs, which is rather brilliant.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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