MR GULBENKIAN WAS NOT AT HOME
by Charlemagne

Economist
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