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Europe's art racket


I just wanted to get in the door marked "Europe." Lisbon is great, but I'd be equally happy in Split or Bucharest or Lubeck, were the fare as reasonable. The blood and soil of a place, its creeds and ancient loyalties, are not intrinsically interesting. The castle on the hill behind me was really important to people trying to stay alive 800 years ago, but it's just a bilheteria and a turnstile today.

Now, when a shady art collector like Calouste Gulbenkian wants to serve up his collection on any number of leopard-spotted, hyacinth-embossed platters ― this is when things get interesting. Bring it on. I am a porous visitor, here to soak up the continent.


He was a strange dude. The day after the Earl of Carvanon died in 1923, Gulbenkian was on the phone trying to scoop up his collection of antiquities. A prominent art dealer reminded him the body was still warm.

Gulbenkian was born to a family of wealthy Armenian kerosene merchants in Istanbul. Under the tutelage of a curator at the Louvre, he started collecting Persian carpets, Egyptian antiquities, Dutch landscapes. He amassed the world's largest private collection of silverware.

Approaching the Gulbenkian Museum from the south is a stupendous experience. When you arrive at this part of the building, all the doors appear to be locked. It's like being on a video-game quest. Look, there's a tiny wooden ramp leading to one door. It opens.


A room devoted to Francesco Guardi and his little studies of Venetian architecture.



A monstrously large 16th century tapestry of children at play, after Giulo Romano of Manuta.



A portrait of Helena Fourment, by Rubens, is below. Gulbenkian did business with Josef Stalin, negotiating the purchase of a Rubens and two Rembrandts in 1930. He was as slippery as an eel, holding Armenian and British passports but residing in Paris. Because of his diplomatic status as a member of the Persian legation, he avoided French customs duties. 


He sided with France's Nazi puppet government in World War II and was accorded enemy status by the UK, which also considered stripping him of British citizenship on the basis of tax avoidance. 

The museum contains a large collection of 18th century decorative arts ― clocks, mechanical tables, and the kinds of precious silks you frame to hang on a wall.



Hals, Van Dyck and Rembrandt are represented. There are orange skies from Daubigny. And from Corot, dirt lanes in the French countryside. Below, a Renoir, left, and Monet, right. 


"Lady and a Child Asleep in a Punt Under the Willows" by John Singer Sargent.


In a drawing workshop titled "While We Wait," participants take the measure of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret's "Breton Women at a Pardon."


A still life from the peerless Henri Fantin-Latour, whom I wrote about at some length in Paris, as well as his "The Reading," which exudes a painful awkwardness peculiar to the artist. He is the Nathan Fielder of the 19th century Salon.



The United States granted Gulbenkian a visa, but he worried that British and American tax authorities might be comparing notes. A billionaire who would do anything to save a nickel, he decided that neutral Portugal was his best bet. He moved into Lisbon's Hotel Aviz, where he stayed until his death in 1955.

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