Today we went to the Gulbenkian Museum.
Calouste Gulbenkian was born in what is now Istanbul and was from Armenian extraction. He was a businessman, heavily involved in oil export, eventually making his way to doing business with Shell.
He was well known for his philanthropy. Over his lifetime, he accumulated a huge fortune and a vast number of paintings, French royal furniture and artifacts from around the world. Towards the end of his life, he created the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, bequeathing this collection to the public.
While we walked the museum, my mom, sister and I discussed the intricacies of people or nations owning artifacts of other countries. More often than not, it happened when colonizers swooped in and took art and artifacts of the colonized country and displaying it in their museums, claiming ‘guardianship’ over the possessions of another country’s belongings.
Gulbenkian was a private collector. How does that fit into the whole puzzle of rightful ownership?
His collection is huge and amassed throughout his lifetime, starting from when he was a young boy after he bought Roman coins at a market.
The museum owns about six thousand pieces but only about one sixth is on permanent display.
From the Islamic world – bowls with passionate poetry inscribed:
An illuminated Qur’an and a leather Qur’an cover
From China and Japan – bowls, jars, jade figures:
The European and American collection include Monet, Manet Degas, Renoir, Cassatt, Singer-Sargent and Corot.
At first, I walked past Les Bretonnes au Pardon by Dagnan-Bouveret (#4, 5 and 6 in the slideshow) – a composition of seven women and two men in a church yard. But something in the painting made me circle back to it.
The women are dressed in traditional, starched, white head coverings and stiff long black dresses. One of the women is reading to the group of attentive listeners. The two men stand at the edge of the group, their expressions are hard to read. To me, the younger of the two looks annoyed; both of them look as though they’re receiving bad news.
The central figure stares past the viewer, her eyes contemplative, perhaps sad. She looks troubled. To the right of the reader sits a young woman who appears to be listening but her eyes suggest that she’s lost in her own thoughts. I want to believe it’s the latter.
From the Lalique collection: broaches, hair combs, chokers:
Even now as I write this, I don’t know how to feel about this collection. On one hand, I am happy to have had the chance to see it, but I am also cognizant that so often (perhaps not in this case) art is commoditized and not always acquired legitimately.
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