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The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon had been closed for a year and a half to travel another 57 years into the past. From March 2025 until this past Saturday, the day it reopened to the public, the private foundation worked on renovating its interior spaces to restore them to the spirit of 1969, the year it opened. The artistic wonders, from Ancient Egypt to the 20th century, amassed by the man who at his death in 1955 was considered the richest person in the world are now again on display, bathed in a dim light, with some rooms carpeted in a greenish hue that links the interior of the brutalist building to the grass of the courtyards around which the galleries are organized. Nature and culture fused in harmony, just as the Armenian-British oil magnate (1869–1955) imagined. Gulbenkian, who stopped in Lisbon en route to an intended exile in the United States during World War II, instead ended up settling in the city on the Tagus for the last 13 years of his life.
“In nearly sixty years there had been several renovations, and the goal of this restoration was to return the museum to its origins. But the idea was to go back to 1969 without making everything exactly the same, instead integrating technology to improve the original vision,” explains curator and British art historian Xavier F. Salomon, recently named director of the museum, who arrived from the Frick Collection in New York eight months ago. Salomon acknowledges that one of his main missions is to increase the museum’s international profile, as it remains relatively little known.
Surrounded by extensive gardens that were expanded in 2024 and built alongside a Center for Modern Art that also completed a major restoration that year, it was then—Salomon says—that “it became clear it was the museum’s turn,” “a jewel of modernism” designed by Portuguese architects Ruy Jervis d’Athouguia, Pedro Cid and Alberto Pessoa.
After the recent intervention by Teresa Nunes da Ponte’s architectural studio, treasures such as an extraordinary bust of Senusret III carved in obsidian (a stone that the Egyptians of 4,000 years ago either imported from distant lands or obtained from a meteorite), which still retains its nose, are now shown behind anti-reflective glass; while textile marvels such as a Persian carpet decorated with Portuguese ships now rest on platforms raised a few centimeters above the floor, evoking the custom of Muslim Portugal. The museum’s circular route preserves its traditional division into three major sections—Antiquity, Asia and Europe—while original architectural materials such as silk wall coverings, wood and bronze have been restored, and changes introduced, including ultraviolet filters on windows and LED lighting.
Born in Istanbul in 1869, Calouste Gulbenkian was the son of carpet merchants, a category of objects for which he always showed a special fondness. He began collecting as a child, although never with an archaeological or scientific aim; rather he was driven by an aesthetic sense endorsed by the various advisers he trusted: Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamun’s tomb, was his adviser on Egyptian art, and the noted art historian Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, helped him with several acquisitions hoping he would leave his collection in the United Kingdom—a hope that did not materialize.
“He always wanted the best of the best, and was only interested in exceptionally well-preserved pieces,” Salomon notes, highlighting among the museum’s 6,000 works (around 1,000 of which are on display) items such as Mughal carpets from India, a collection of Mamluk glass dating from 1250 to 1500, and the late-medieval carved ivories that Gulbenkian avidly gathered. A contemporary of French jeweler René Lalique, the magnate commissioned more than 200 pieces from him—combs, chokers, brooches, bracelets—about 40 of which were recently exhibited at the Fundación Barrié in Spain’s northwestern city of A Coruña, a collaboration with a Spanish institution that will soon be joined by others with the Thyssen Museum and Patrimonio Nacional.
Gulbenkian was a collector guided by his passions: if he liked something, he pursued and accumulated it. He compared his collection to a child. Like carpets or ivories, one of his obsessions was coins, for which this renovation has created a dedicated room where, for the first time, the set of 11 Abukir gold medallions that the magnate collected is displayed—more than half of a treasure of 20 Roman pieces from the third century, minted as gifts for athletes and found in Egypt in the early 20th century.
The gallery dedicated to the Islamic world, “an iconic space of the museum,” in Salomon’s words, runs the length of the building, and the renovation prioritized straight lines and movable panels. In the section focused on Europe, 18th-century French furniture on display—“better than Versailles’”—is shown elevated on pedestals near the paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens that Gulbenkian bought from the USSR in the 1930s, when the Soviet government sold works from the Hermitage to finance its five-year plans.
If the provenance of those paintings is clear, other, more uncertain origins of Gulbenkian’s possessions—especially regarding ancient art—are being traced by the museum’s curators. With a fabulous legacy of artworks and decorative objects from across the globe, the debate over decolonization runs through the heart of the museum’s self-described “cosmopolitan” identity. “It’s a very complicated and difficult conversation,” the director replies when asked how the discussion affects them. “I think when an acquisition involves acts of violence or illegal acts, then the pieces should be returned to where they legitimately belong. If something was stolen or taken illegally from a country, all of that must be addressed.”
And if not? “When we talk about different cultures, the question is where we draw the line. The Romans conquered Egypt and took obelisks to Rome. Should those obelisks be returned to Egypt? Should all Egyptian art be in Egypt, all Turkish art in Turkey, all Italian art in Italy, all Portuguese art in Portugal and all Spanish art in Spain? My answer is no,” Salomon says. “Museums must confront colonization, slavery and all these issues. We have to understand where we come from. The reality is that much of human history is uncomfortable. One of museums’ challenges is to help people understand that these things happened, that they were wrong and that we must not repeat them.”
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