Beirut’s Sursock Museum reopens three years after port blast

Beirut’s Sursock Museum

 

Beirut, Lebanon – There is a secret hiding in the portrait of Nicolas Ibrahim Sursock, a secret that only a sharp eye can spot: a minuscule line that marks the spot where the canvas was ripped by debris from the 2020 Beirut port explosion.

It hangs at the recently reopened Sursock Museum, the first modern art gallery in the Arab world, which reopened its doors on May 26, three years after the explosion.

Much like the portrait, originally painted in the late 1920s by Kees van Dongen and one of the few restored in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the museum looks as good as new.

Jacques Aboukhaled, the museum’s longtime architect, walks through the building, pointing out the extensive restoration

 work from the ceilings and panels that were mangled to the invisible but vital air conditioning and electrical systems as well as the elevators and skylights.

In total, 57 artworks were damaged and meticulously restored by a team of Lebanese and foreign artists. All the pieces in the museum, including the dozens in storage, had to be carefully cleaned by specialists.

‘Put together like a puzzle’

Some of the original elements of the palace dating back to 1912 could not be replaced. Others, like the intricately carved wood panels, had to be “put together like a puzzle”, says Aboukhaled, who knows the museum like the back of his hand.The windows were blown off completely, all the stained glass, everything,” Aboukhaled tells Al Jazeera, adding that the colourful glass, one of the building’s most prized elements, actually saved the museum’s structure.

“When the explosion came, it was like a suction, so it blew off [all the stained glass], which allowed the building to breathe,” he explains.

This was not the first time the museum has been impacted in recent decades. It has closed and reopened four times since art collector Nicolas Sursock’s residence was turned into a museum in 1961.

Aboukhaled, who first got involved with the museum when he was just 16 years old, says not even the civil war damaged the building as much as when 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored at Beirut’s port exploded.

Some of the museum’s first visitors, Kate and Farid El Khazen, a couple in their 70s from England and Lebanon, gave high marks to the restoration.

“I never expected to find such a wonderful thing in Beirut. I’m Lebanese, but I never thought this existed,” Farid tells Al Jazeera.

“It’s a very important thing to keep going forward after something so horrific as the explosion. Art is always good for the spirit,” Kate says.

At the entrance of the building, a plaque acknowledges all the institutions and individual donors who financed the $3m project. Among them are the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas, the French Ministry of Culture, the Italian government and UNESCO.

But one entity is absent from that list. Aboukhaled says official support from the Lebanese government was “zero, as usual”.

When Sursock offered his palace to the city of Beirut before his death in 1953, a decree was signed to allocate 5 percent of all taxes from construction permits to the museum. In the past, this was enough to pay, for example, for a $30m extension in the mid-2000s. Now, with Lebanon’s financial crisis and currency crash, this endowment represents less than 1 percent of the museum’s annual budget.

As international money came in for the museum, so did criticism over the lack of funding needed to rebuild houses, water systems and government buildings instead.

 

Courtesy by:Aljazeera