Mr Five Per Cent's museum: the Gulbenkian opens in Lisbon, 1969

At 10.30 on the morning of Thursday 2 October 1969, a formal session opened in the Grand Auditorium of a new concrete building in a park off Avenida de Berna, in Lisbon. More than a thousand guests had been invited to two days of ceremonies. The President of the Republic presided, flanked by the Prime Minister, Marcelo Caetano, and two cabinet ministers. The Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, sat in a chair of honour.1 source

Among the guests were Lord Clark, the former director of the National Gallery in London, and John Walker, the former director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Both had known the man the building was named after, and both had once discussed with him a home for his art collection at their own galleries.3 sources

José de Azeredo Perdigão, president of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, spoke first, about the founder and the institution he had left behind. Clark, Walker and a member of France's Economic and Social Council followed. The head of state closed the session by pinning the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry on Perdigão and on Kevork Essayan, the founder's son-in-law, the two executors of the will.2 sources

Then the guests walked through to the museum, which showed more than a thousand pieces from the collection. In its entrance hall, in bronze letters, was a passage from a letter Gulbenkian had written to Walker about his collection.2 sources

That night the foreign minister, Franco Nogueira, gave a reception at the Necessidades Palace. The next evening the Gulbenkian Orchestra and Choir gave a choral and symphonic concert in the Grand Auditorium, and the head of state came back to hear it.2 sources

Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian was born in March 1869 in Scutari, now Üsküdar in Istanbul. His family were Armenian merchants who traded carpets, wool and kerosene. He was sent to Marseille at 14 to perfect his French, then to King's College London, where he studied applied science and became an Associate in 1887.1 source

In 1888 he went to Baku, on the Caspian, to study the oil business, and wrote about it for French journals. He married Nevarte Essayan in London in 1892 and took British citizenship in 1902. He called himself a business architect rather than an oilman, and after 1918 he lived mostly in Paris.1 source

Most of his fortune came from one company. The Turkish Petroleum Company was formed in 1912 to look for oil in the Ottoman provinces of what is now Iraq, and Gulbenkian held 15 per cent of it. In 1914 he cut his stake to 5 per cent to make room for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. After the First World War the German share passed to France, and in 1925 the company won a concession from Iraq, then under British mandate.2 sources

On 31 July 1928, at Ostend in Belgium, the partners signed what became known as the Red Line Agreement. American companies came in, and every partner agreed not to develop oilfields inside a line drawn round the old Ottoman lands without the others. Gulbenkian kept his 5 per cent of the crude, and he regarded the deal as his greatest achievement.2 sources

He spent the money on art. Between 1928 and 1930 he bought pieces from the Hermitage in Leningrad, which the Soviet government was selling through its trading agency Antikvariat. Rubens's portrait of his wife Helena Fourment, once owned by Catherine the Great, became his in March 1930. He also bought about 200 objects from the French jeweller and glassmaker René Lalique, including 82 jewels, directly from the artist.3 sources

By his death the collection held more than 6,000 pieces, from Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian, Armenian, Persian and Japanese art, with paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Manet, Degas and Monet. In the 1930s the National Gallery's young director, Kenneth Clark, advised him on purchases, and from 1937 the two discussed a Gulbenkian institute beside the gallery in London.3 sources

Why it came to nothing depends on whom you read. The museum's history says the war ended the project, and that in 1947 Gulbenkian refused to let Clark's successor, Philip Hendy, show the paintings he had lent. The historian Jonathan Conlin, writing from the Foundation's archives, says plans and a model were made for a two-storey annexe, and that a series of slights by Clark's post-war successor changed Gulbenkian's mind. Conlin gives only an outline in that article and calls the episode a story in itself, told more fully elsewhere.2 sources

When France fell in 1940 Gulbenkian stayed in France. Since 1920 he had been commercial adviser to Persia, and as a member of its diplomatic mission he followed the French government to Vichy. Britain classed him as an enemy and froze his assets, and his oil partners used that as an excuse to stop paying him. In 1942 Persia joined the Allies, and he had to leave.2 sources

His son Nubar persuaded him to choose Portugal over Switzerland, because from a neutral Atlantic port it would be easier to escape to the United States. He arrived in Lisbon in April 1942, meaning it as a stopover, and took five suites at the Aviz Hotel. He lived there for the last 13 years of his life, never sold his house on the Avenue d'Iéna in Paris and never learned Portuguese.4 sources

On the night of 17 December 1942 he was arrested at the Aviz, in circumstances Conlin calls mysterious, and held briefly in Lisbon's central prison until the Egyptian ambassador arrived and got him released. He demanded to know the charge; under Salazar none was needed. It was his only direct experience of the regime, and he blamed his British partners for it.1 source

From 1942 he also had a Portuguese lawyer, José de Azeredo Perdigão, who kept out of the way when Gulbenkian's closest friend, the British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, came to visit. Gulbenkian wrote several wills. In 1923 he wanted the collection kept together, ideally in a museum in London or Paris. A will of 1950 proposed a foundation but did not say where. By then many of his best paintings had moved on loan from the National Gallery in London to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.2 sources

The last will, signed on 18 June 1953, left most of his fortune to a foundation for charity, art, education and science. Clause 10 made it “a Portuguese permanent Foundation” with its domicile in Lisbon, free to work in any country. Gulbenkian died in Lisbon on 20 July 1955, aged 86.3 sources

Accounts differ on what the will said about the art. The museum's collection history, like the report of the 1969 opening, says it sent the works to Lisbon and called for a museum there. The Foundation's biography of its founder and a 2026 museum podcast say it said nothing directly about the collection and left the question open.4 sources

The will named three trustees: Essayan, Perdigão and Radcliffe, one of Britain's senior judges and Gulbenkian's chief legal adviser since the 1930s. Radcliffe was to have “the supreme direction” of the estate and the Foundation and a salary of £20,000 a year. He wanted a board on which no single country would ever have a majority.1 source

Salazar saw it differently. Portugal was poor, and the Foundation's income could be compared, he noted, with the state's whole budget for education, health and welfare.1 source

Between September 1955 and June 1956 the trustees argued over the conditions Portugal set for treating the Foundation as a tax-exempt charity. The government wanted a Portuguese majority on the board and at least a third of all grants spent in Portugal. Radcliffe would accept at most a third of the seats for Portuguese nationals and a minimum of 15 per cent of grants. Unknown to him, Perdigão was passing their letters to Salazar and to Marcelo Caetano, who drafted at least two of Perdigão's replies.1 source

In the end Essayan sided with Perdigão. Radcliffe renounced his trusteeship on 1 June 1956, and on 18 July Decree-Law 40 690 approved statutes for a private, perpetual foundation based in Lisbon, with Perdigão as chairman of a four-member board.3 sources

Conlin also ties the Foundation's early generosity in Britain to the dispute. During it, Perdigão and his allies in the regime proposed a grant of £1.5 million to the National Gallery in London, paid over ten years, and a UK branch with a large starting budget opened in 1956. Such grants, Conlin writes, “could be said to have bought off” any trouble from official London, leaving Radcliffe no one to appeal to.1 source

The collection was the next fight. Perdigão said Gulbenkian had always wanted it kept together in Lisbon, though Conlin found no evidence that he had said so. In the museum's account, Radcliffe replied that there was no such obligation and that the works should go to English museums. In Conlin's, he said Gulbenkian had talked to the end of keeping them in Washington, where John Walker had shown him a film of a site beside the National Gallery of Art.2 sources

Conlin is careful about how far this can be settled. No letters or notes by Gulbenkian on his plans survive from after June 1953, so historians must choose between the competing memories of Radcliffe, Perdigão and the family. No architect's plans were ever drawn up for Washington, as they had been in London.1 source

Most of the objects were in Paris, and France required export permits. Curators flagged 55 works, and the permits for the last 43, including Houdon's Diana, came through only at the end of 1959. Conlin writes that France received Gulbenkian's estate at Deauville and promises of future grants. The museum's account adds that his Paris house became a Portuguese cultural centre, and that the Foundation built a residence for Portuguese students in Paris.3 sources

More than 1,200 crates left Paris in four shipments between August 1958 and February 1960, mostly by rail to Santo Amaro de Oeiras, west of Lisbon. Manuscripts and medals came by sea from London, and the paintings came from Washington. By June 1960, for the first time, all 6,440 objects Gulbenkian had bought were in one place.3 sources

The Foundation needed a building. On 30 April 1957 it bought 69,283 square metres, six sevenths of the Parque de Santa Gertrudes, from the Eugénio de Almeida family. The park had been laid out by the Swiss gardener Jacob Weiss in 1866 to 1870 and had since housed Lisbon's zoo, a racetrack and, from 1943, the Feira Popular, the city's funfair.2 sources

In 1959 the Foundation launched a limited competition between three teams of three architects. The brief asked for “a perpetual homage to the memory of Calouste Gulbenkian”. Building began in 1962, according to the Foundation's chronology (the garden's history gives 1963), with Luís Guimarães Lobato directing the works and the landscape architects Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and António Viana Barreto designing lawns, trees, pools and an open-air amphitheatre around the buildings.4 sources

Meanwhile the art went on show near where it had landed. On 20 July 1965, the tenth anniversary of Gulbenkian's death, 300 objects went on permanent display at the Palace of the Marquis of Pombal in Oeiras. They stayed there until 1969. The rest of the collection was stored in the palace, where torrential rains in 1967 damaged some of the pieces.4 sources

The finished complex was low and horizontal, built mainly of concrete. The six-storey headquarters block, two floors partly underground, held the entrance hall, offices and a restaurant. The museum and library stood to the east, with a long gallery for temporary exhibitions between the two blocks. The Grand Auditorium seated 1,315, and the amphitheatre in the park about 1,200.2 sources

The galleries were laid out as two circuits. The first ran through Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Mesopotamian, Islamic and Far Eastern art. The second covered Europe, from the Middle Ages through French eighteenth-century painting and furniture to nineteenth-century painting and sculpture, with a final section of goldsmiths' work. Lalique's jewels were among the pieces on show.1 source

By 1969 the Foundation was already part of Portuguese life. Its best-known programme was a service of travelling libraries, run by the writer Branquinho da Fonseca from its creation in 1957 until his death in 1974. He modelled it on the mobile library he had run for the Cascais municipal library since 1953. The first 15 vans went out in 1958.2 sources

In the second half of 1961 the network covered the whole of mainland Portugal with 47 travelling and 36 fixed libraries, and it reached the Azores and Madeira in 1963.1 source

The historian Daniel Melo argues that under a regime hostile to spreading culture, only the Gulbenkian and Catholic Action had enough independence to survive censorship and political surveillance. That independence had limits. Books were chosen by a committee that Conlin, citing an earlier history, describes as party faithful. Between 1960 and 1963 the political police, the PIDE, watched and denounced library staff, among them the poet Herberto Helder at Castro Verde. The one Gulbenkian library the regime closed was the one at the Coimbra students' union.2 sources

The arts followed. The Foundation started a permanent chamber orchestra in 1962 with only twelve musicians, created a choir in 1964 and took in an experimental ballet group in 1965. It gave postgraduate scholarships from its first years and began commissioning new music from Portuguese composers in 1963.2 sources

Perdigão kept close to the regime. In 1961, when Portugal was short of foreign currency, he brought about $16 million of the Foundation's investments home, and in a 1962 report he wrote of the great need for “Family, Church and School”.1 source

That closeness did not protect the Foundation from the regime. In June 1968 the government expelled the choreographer Maurice Béjart, whose company the Foundation had invited, after he asked the audience for a minute's silence. The Foundation's chronology says the silence was for Robert Kennedy, shot that month; the history Conlin cites describes it as one for the victims of dictatorship.2 sources

Its grants leaned towards Portugal too. In the early years 42 per cent of the money went to Portugal, a share that later rose above 85 per cent, by Conlin's count. After the revolution of 25 April 1974, which ended the dictatorship, two of the Foundation's directors were dismissed (Conlin counts five staff purged), and for a time it looked as if it might be nationalised. Perdigão defended it by arguing, as Radcliffe once had, that it was an international body.2 sources

The complex won the Valmor Prize for architecture in 1975. In 1983 the Foundation opened the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) in the garden, a building by the British architect Leslie Martin for a modern art collection that now numbers almost 12,000 works. Perdigão remained chairman until his death in 1993.4 sources

Decree 18/2010 of 28 December 2010 classified the headquarters building and park as a national monument, naming Athouguia, Pessoa, Cid, Ribeiro Telles and Viana Barreto as its designers. Docomomo Portugal, which records modern architecture, calls it the first contemporary work to be considered heritage in Portugal. Ribeiro Telles himself led a rehabilitation of the garden from 2002.4 sources

On 21 September 2024 the CAM reopened after more than four years of work, Kengo Kuma's first completed building in Portugal. Kuma added over 900 square metres of exhibition space and a 100-metre canopy of Portuguese ceramic tiles. He calls it an engawa, the Japanese term for a sheltered in-between space, and it faces a new southern extension of the garden.2 sources

The museum itself closed for about 18 months for a €7.8 million renovation, driven mainly by security, fire safety, ventilation and lighting. It reopened on 18 July 2026, the Foundation's seventieth anniversary, under a new director, Xavier Salomon, formerly of the Frick Collection in New York. The aim, he said, was to return the display as much as possible to its original 1969 state.2 sources

The Foundation now holds assets of around €3.5 billion. In 2024 it awarded 2,105 scholarships, and its garden receives about a million visitors a year.3 sources