By
Alexandra Papaisidorou*
Art lovers are preparing to welcome the impressive building which will house the new Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation Museum, located at 13 Eratosthenous Street - just a short distance from the Kallimarmaro Stadium - at the beginning of autumn.
The museum’s opening programme, which will comprise a series of events beginning on Tuesday 1st October 2019, will be announced soon.
The beginning of the operation of the museum will signal the end of a long period of uncertainty for its prospects due to the cancellation of initial plans for its construction on land offered by the Greek State.
Mainly, however, it will signal the beginning of a new chapter for the Foundation, whose aim is, in parallel to the museum on Andros, to promote this new home as a vehicle for the development of pioneering cultural activities through the exploitation of contemporary museological applications in the field of modern and contemporary Greek and international art.
The new museum, which will be called “Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation”, is housed in a self-owned building, which has occurred from the harmonious interaction between a listed, interwar building and a contemporary extension. Its construction began in August 2012 and was completed in October 2018.
The choice of location was based on the wish of Basil & Elise Goulandris for the museum to be situated in a central area of the capital, within the cultural axis Athens which includes the city’s large museum and easily accessible to visitors.
The museum, which has a total surface area of 7,250 sq m and extends over 11 floors, will house rare works by important artists of the modern and contemporary European avant-garde including Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, Degas, Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Picasso, Braque, Leger, Miro, Giacometti, Balthus and others, as well as works by distinguished Greek pioneering painters such as Parthenis, Bouzianis, Vasiliou, Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Tsarouchis, Moralis, Tetsis, and others.
It will also host temporary exhibitions by Greek and foreign artists which will be in keeping with the exhibition policy followed by the Foundation over the past thirty-five years. Auxiliary spaces will house the museum’s shop and cafe-restaurant, art library, children’s workshop, as well as a state-of-the-art auditorium with a capacity of 190 seats.
The project also includes the redesign of the square of Agios Spiridonas offered as a gift by the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation to the Municipality of Athens.
*Editor-at-large & PhD candidate of European & International Relations
By: N. Peter Kramer
