Founder’s Day at the Calouste Gulbenkian Center in Lisbon

“Calouste Gulbenkian’s deep faith played a major role in his monumental accomplishments.  He felt that his God-given abilities were an empowerment — at the very heart of his business successes and the foundation he established. Calouste Gulbenkian was able to overcome the hardships of being an immigrant — a stranger in a strange land — and transform that experience into the larger work of an architect who joined East to West.

“Our world today needs individuals like Calouste Gulbenkian. He was very proud of his identity as an Armenian, very comfortable in expressing it. But he was also a global personality. His many international philanthropic endeavors – establishing schools, hospitals, and churches – made him a good steward and citizen of the whole world.”

Then Barsamian expressed his appreciation to the past and present board members of the Gulbenkian Foundation who continue to promote the arts, charitable benevolence, education, and science in countless cultures and countries – empowering people worldwide while consistently serving as stewards of the Armenian community as well.

In the afternoon, Barsamian, together with Ambassador Garen Nazarian, the Armenian Ambassador to the Holy See and Portugal and the latter’s wife Nana, visited the Arshile Gorky and Jorge Queiroz Exhibition at the Gulbenkian Museum.

This exhibition aims to bring together two artists, one modern, Arshile Gorky (Khorkom, Armenia, c. 1904– Sherman, Connecticut, 1948), and the other contemporary, Jorge Queiroz (Lisbon, 1966). The initial idea was simply to observe the way in which Gorky’s work ‘speaks’ to Queiroz. And Queiroz transformed the project into an installation in which he welcomes, or receives, Gorky’s visit. As the artist mentioned in an accompanying text, he “frequented Gorky to the point of incorporating him into the vision for the exhibition (…) and Gorky was there [in the exhibition, in the studio] almost always sitting in black and white, like his photograph.”

Due to its long-standing relationship with Armenia, the Gulbenkian Foundation has on long-term loan 57 works by Arshile Gorky, property of the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern) in New York, and another three works in its Modern Art Centre collection. It was from this group that Queiroz selected the paintings and drawings to be presented in this exhibition, all belonging to the final period in Gorky’s career, in the 1940s, unanimously regarded as his best phase, in which the artist reached full maturity and achieved a visual language that was entirely his own.