From Lisbon with Love: The Museum of Contemporary Art

Photos by Maya Stoilova

My dearest artlings,

It was my mother’s 54th birthday that week. We had thought of all kinds of things to do, beaches and cafés among them, but - like all moms - she just wanted to be with me, and to indulge me. So we went to Lisbon, straight to the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The centre of Lisbon is a crammed, crowded, and somewhat off-putting cluster of decaying buildings, tourists, and tourist shops. It’s not what I expected, and I don’t recommend it. But venture to the coast, or up north towards the residential areas, and a whole other city opens up. The pavements turn pale beneath the sun; Neoclassical buildings rise above jacaranda trees, and fountains offer brief relief from the heat. There are pastelarias everywhere, some better than others, and enough of them to make you worry about your waistline. Then, near the docks, there is the best of it all: a collection of works by Picasso, Fontana, and Basquiat, at least according to the huge pink sign flanking its entrance.

Even with their big names looming over my head, I didn’t have great expectations. As far as I was aware, Portugal wasn’t famous for housing a ton of art — sans that Bosch I couldn’t see, due to the National Museum of Ancient Art’s temporary closure. My mother was equally bummed, by the way; she loves his monsters. So we paid and climbed the curved staircase, past a characteristically enormous Alexander Calder, expecting little more than a modest permanent collection and the usual museum fare.

How wrong we were! What we were actually walking into was An Atlantic Drift: The Arts of the 20th Century Based on the Berardo Collection, the museum’s reinstallation of its permanent collection. The exhibition traced the development of twentieth-century art across Europe and the Americas from 1909 to 1977, welcoming us in with a selection of photographs. And a bust, with a face so elongated and a nose so flat it had to be a Modigliani. (It was.) Then came the Surrealists, with their shoes, Man Ray sound boxes, and a lobster-handle telephone by Salvador Dalí. Only a few steps in, and we were already enthralled.

Stepping into the next room, we were greeted by a Louise Bourgeois installation, which sent us both into awe. It’s a circular construction (see the collage accompanying this article) inhabited only by two dresses and a cropped top hanging from the ceiling. According to the label and, more importantly, my mom, they evoke the three selves we women wear: the public self, in the Carolina-blue dress at the front; the domestic self, in the pale dress behind; and the maternal self, reduced to a top that reaches only to the breasts. No figure lurked inside, not that one needed to. The empty clothes said enough: three costumes for the roles we play as we move through the circles of life.

Bourgeois often spoke of women’s cage-like existence within the home, and described her Cells as spaces of physical and psychological pain. This one makes voyeurs of us all. We peer through its wires at a life some of us may recognise from within, while others are made to imagine how it feels: a woman confined by the very roles she is expected to inhabit. And as for who — or what — put her there? Perhaps the answer lies in the rather phallic silhouette of one hanging dress, complete with two balls at its base. Perhaps.

More masterpieces awaited in the next room. A fair few of Peggy Guggenheim’s lovers and husbands hung proudly on the wall: Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, among others, with their Surrealist visions, none of which I could understand. Before I could ponder them for much longer, I caught a Bacon in the distance and sprang towards it, only for my mother to tell me to slow down, breathe: what’s the deal with this one?

It’s a big canvas, as most of Francis Bacon’s are, with all his trademarks: straight lines, clear-cut colours, and smudged faces. But what makes it cooler than usual, even, is the puzzle. What looks like a seated boxer facing a sphinx is actually an imagination of a work by Ingres; no wonder it’s titled Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres. I don’t know the original. At that point, it becomes personal. How can I, visually literate as I think I am, not recognise it? Shame on me. Even my mom smirks, after having had her ears blown off about this Picabia and that Miró. So we pull out our phones and compare the painting to Ingres’ original; she sees more than I do, catching things intuitively, their postures, expressions, and eyes, and I smile. We’ve solved a riddle, or so we think.

Wandering into the next room, I ah at a Warhol (how I love Warhols) and pose in front of a Lichtenstein, only to become entranced by something I have never seen before. It’s by Tom Wesselmann, the first time I heard of him (too?), and it depicts a man and a woman in a domestic environment with references to the canon. A Black odalisque lounges in the foreground, her eyes and forehead cut out; a Matisse-like vase of flowers sits on the counter; and Expressionist sketches of women — along with two portraits that seem almost antique — line the walls. How cool. Almost as cool as the recreation of Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass hanging to its right.

Having browsed the entire museum in two hours, and moved through its artworks chronologically, we feel strangely upbeat and recharged. It’s not the usual feeling, when seeing one more thing might finish you off. Quite the opposite. We’ve seen just enough, with enough space to actually look. Room by room, the curators have led us through the progressions and transgressions of modern art, and we have followed happily. Perhaps it helped that we were looking together.

If you find yourself in Lisbon, give the Museum of Contemporary Art a try. You might enjoy it far more than anything else in that city. And, yes, that’s a bold claim.

But I mean it,

Maya