As we were passing by the millennial city towards the end of the year, we took the opportunity to discover the one museum that everyone is talking about: the Goulandris Foundation Art Museum.

Art comes in all its forms in the Greek capital, among the Goulandris, it sealed the story of this couple of shipowners and gave birth to a unique private collection in the world. Enlightened collectors, lovers of the arts and the world, Elise and Basil have left us an inheritance a treasure of exception to the city of Athens.

Founder of the first museum of contemporary art of Greece in Andros – stronghold of the family Goulandris -, it was not until a quarter of a century after the disappearance of the couple that the Goulandris Foundation opened its doors to the public in the ancient city. And the least we can say is that the museum has not opened half in size in the heart of the arty district of Pangrati with more than 7’000 m2 dedicated to the priceless private collection of two aesthetes.

This is because the museum is home to beautiful people. Three hundred works signed by the hands of the greatest masters of modern and contemporary art of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century. No need to look for a missing one … They are all here! Monet, Picasso, Rodin, Modigliani, Braque, Miro, Matisse, Chagall, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Kandinsky, Leger, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Giacometti, Bacon, Ernst or Soulages … and by their side the most beautiful figures of Greek modernism – Byzantios, Moralis, Takis, Parthenis, Mpouzianis, Tsarouchis, Tetsis and many others.

Various workshops, a library and a sublime terrace to bubble around a good (Greek) coffee.

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Photographies © Christoforos Doulgeris
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