New Lisbon contemporary museum opens to applause

LISBON (Reuters Life!) - Lisbon's new contemporary art museum opened this week to grand applause and Portuguese satisfaction that their capital finally has an artistic home to rival the best of other European cultural hotspots.

The permanent display consists of 862 pieces belonging to local investor Joe Berardo's vast private collection and includes works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dali and Roy Lichtenstein as well as local artist Paula Rego.

"With this display of art the country becomes richer and Lisbon a better city," Prime Minister Jose Socrates said as he entered the museum late on Monday. "In the past the European route of modern art ended in Madrid, now it begins here."

London auction house, Christie's, has valued the exhibited works at around 316 million euros ($425.3 million).

Of special note are Picasso's two pyramid shaped paintings from 1929 -- Femme dans un fauteuil rouge and Femme dans un fauteuil -- which represent a summary of violent works from previous years and are worth around 36 million euros.

This impressive production will be housed by the Belem Cultural Centre located at the heart of the capital and overlooking the Tagus river.

"The Belem Cultural Centre is an ideal space in Lisbon to display a collection of contemporary art of this quality," curator Rita Lougares told Reuters.

The collection, worthy of the Tate Modern in London or the Pompidou Centre in Paris, is the first of its kind in Portugal and will inject the country with a much-needed dose of cultural entertainment of the kind that other European countries have long since made readily available.

But the museum was only made possible by a private-public partnership between Berardo, a 62-year-old self-made man who earned a fortune in mining in South Africa, and the Portuguese government after 10 years of negotiations.

Under the partnership agreement the Portuguese state will incur the costs of displaying Berardo's collection and has the option of buying the entire exhibition for 316 million euros by 2016.

Berardo's Museum, flanked by two impressive green-bottled structural pieces by Portuguese sculptor, Joana Vasconcelos, has three color-coded floors divided by seven genres ranging from Surrealism to Pop Art and Minimalism.

"It's an opportunity for Portuguese artists to be exhibited on the same stage as other international artists," she said, adding that the museum would also help bridge the gap between local artists and the rest of the world.