The story
The Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation runs two museums, 40 years and a sea crossing apart. The first opened in July 1979 in Chora, the main town of the island of Andros. Andros was the birthplace of Basil Goulandris, a shipowner whose family firm ran one of the biggest Greek fleets, and the museum, presented as the first in Greece devoted to contemporary art, was built to show the work of the island's own sculptor, Michalis Tombros.
The second opened in Athens in October 2019, on Eratosthenous Street in the Pangrati district. It joins a 1920s neoclassical mansion to a new ten-storey wing, half of it underground. Here hangs the collection Basil and his wife Elise assembled from the post-war years onward, with Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin, Kandinsky, Francis Bacon and El Greco among the names. The couple had no children, and after Basil died in 1994 and Elise in 2000, their estate became the subject of long litigation.
Among the paintings in Athens are two by Vincent van Gogh. Les Alyscamps, from 1888, shows the old Roman burial avenue in Arles, lined with poplars and stone sarcophagi. Olive Picking dates from December 1889, during his year at the asylum in Saint-Rémy.
