The story
In 1954 the painter José de Almada Negreiros, a veteran of Portugal's first modernist circle, painted the poet Fernando Pessoa at a table for a Lisbon restaurant, Irmãos Unidos. The Gulbenkian Foundation wanted to buy it, found the price too high, and in 1964 commissioned a second version instead. It is almost a mirror image of the first, with Pessoa turned the other way, a cup of coffee in front of him and a copy of Orpheu, the magazine they had both written for, on the table. That second portrait is one of the best-known pictures at the Centro de Arte Moderna, the Foundation's museum of modern art in the same Lisbon park as the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum.
The building opened in 1983 to a design by the British architect Leslie Martin. After a long closure it reopened in September 2024, remodelled by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, who added a canopy about 100 metres long, clad in Portuguese ceramic tiles and modelled on the engawa, the covered veranda of a Japanese house.
Its collection of close to 12,000 works is one of the most important holdings of modern Portuguese art, running from Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, the Paris-trained modernist who died in 1918 at 30, to Paula Rego. Amadeo's Greyhounds, painted in 1911 during his first years in Paris, is among his works here.
