Touching base with the Duke

Another sunny day? It’s beginning to seem like normal weather for Lisbon. A nice soft light (not sharp and intense like back home) along with a big river breeze that doesn’t kick up any dust. Balmy. One could go out and conquer the world. Like the Portuguese duke Afonso de Albuquerque did in the early 16th century (Not to be confused with the Spanish duke Albuquerque is named after).

Trekking to Bélem to see the modern art exhibits at the Museu Coleção Berardo, we took some time to wander over to Afonso’s statue dominating the park across from the gigantic monastery we visited on Friday. At the base of the statue were four bas relief squares celebrating “the lion of the seas.” A key player in establishing the initial colonies that set up the Portuguese Empire, he was noted for being a ruthless military strategist (bas relief #1) and an able administrator (bas relief #2). In other words, a successful bully. Of all the possible Albuquerques, I’m glad he isn’t our Albuquerque.

But back to the museum which was first on our list. As we seemed to be the only people approaching the expansive empty walk outside the immense walls of the Berardo, I felt like we were figures in a Chiraco painting. In other words, I was pumped for some modern art. And I wasn’t disappointed. The space in the Berardo was built so that the visitor can easily glide from gallery to gallery where the ceiling is high and the walls are tall. Connoisseurs talk about opening a bottle of wine to let it breathe, I prefer spacious galleries that do the same for the art displayed.

Devoting rooms to every modern art movement you can imagine, the Berardo has an incredible collection. Like MOMA in NY, only with more breathing room. Here is one of the paintings:

Glasses. Roving the streets of Lisbon, I keep noticing how couples wear matching pairs of sunglasses.

Proust says nothing gets so trapped in time as hairdos and clothing, so with this representative work…

I try to think back to my twenties. Trippy. But other than John and Yoko, do I remember matching sunglasses as part of the courting ritual? When couples break up nowadays do they signify the act by changing the design of their shades? Or am I reading too much into fashion bonding when it turns out that for people under forty there’s only one brand of sunglasses on the market?

Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology

Ella’s pick for a final destination today was MAAT (Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia). Installed in an old electrical plant that has been cleaned up and polished, it was like touring the innards of some power generating Futurist beast, iron latticework catwalks above monstrous glistening black steam pipes tangled amid blood red walls, dark steel housing hiding the blades of mill-wheel size rotors, levers that look like they were cast in some medieval forge, it was a freshly painted temple to Henry Adams’ Virgin-denying Dynamo. And in the basement where the underground workers of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” are meant to be, I find an arresting tableau.

And I consider: perhaps this is how my distant, dissipated monk paid his karmic debt? In the ash pit shoveling coal firing up the heat that turned the turbines providing light for poets like Fernando Pessoa. Little did my monk know that in his reckless debauchery he was embarking on a karmic journey that would help a Portuguese writer craft his verse throughout the dark nights of the 1930s.