Three paintings from Beirut’s cultural and artistic memory have returned to the Sursock Museum of Fine Art in Beirut, after their restoration at the Pompidou Center in France, after they were distorted during the Beirut port explosion on August 4, 2020, among other pieces of art. The first painting was painted by the Dutchman Kees van Dongen in the 1930s, representing the founder of the museum, Nicolas Sursock, and the second by the Lebanese painter Paul Guiragossian, entitled “Consolation”, and it represents the spectrum of a family embracing their child, while the third is (portrait) dating back to 1967 by Sissy Tamazio Sursock, and it represents Painter Odile Mazloum is one of the Beiruti cultural faces of the sixties. The director of the Sursock Museum of Ancient and Contemporary Fine Art, Karina El-Helou, explained: The three paintings that hung, (today), were sent to Paris for restoration after the terrible explosion that affected the neighborhoods near the port, and the museum is located in one of them because repairing them was difficult and complicated compared to other pieces of art. damaged, and that the paintings underwent months of work in the Department of Art Preservation at the Pompidou Center, one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the world, to return to how it was. It is worth noting that 66 paintings and sculptures from the museum’s permanent collection and works by the pioneering plastic artist George Daoud Corm (1896-1971) were damaged in the Beirut Port explosion disaster. The museum team specialized in restoration carried out the restoration of a large number of the sixty-six damaged pieces, including paintings and sculptures, to their previous condition in an elaborate manner, with the support of the French National Institute of Heritage. The museum, which opened in 1961, is located in the Sursock neighborhood of Beirut, in a palace built by Nicolas Sursock, who was passionate about the arts in 1912, and which he presented in his will before his death in 1952 to the Beirut municipality to convert it into an art museum.
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