National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum.
From El Greco to Tsarouchis. Doubled in size in 2021.
Museum
Since 1900
~11 min walk to Kolonaki Square
~12 min to Lycabettus Hill
Greece's national art museum, founded in 1900 and reopened in 2021 after an expansion that more than doubled it to 20,760 square metres. Around a thousand of its roughly 20,000 works, Greek and European art from the 14th to the 20th century, are on permanent display across three floors: El Greco's Concert of Angels, Gyzis, Lytras, Parthenis and the Generation of the '30s. A short walk from Evangelismos metro.
The National Gallery was founded on 10 April 1900, with the painter Georgios Jakobides of the Munich School as its first curator. Its core had come from the university's collections; four years earlier, the jurist Alexandros Soutsos had left his estate and paintings to the state for a museum of fine arts. The two institutions were formally merged in 1954, which is why the museum still carries his name.
The modernist building on Vasileos Konstantinou was designed by Pavlos Mylonas and Dimitris Fatouros. Work on its expansion, designed by Grammatopoulos–Panousakis Architects with D. Vassilopoulos & Associates and supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, began in 2014. When the museum reopened on 24 March 2021, the eve of the bicentenary of the War of Independence, it had grown from 9,720 to 20,760 square metres.
Twenty thousand works in the collection. A thousand on the walls. Choose your floor.
Of roughly 20,000 works, about a thousand are on permanent display, hung chronologically over three floors. El Greco is here with the late, unfinished Concert of Angels. The nineteenth century belongs to Nikiforos Lytras and Nikolaos Gyzis, whose Betrothal of the Children (1877) is one of the collection's best-known canvases. Further on, Konstantinos Parthenis and the Generation of the '30s, Tsarouchis among them, show how Greek painting found its modern voice.
Go on a Wednesday evening, when the doors stay open until ten. Entry to the permanent collection is €10.
1900
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