A Venetian-Ottoman villa given to the city as a modern art museum, wrecked by the port blast and reopened in 2023.
Nicolas Sursock was a member of one of the great Greek Orthodox merchant families of Beirut. He built this villa in 1912 in a style that mixes Venetian and Ottoman — arcaded loggias, marble, coloured glass — and on his death in 1952 he left it to the city as a museum of modern art.
It opened in 1961 and became the principal home of modern and contemporary Lebanese art.
The collection
Around 5,000 works, mostly Lebanese, from the late nineteenth century onwards.
Khalil Saleeby, Daoud Corm, Habib Srour — the founding generation of Lebanese painting. Moustafa Farroukh, César Gemayel, Saloua Raouda Choucair, whose abstract sculpture was rediscovered internationally late in her long life. Shafic Abboud, Etel Adnan, Huguette Caland.
There is also an important collection of Japanese prints and Islamic art assembled by the Sursock family, and a substantial holding of works acquired through the Salon d’Automne, which the museum has run since 1961.
The building is the other exhibit: the Arabic Salon, a full Ottoman-style reception room brought from a Sursock property, with carved and painted woodwork.
4 August 2020
The museum is about 800 metres from the port.
The explosion blew out the entire east facade, destroyed the stained glass, brought down ceilings, and damaged or destroyed dozens of works. A member of staff’s family member was killed. The photographs of the wrecked galleries went around the world.
Restoration took three years, funded by an international coalition of institutions and donors, and included the reassembly of the coloured glass from fragments.
It reopened on 26 May 2023.
The museum has not hidden any of this. There is documentation of the damage and the repair on display, and it is part of what you come to see.
What it is like now
Free-flowing, contemporary in its programming, and genuinely good. Rotating exhibitions of Lebanese and regional artists, a strong emphasis on the recent past, and a permanent display drawn from the collection.
There is a café and a good bookshop.
Practical
Free entry, which is unusual and is a deliberate policy.
Closed Tuesdays, with limited hours — check.
The walk from Gemmayzeh is steep. Achrafieh is a hill and Sursock Street climbs it.
Sursock Street itself is worth walking for the surviving nineteenth-century Beiruti villas — triple-arched central halls, red tile roofs, gardens — which are the last coherent stretch of the architecture that covered this whole city before the 1960s. Most of them are privately owned and several were badly damaged in 2020.
More Museums
National Museum of Beirut
The collection survived fifteen years on the front line because the director sealed it in concrete.
American University of Beirut
A green campus falling down a hillside to the sea, with the third oldest museum in the Middle East on it.
MIM Mineral Museum
One of the finest private mineral collections in the world, in a university basement, and almost nobody knows it is there.