Among the dozens of paintings that were in the Sursock Museum of Fine Art in Beirut and were distorted by the city's port explosion on August 4, 2020, three are linked to personalities who "contributed to the renaissance of Lebanese cultural life." They returned on Tuesday to their place after a rescue operation at the French Pompidou Center.

The director of the Sursock Museum of Ancient and Contemporary Art, Karina El-Helou, told AFP that the three paintings that were hung on Tuesday were sent to Paris for restoration after the terrible explosion that damaged 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.” affected.”

El-Helou added, "These paintings underwent months of work in the Department of Art Preservation at the Center Pompidou," one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the world, to return to how they were.

With great care, Malik El Setif, who has been working in the museum for about nine years, took out the carefully packed paintings from their wooden boxes at the end of last week, while he was wearing gloves.

The first piece, drawn by the Dutchman Kees Van Dongen in the thirties of the twentieth century, represents the founder of the museum, Nicolas Sursock, sitting on a chair, and it was subjected to a deep horizontal tear near the eye. The painting will be installed where it was, in Nicolas Sursock's office on the second floor. "It was as if she was sick and had traveled to seek treatment," says Al-Stif.

Al-Helou recounts that Dongen, of Dutch origin, who was living in France, visited Beirut at that time and painted several portraits in the Lebanese capital for families from this region and clerics. And she stresses that "this painting has an important meaning in the museum's collection, as it confirms Lebanon's openness to the West and Beirut's pioneering role, as foreign artists used to visit it."

When the owner of Setif opened the second box, an oil painting by the Lebanese painter Paul Guiragossian entitled "Consolation" appeared in it, pulsating with tenderness and overshadowed by the white color. Al-Helou explains that Paul Guiragossian, one of the most prominent faces of Lebanese plastic art, was "affected by the war and distinguished by drawing the mother carrying her son."

El-Helou admired the restoration of the cracks in the third panel with fiery colors, and noticed the delicate work in weaving each thread of this personal drawing (portrait) dating back to 1967 by Sissi Tamazio Sursock, and representing the painter Odile Mazloum, who established an art gallery in Beirut, "and she was Since the sixties, he has been one of the most prominent cultural figures in Beirut.
The importance of the three paintings lies in the fact that they express "Beirut's cultural and artistic memory," according to El-Helou, who recalls that "Nicolas Sursock, Odile Mazloum, and Paul Guiragossian contributed to the renaissance of cultural life in Lebanon."

However, these paintings were not the only ones on which the Beirut explosion depicted the effects of the disaster. At the time of the explosion, which resulted in more than 200 dead and six thousand wounded, the Beirut Museum was holding two exhibitions, one of which included 26 impressionistic and expressive paintings by the pioneering Lebanese plastic artist George Daoud Corm (1896-1971), while the second collected more than 100 artworks by twenty-one plastic artists, from Among them are paintings in the museum's permanent collection.

The first and second floors, which housed the two galleries, were severely damaged. The walls cracked, the ornate wooden doors were shattered, and the high stained glass windows crumbled.

The fragments of glass and doors tore most of these paintings and the collapse of the suspended ceilings left white spots on them, while some of the paintings lost their colors.

In October 2020, the museum's curators finished removing the dust from more than 1,500 works of art that were safely preserved in underground layers, and consequently did not suffer any damage. In November, the dust was removed from the books and documents that adorned the museum's library.

The museum’s team specialized in restoration carried out the return of a large number of the sixty-six damaged pieces, including paintings and sculptures, to their previous state “in an elaborate manner, with the support of the French National Institute of Heritage,” according to El-Helou, and “his success in this task strengthened confidence in the role of the museum.” And he raised "the relief of the families of the late artists, whose paintings the museum owns."

Al-Helou stresses that the museum seeks to strengthen and develop this section, which is the most prominent in Lebanon in this field.

The museum is located in the Sursock neighborhood in Beirut, in a palace built by Nicolas Sursock, who was passionate about the arts, in 1912. In his will before his death in 1952, Sursock presented his palace to the Beirut Municipality to convert it into an art museum. It was opened for the first time in the year 1961.