Post by Bozur on Jul 13, 2008 13:50:14 GMT -5
Lisbon Comes Alive
After decades in the Continent’s shadows, Western Europe’s newest cultural capital is ready for the spotlight.
By SETH SHERWOOD
Published: July 13, 2008
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
A shop assistant tidies clothes and a teddy bear in Storytailors, where each year’s collection begins with a classic fairy tale.
FOR its 99th birthday last year, the decrepit Fábrica Braço de Prata factory complex underwent the real estate equivalent of a Saul-to-Paul spiritual conversion.
A manufacturer of weapons during the dark years of dictatorship in Portugal, the long-disused facility was reborn as Lisbon’s most ambitious new cultural venue. Guns and grenades were replaced by concert rooms, exhibition spaces, a sprawling bookstore, a cinema, a restaurant and various bars.
When the metamorphosis was complete, only one potentially troubling question lingered: Would Lisbonfolk actually drag themselves to the city’s outskirts to visit an old industrial space with sinister associations and an unusually eclectic booking policy encompassing everything from electronic music to philosophical conferences to free-form jazz?
“It was a big risk,” said Michel de Roubaix, a resident artist who is the accordion-playing leader of a postmodern cabaret show at the center.
After all, this wasn’t a metropolis with a well-established avant-garde tradition like Paris or Berlin, but dowdy old Lisbon, a small Catholic city that is best known for inexpensive seafood meals, throwback cable cars and faded colonial architecture from Portugal’s long-vanished international empire.
But on a balmy night in March, the throngs filing into the complex made it clear that the city was more than ready for a bit of progressive bohemia in their remote corner of the Continent. Looking like the assembled listenership of some Portuguese version of National Public Radio, a buzzing crowd of tweedy academics, tattooed cool kids, bourgeois couples and bespectacled grad-student types fanned out to sample Fábrica Braço de Prata’s typically diverse offerings: a jazz combo, a reggae outfit, a Leonard Cohen documentary and a 1 a.m. after-party featuring D.J.’s and alternative bands.
“It’s creative in all areas — theater, art, music, dance,” Mr. de Roubaix said of the venue’s appeal, clearly pleased by its unexpected success. “There’s a fast turnover of events and shows that keeps the place very dynamic.”
The same could be said for 21st-century Lisbon.
Fábrica Braço de Prata’s transformation is emblematic of the city’s sudden cultural emergence. Like the factory, Portugal languished for much of the 20th century on Europe’s geographic and cultural margins. From the 1920s until the 1970s, a repressive dictatorship smothered the nation, sending the creative classes fleeing to London and Paris and severely stunting any potential arts scene. The economy also slumped. Once the center of*global trade empire, Portugal sunk into notoriety as Western Europe’s poorest nation.
As dust collected on Lisbon’s monuments — Roman theaters, Moorish edifices, Gothic churches, Baroque squares — the city became the Miss Havisham of Western Europe: a relic, forgotten and forlorn.
The last of the Western European capitals to experience a cultural bloom, Lisbon is avidly making up for lost time. All over the city, an upstart generation is laying waste to the sepia-toned stereotypes and gleefully constructing edgy and forward-looking ventures amid the time-worn monuments and quaint cobbled lanes.
“I remember being a kid and thinking, ‘Nothing happens in Lisbon. Why should we have to go abroad to see stuff happening and new stuff and to get inspired?’ “ said Nuno Pinho, 33, co-owner of*gallery called In-Cubo that opened last year. “Now there are so many things happening in Lisbon that you can’t get to everything — concerts, exhibitions.”
“It is not an old-fashioned city where the women still carry fish on their heads.”
A former antiques store, In-Cubo is devoted to graffiti and other contemporary urban art forms. Similar renovations are taking place throughout the neighborhood, Principe Real, where dilapidated buildings are filling with concept stores, galleries and boutiques. A short walk away, a formerly louche strip club called Cabaret Maxime has reopened as a much-ballyhooed new nightclub for the city’s most unusual and alternative bands and performance outfits. Throw in Lisbon’s new world-class art museum, the Berardo Collection Museum, and a nascent fashion scene, and you have Western Europe’s fastest-rising cultural center.
The future appears even brighter. Next year may see the much-awaited opening of MuDe, an eight-story museum of international fashion and design. Meanwhile, Norman Foster has been hired to construct a vast new development in Lisbon’s emerging design district, Santos , that will add even more cutting-edge shops and art spaces to the waterfront. The star architect Jean Nouvel, this year’s winner of the Pritzker Prize, is also slated to add his postmodern stamp to the Lisbon cityscape. His Alcântara-Mar project, if realized, will contain four sleek buildings of restaurants, cafes, boutiques, gardens and apartments.
And as the city’s cool factor has surged, so has its international profile. MTV Europe held its music awards in Lisbon in 2005. Last year, the influential London-based World Travel and Tourism Council held its annual convention there. If anything, the global spotlight seems likely to get even more intense thanks to a bevy of high-profile international festivals that have started in recent years, including the biennial ExperimentaDesign (next up in 2009) and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (coming again in 2010).
On a balmy spring night, the gala 30th edition of Moda Lisboa, Lisbon’s twice-yearly fashion week, was in full swing. As a pulsating electronic-music beat filled the Estoril Casino ballroom, female models filed down a catwalk in futuristic black and gray garments suggesting haute-couture flight suits. Conceived by a young designer named Katty Xiomara, and known as “Metropolis,” the retro-futuristic collection owed a clear debt to Fritz Lang’s sci-fi film.
“In the beginning we didn’t have buyers, no fashion magazines, no journalists and only one modeling agency,” said Eduarda Abbondanza, the festival’s director, of the early editions of Moda Lisboa, in the 1990s. Next to her, Portuguese and Italian camera crews interviewed designers and local VIPs, many with champagne flutes and BlackBerrys in hand.
“Now we have fashion universities, and the world media is here,” she observed before shooting off a list of Portuguese designers now working senior positions in major international fashion houses: Balenciaga, Givenchy, Betsey Johnson.
For designers who have chosen to stay at home, the old lanes of the Bairro Alto and Chiado districts have become the choice spots for launching stores and showrooms.
By night, hipsters and young professionals fill the area’s myriad bars and D.J. lounges. By day, tranquillity resumes and savvy clotheshorses snap up locally made threads in boutiques like Ana Salazar and Alves/Gonçalves. Much of the best work imaginatively channels Portuguese history, geography or even literature into distinctive 21st-century garments.
“I’m from Madeira island, from the sun,” said Fátima Lopes, 43, the dark-eyed queen of Portuguese fashion, as she sat one afternoon in her eponymous Bairro Alto boutique. “I am used to wearing miniskirts and shorts. For me the body is nothing to hide.”
It’s hardly a surprising statement coming from a woman who in 2000 astonished Paris Fashion Week by mounting the runway in a self-designed bikini outfitted with about a million dollars’ worth of diamonds. (They were supplied by an Antwerp merchant.)
Similarly, a Latin warmth radiates throughout the angular, postmodern shop, whose bright orange and red walls hold all manner of colorful, finely cut and close-fitting clothing: slimly tailored gunmetal blue suits for men, long, low-cut red diva dresses for women. The Fátima Lopes woman, the designer said, “is strong and at the same time very feminine.”
As for fairy-tale waifs, coy Lolitas and escapees from the pages of “Wuthering Heights,” they flash their credit cards at Storytailors, certainly the most brilliantly strange new store to set up in Lisbon.
Opened in 2007 by the young design duo João Branco and Luis Sanchez, Storytailors isn’t so much a retail outlet as a cabinet of wonders where the ghosts of Lewis Carroll and the Brothers Grimm haunt the racks. The 18th-century warehouse brims with hoopskirts, corsets and elaborate lace getups adorned with richly patterned fabrics and kaleidoscopic colors.
Regally enfolded in a Baroque-style armchair, Mr. Branco, 30, explained that each year’s line of clothes began with a classic fairy tale, myth or legend, either Portuguese or international. The pair then hire writers to transform it into “twisted stories,” whose characters and experiences form the basis of various collections.
These literary-sartorial mash-ups, Mr. Branco said, have yielded “Narkë: the History of a Dress” (about a Cinderella offshoot who “was cursed to travel through time,”) EUphyra (about “a Medusa who wanted to fly”) and “E.L.A (lice) and Ela (Queen of Roses)” (the tale of a schizophrenic girl that mixes elements of “Alice in Wonderland” and a Portuguese myth about “a queen that transforms roses into bread for the poor”).
“People often said when we started this project that we should go elsewhere, like London or Paris,” Mr. Branco said, smiling and shaking his head at the memory. “Still, we believed that there was potential in Portugal and that there was something happening in Portugal.”
So far, he’s been right. The pair’s dresses now hang in the personal wardrobes of the British singer Lily Allen and Madonna.
Situated across the street from the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos — a magnificent 16th-century Gothic monastery built at the height of the Portuguese empire — the year-old Berardo Collection Museum is Lisbon’s boldest 21st-century bid to recapture some cultural prominence.
As Prime Minister José Sócrates remarked when the museum debuted last year, “In the past, the European route of modern art ended in Madrid.” He added, “Now it ends here.”
It’s the kind of boast that one expects from a cheerleading politician, of course. But the goods on the walls easily back him up. The place is packed with iconic 20th-century works that seem transposed from the pages of coffee-table books and glossy art-history bibles. Picasso, Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Francis Bacon, Richard Serra, Nam June Paik, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky — all the heavyweights are there, amassed over the years by the Portuguese business titan José Berardo.
On a lazy afternoon, couples and 20-something art students strolled through the airy white galleries, pausing to contemplate Salvador Dali’s “White Aphrodisiac Telephone” (topped with a lobster), while a guide held forth to a group of school kids about Andy Warhol’s “Ten Foot Flowers” canvas.
“Lisbon can now show the world that it can be a modern and contemporary art center,” said the museum’s director, Jean-François Chougnet, who formerly oversaw France’s vast network of public museums. Equally important, the Berardo can help introduce the wider world to Portugal’s many talented artists, Mr. Chougnet said.
He paused before a hallucinatory pastoral scene painted by Paula Rego, a Portuguese artist based mostly in London. Entitled “The Barn,” it depicted two young girls gleefully whipping the exposed backside of a milkmaid passed out next to a cow. “She’s already had two retrospectives at the Tate.”
Nearby, he motioned to some monolithic silvery blocks — like shiny refrigerators carved with grid patterns — by the sculptor Pedro Cabrita Reis. “He’s one of the favorite artists of Norman Foster,” he explained. “Foster has a huge collection.”
A few days later, as the Saturday afternoon washing fluttered on Lisbon’s wrought-iron balconies, a few dozen locals and travelers boarded a pair of buses outside the Museu da Cidade. Destination: a visit to the hot local and international artists of tomorrow.
Organized by Lisboarte (www.lisboarte.com), a confederation of local galleries, the buses make two separate circuits around the city, ferrying curious parties and collectors to exhibition spaces that have coordinated the debuts of their new shows. These free tours, which happen about six times a year, are essential in a city with an expanding art scene but no concentrated gallery district. (The next tour is Sept. 13.)
In a darkened alcove of the Galeria Luís Serpa, a flickering video depicted a white lily slowly wilting and dying as a disembodied female voice read from “The Inferno” in Arabic.
One of the most prestigious galleries in Lisbon — along with the likes of Vera Cortes Art Agency and Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art — Luís Serpa has been a passionate advocate of Portuguese artists (including Cabrita Reis), championing their work in global forums like Art Basel and the Frieze Art Fair in London. The gallery has also shown creations by boldface foreigners like Chuck Close and Robert Wilson.
But its most ambitious project is yet to come. Next year, the gallery’s namesake owner is creating a “think tank” of international experts — urban planners, cultural impresarios — who will devise strategies for fully elevating Lisbon, at last, into a globally recognized cultural capital. A large part of his hope, he explained, is to lure creative people from around the world and “to create a cosmopolitan place where new talent can come and create in a new way.”
“I think Lisbon has a very, very good chance to be a transcultural platform for the creative industries in the future, because we have such good weather, food, unused spaces” and low prices, said Mr. Serpa, sporting an elegant tieless suit and eating a cookie. “Architecture, design, art, photography and literature will all be involved.”
A decade ago, such a pronouncement would have drawn laughs. On this day, however, the only sound was some well-dressed middle-aged women appreciatively questioning the video installation’s creator, a French photographer named Marie Bovo. Later in the year, Mr. Serpa said, the gallery intended to host exhibitions by artists “from China to Egypt to Iran to France to Spain.”
“Lisbon has the potential to become the most cosmopolitan and international city,” he said as the cadences of Dante’s masterpiece, in Arabic, mingled with his guests’ French, English and Portuguese chatter. “I really believe that.”
A BIT OF PROGRESSIVE BOHEMIA IN A REMOTE CORNER OF THE CONTINENT
GETTING THERE
Continental, United and the Portuguese airline TAP all fly between Newark Liberty airport and Lisbon. Fares for travel in August start at around $1,200 round trip, according to a recent Web search.
WHERE TO STAY
The 42-room Heritage Av Liberdade (Avenida da Liberdade 28; 351-21-340-4040; was designed by the Portuguese architect Miguel Câncio Martins, who has worked on such hip hangouts as the Pacha Club in Marrakesh and the Buddha Bar in Paris. It occupies an attractive 18th-century colonial structure and doubles cost 224 to 250 euros (about $350 to $400 at $1.59 to the euro) depending on the season.
Also housed in a lovely 18th-century building, the three-year-old, 55-room Bairro Alto Hotel (Praça Luís de Camões 2, 351-21-340-8288; is a sleek boutique hotel in the heart of Lisbon’s main shopping and night-life district. Excellent rooftop bar. The rack rate for doubles, including taxes and breakfast, is 395 euros, but better deals can often be found online or by calling.
John Le Carré and Graham Greene are among the luminaries who have holed up at the venerable York House (Rua das Janelas Verdes 32; 351-21-396-2435; , a 17th-century mansion that was redone in 2004. Located in the Santos design district, it is an excellent choice for furniture and home-décor aficionados. Doubles range from 150 euros to 250 euros depending on the day and season.
WHERE TO EAT
The chef Vitor Sobral literally wrote the book on contemporary Lisbon cooking as co-author of the culinary bible known as “Nova Cozinha Portuguesa” (“New Portuguese Cuisine”). At Terreiro Do Paço (Praça do Comércío; 351-21-031-2850; he whips up creative concoctions like salt-cod carpaccio, Azores tuna with mango-tomato-fig compote, and pineapple goat-cheese ravioli. Three courses for two, without wine, run about 100 euros.
Situated in the Santos Design District, the minimalist-cool Cop ‘3 (Largo Vitorino Damásio 3, 351-21-397-3094; opened in 2006 and also specializes in nouveau Portuguese cuisine. Offerings include roasted sardines with sea salt and Alvarinho wine, and swordfish with coriander crust. Two people can eat three courses, without wine, for around 90 euros.
Lisbon’s first Michelin-starred restaurant, Eleven (Rua Marquês de Fronteira, Jardim Amália Rodrigues; 351-21-386-2211; serves up flashy Portuguese-modern dishes like octopus terrine and black pork loin in red pepper crust. Tasting menus at 69 and 85 euros per person.
ART
From Picasso to Warhol to Andreas Gursky, the new Berardo Collection Museum (Praça do Império; 351-21-361-2878 in the Belém Cultural Center holds a world-class collection of international modern and contemporary art. Among the top local galleries for Portuguese and global conceptual art are Galeria Luís Serpa Projectos (Rua Tenente Raul Cascais 1B; 351-21-397-7794) and Cristina Guerra (Rua Santo António à Estrela 33; 351-21-395-9559; .
FASHION AND DESIGN
Classic Portuguese products and design items, from hair tonics to cool ceramics, are affectionately presented at A Vida Portuguesa (Rua Anchieta 11; 351-21-346-5073; . For edgy lighting, unusual sculpture and other contemporary Portuguese and European creations, hit Fabrico Infinito (Rua Dom Pedro V, 74; 351-21-246-7629; , a concept store and cafe.
Portugal’s fashion queen, Fátima Lopes (Rua da Atalaia 36, 351-21-324-0546; , does colorful and streamlined outfits for men and women. Design duo Storytailors (Calçada do Ferragial 8, 351-21-343-2306; , meanwhile, create flamboyant retro-bizarre clothes for women based on their own original fairy tales and myths.
MUSIC AND NIGHT LIFE
A former strip club, the venerable Cabaret Maxime (Praça da Alegria 58, 351-21-346-7090; was reopened two years ago as a bar and nightclub dedicated to staging some of Lisbon’s most adventurous and alternative acts.
With numerous concert rooms, art spaces and conference areas — as well as a bookstore, bar and restaurant — the newly restored weapons factory known as Fábrica Braço de Prata (Rua da Fábrica do Material de Guerra 1, 351-9-6735-4817; is a hotbed of culture in Lisbon.
SETH SHERWOOD, based in Paris, is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.
travel.nytimes.com/
After decades in the Continent’s shadows, Western Europe’s newest cultural capital is ready for the spotlight.
By SETH SHERWOOD
Published: July 13, 2008
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
A shop assistant tidies clothes and a teddy bear in Storytailors, where each year’s collection begins with a classic fairy tale.
FOR its 99th birthday last year, the decrepit Fábrica Braço de Prata factory complex underwent the real estate equivalent of a Saul-to-Paul spiritual conversion.
A manufacturer of weapons during the dark years of dictatorship in Portugal, the long-disused facility was reborn as Lisbon’s most ambitious new cultural venue. Guns and grenades were replaced by concert rooms, exhibition spaces, a sprawling bookstore, a cinema, a restaurant and various bars.
When the metamorphosis was complete, only one potentially troubling question lingered: Would Lisbonfolk actually drag themselves to the city’s outskirts to visit an old industrial space with sinister associations and an unusually eclectic booking policy encompassing everything from electronic music to philosophical conferences to free-form jazz?
“It was a big risk,” said Michel de Roubaix, a resident artist who is the accordion-playing leader of a postmodern cabaret show at the center.
After all, this wasn’t a metropolis with a well-established avant-garde tradition like Paris or Berlin, but dowdy old Lisbon, a small Catholic city that is best known for inexpensive seafood meals, throwback cable cars and faded colonial architecture from Portugal’s long-vanished international empire.
But on a balmy night in March, the throngs filing into the complex made it clear that the city was more than ready for a bit of progressive bohemia in their remote corner of the Continent. Looking like the assembled listenership of some Portuguese version of National Public Radio, a buzzing crowd of tweedy academics, tattooed cool kids, bourgeois couples and bespectacled grad-student types fanned out to sample Fábrica Braço de Prata’s typically diverse offerings: a jazz combo, a reggae outfit, a Leonard Cohen documentary and a 1 a.m. after-party featuring D.J.’s and alternative bands.
“It’s creative in all areas — theater, art, music, dance,” Mr. de Roubaix said of the venue’s appeal, clearly pleased by its unexpected success. “There’s a fast turnover of events and shows that keeps the place very dynamic.”
The same could be said for 21st-century Lisbon.
Fábrica Braço de Prata’s transformation is emblematic of the city’s sudden cultural emergence. Like the factory, Portugal languished for much of the 20th century on Europe’s geographic and cultural margins. From the 1920s until the 1970s, a repressive dictatorship smothered the nation, sending the creative classes fleeing to London and Paris and severely stunting any potential arts scene. The economy also slumped. Once the center of*global trade empire, Portugal sunk into notoriety as Western Europe’s poorest nation.
As dust collected on Lisbon’s monuments — Roman theaters, Moorish edifices, Gothic churches, Baroque squares — the city became the Miss Havisham of Western Europe: a relic, forgotten and forlorn.
The last of the Western European capitals to experience a cultural bloom, Lisbon is avidly making up for lost time. All over the city, an upstart generation is laying waste to the sepia-toned stereotypes and gleefully constructing edgy and forward-looking ventures amid the time-worn monuments and quaint cobbled lanes.
“I remember being a kid and thinking, ‘Nothing happens in Lisbon. Why should we have to go abroad to see stuff happening and new stuff and to get inspired?’ “ said Nuno Pinho, 33, co-owner of*gallery called In-Cubo that opened last year. “Now there are so many things happening in Lisbon that you can’t get to everything — concerts, exhibitions.”
“It is not an old-fashioned city where the women still carry fish on their heads.”
A former antiques store, In-Cubo is devoted to graffiti and other contemporary urban art forms. Similar renovations are taking place throughout the neighborhood, Principe Real, where dilapidated buildings are filling with concept stores, galleries and boutiques. A short walk away, a formerly louche strip club called Cabaret Maxime has reopened as a much-ballyhooed new nightclub for the city’s most unusual and alternative bands and performance outfits. Throw in Lisbon’s new world-class art museum, the Berardo Collection Museum, and a nascent fashion scene, and you have Western Europe’s fastest-rising cultural center.
The future appears even brighter. Next year may see the much-awaited opening of MuDe, an eight-story museum of international fashion and design. Meanwhile, Norman Foster has been hired to construct a vast new development in Lisbon’s emerging design district, Santos , that will add even more cutting-edge shops and art spaces to the waterfront. The star architect Jean Nouvel, this year’s winner of the Pritzker Prize, is also slated to add his postmodern stamp to the Lisbon cityscape. His Alcântara-Mar project, if realized, will contain four sleek buildings of restaurants, cafes, boutiques, gardens and apartments.
And as the city’s cool factor has surged, so has its international profile. MTV Europe held its music awards in Lisbon in 2005. Last year, the influential London-based World Travel and Tourism Council held its annual convention there. If anything, the global spotlight seems likely to get even more intense thanks to a bevy of high-profile international festivals that have started in recent years, including the biennial ExperimentaDesign (next up in 2009) and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (coming again in 2010).
On a balmy spring night, the gala 30th edition of Moda Lisboa, Lisbon’s twice-yearly fashion week, was in full swing. As a pulsating electronic-music beat filled the Estoril Casino ballroom, female models filed down a catwalk in futuristic black and gray garments suggesting haute-couture flight suits. Conceived by a young designer named Katty Xiomara, and known as “Metropolis,” the retro-futuristic collection owed a clear debt to Fritz Lang’s sci-fi film.
“In the beginning we didn’t have buyers, no fashion magazines, no journalists and only one modeling agency,” said Eduarda Abbondanza, the festival’s director, of the early editions of Moda Lisboa, in the 1990s. Next to her, Portuguese and Italian camera crews interviewed designers and local VIPs, many with champagne flutes and BlackBerrys in hand.
“Now we have fashion universities, and the world media is here,” she observed before shooting off a list of Portuguese designers now working senior positions in major international fashion houses: Balenciaga, Givenchy, Betsey Johnson.
For designers who have chosen to stay at home, the old lanes of the Bairro Alto and Chiado districts have become the choice spots for launching stores and showrooms.
By night, hipsters and young professionals fill the area’s myriad bars and D.J. lounges. By day, tranquillity resumes and savvy clotheshorses snap up locally made threads in boutiques like Ana Salazar and Alves/Gonçalves. Much of the best work imaginatively channels Portuguese history, geography or even literature into distinctive 21st-century garments.
“I’m from Madeira island, from the sun,” said Fátima Lopes, 43, the dark-eyed queen of Portuguese fashion, as she sat one afternoon in her eponymous Bairro Alto boutique. “I am used to wearing miniskirts and shorts. For me the body is nothing to hide.”
It’s hardly a surprising statement coming from a woman who in 2000 astonished Paris Fashion Week by mounting the runway in a self-designed bikini outfitted with about a million dollars’ worth of diamonds. (They were supplied by an Antwerp merchant.)
Similarly, a Latin warmth radiates throughout the angular, postmodern shop, whose bright orange and red walls hold all manner of colorful, finely cut and close-fitting clothing: slimly tailored gunmetal blue suits for men, long, low-cut red diva dresses for women. The Fátima Lopes woman, the designer said, “is strong and at the same time very feminine.”
As for fairy-tale waifs, coy Lolitas and escapees from the pages of “Wuthering Heights,” they flash their credit cards at Storytailors, certainly the most brilliantly strange new store to set up in Lisbon.
Opened in 2007 by the young design duo João Branco and Luis Sanchez, Storytailors isn’t so much a retail outlet as a cabinet of wonders where the ghosts of Lewis Carroll and the Brothers Grimm haunt the racks. The 18th-century warehouse brims with hoopskirts, corsets and elaborate lace getups adorned with richly patterned fabrics and kaleidoscopic colors.
Regally enfolded in a Baroque-style armchair, Mr. Branco, 30, explained that each year’s line of clothes began with a classic fairy tale, myth or legend, either Portuguese or international. The pair then hire writers to transform it into “twisted stories,” whose characters and experiences form the basis of various collections.
These literary-sartorial mash-ups, Mr. Branco said, have yielded “Narkë: the History of a Dress” (about a Cinderella offshoot who “was cursed to travel through time,”) EUphyra (about “a Medusa who wanted to fly”) and “E.L.A (lice) and Ela (Queen of Roses)” (the tale of a schizophrenic girl that mixes elements of “Alice in Wonderland” and a Portuguese myth about “a queen that transforms roses into bread for the poor”).
“People often said when we started this project that we should go elsewhere, like London or Paris,” Mr. Branco said, smiling and shaking his head at the memory. “Still, we believed that there was potential in Portugal and that there was something happening in Portugal.”
So far, he’s been right. The pair’s dresses now hang in the personal wardrobes of the British singer Lily Allen and Madonna.
Situated across the street from the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos — a magnificent 16th-century Gothic monastery built at the height of the Portuguese empire — the year-old Berardo Collection Museum is Lisbon’s boldest 21st-century bid to recapture some cultural prominence.
As Prime Minister José Sócrates remarked when the museum debuted last year, “In the past, the European route of modern art ended in Madrid.” He added, “Now it ends here.”
It’s the kind of boast that one expects from a cheerleading politician, of course. But the goods on the walls easily back him up. The place is packed with iconic 20th-century works that seem transposed from the pages of coffee-table books and glossy art-history bibles. Picasso, Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Francis Bacon, Richard Serra, Nam June Paik, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky — all the heavyweights are there, amassed over the years by the Portuguese business titan José Berardo.
On a lazy afternoon, couples and 20-something art students strolled through the airy white galleries, pausing to contemplate Salvador Dali’s “White Aphrodisiac Telephone” (topped with a lobster), while a guide held forth to a group of school kids about Andy Warhol’s “Ten Foot Flowers” canvas.
“Lisbon can now show the world that it can be a modern and contemporary art center,” said the museum’s director, Jean-François Chougnet, who formerly oversaw France’s vast network of public museums. Equally important, the Berardo can help introduce the wider world to Portugal’s many talented artists, Mr. Chougnet said.
He paused before a hallucinatory pastoral scene painted by Paula Rego, a Portuguese artist based mostly in London. Entitled “The Barn,” it depicted two young girls gleefully whipping the exposed backside of a milkmaid passed out next to a cow. “She’s already had two retrospectives at the Tate.”
Nearby, he motioned to some monolithic silvery blocks — like shiny refrigerators carved with grid patterns — by the sculptor Pedro Cabrita Reis. “He’s one of the favorite artists of Norman Foster,” he explained. “Foster has a huge collection.”
A few days later, as the Saturday afternoon washing fluttered on Lisbon’s wrought-iron balconies, a few dozen locals and travelers boarded a pair of buses outside the Museu da Cidade. Destination: a visit to the hot local and international artists of tomorrow.
Organized by Lisboarte (www.lisboarte.com), a confederation of local galleries, the buses make two separate circuits around the city, ferrying curious parties and collectors to exhibition spaces that have coordinated the debuts of their new shows. These free tours, which happen about six times a year, are essential in a city with an expanding art scene but no concentrated gallery district. (The next tour is Sept. 13.)
In a darkened alcove of the Galeria Luís Serpa, a flickering video depicted a white lily slowly wilting and dying as a disembodied female voice read from “The Inferno” in Arabic.
One of the most prestigious galleries in Lisbon — along with the likes of Vera Cortes Art Agency and Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art — Luís Serpa has been a passionate advocate of Portuguese artists (including Cabrita Reis), championing their work in global forums like Art Basel and the Frieze Art Fair in London. The gallery has also shown creations by boldface foreigners like Chuck Close and Robert Wilson.
But its most ambitious project is yet to come. Next year, the gallery’s namesake owner is creating a “think tank” of international experts — urban planners, cultural impresarios — who will devise strategies for fully elevating Lisbon, at last, into a globally recognized cultural capital. A large part of his hope, he explained, is to lure creative people from around the world and “to create a cosmopolitan place where new talent can come and create in a new way.”
“I think Lisbon has a very, very good chance to be a transcultural platform for the creative industries in the future, because we have such good weather, food, unused spaces” and low prices, said Mr. Serpa, sporting an elegant tieless suit and eating a cookie. “Architecture, design, art, photography and literature will all be involved.”
A decade ago, such a pronouncement would have drawn laughs. On this day, however, the only sound was some well-dressed middle-aged women appreciatively questioning the video installation’s creator, a French photographer named Marie Bovo. Later in the year, Mr. Serpa said, the gallery intended to host exhibitions by artists “from China to Egypt to Iran to France to Spain.”
“Lisbon has the potential to become the most cosmopolitan and international city,” he said as the cadences of Dante’s masterpiece, in Arabic, mingled with his guests’ French, English and Portuguese chatter. “I really believe that.”
A BIT OF PROGRESSIVE BOHEMIA IN A REMOTE CORNER OF THE CONTINENT
GETTING THERE
Continental, United and the Portuguese airline TAP all fly between Newark Liberty airport and Lisbon. Fares for travel in August start at around $1,200 round trip, according to a recent Web search.
WHERE TO STAY
The 42-room Heritage Av Liberdade (Avenida da Liberdade 28; 351-21-340-4040; was designed by the Portuguese architect Miguel Câncio Martins, who has worked on such hip hangouts as the Pacha Club in Marrakesh and the Buddha Bar in Paris. It occupies an attractive 18th-century colonial structure and doubles cost 224 to 250 euros (about $350 to $400 at $1.59 to the euro) depending on the season.
Also housed in a lovely 18th-century building, the three-year-old, 55-room Bairro Alto Hotel (Praça Luís de Camões 2, 351-21-340-8288; is a sleek boutique hotel in the heart of Lisbon’s main shopping and night-life district. Excellent rooftop bar. The rack rate for doubles, including taxes and breakfast, is 395 euros, but better deals can often be found online or by calling.
John Le Carré and Graham Greene are among the luminaries who have holed up at the venerable York House (Rua das Janelas Verdes 32; 351-21-396-2435; , a 17th-century mansion that was redone in 2004. Located in the Santos design district, it is an excellent choice for furniture and home-décor aficionados. Doubles range from 150 euros to 250 euros depending on the day and season.
WHERE TO EAT
The chef Vitor Sobral literally wrote the book on contemporary Lisbon cooking as co-author of the culinary bible known as “Nova Cozinha Portuguesa” (“New Portuguese Cuisine”). At Terreiro Do Paço (Praça do Comércío; 351-21-031-2850; he whips up creative concoctions like salt-cod carpaccio, Azores tuna with mango-tomato-fig compote, and pineapple goat-cheese ravioli. Three courses for two, without wine, run about 100 euros.
Situated in the Santos Design District, the minimalist-cool Cop ‘3 (Largo Vitorino Damásio 3, 351-21-397-3094; opened in 2006 and also specializes in nouveau Portuguese cuisine. Offerings include roasted sardines with sea salt and Alvarinho wine, and swordfish with coriander crust. Two people can eat three courses, without wine, for around 90 euros.
Lisbon’s first Michelin-starred restaurant, Eleven (Rua Marquês de Fronteira, Jardim Amália Rodrigues; 351-21-386-2211; serves up flashy Portuguese-modern dishes like octopus terrine and black pork loin in red pepper crust. Tasting menus at 69 and 85 euros per person.
ART
From Picasso to Warhol to Andreas Gursky, the new Berardo Collection Museum (Praça do Império; 351-21-361-2878 in the Belém Cultural Center holds a world-class collection of international modern and contemporary art. Among the top local galleries for Portuguese and global conceptual art are Galeria Luís Serpa Projectos (Rua Tenente Raul Cascais 1B; 351-21-397-7794) and Cristina Guerra (Rua Santo António à Estrela 33; 351-21-395-9559; .
FASHION AND DESIGN
Classic Portuguese products and design items, from hair tonics to cool ceramics, are affectionately presented at A Vida Portuguesa (Rua Anchieta 11; 351-21-346-5073; . For edgy lighting, unusual sculpture and other contemporary Portuguese and European creations, hit Fabrico Infinito (Rua Dom Pedro V, 74; 351-21-246-7629; , a concept store and cafe.
Portugal’s fashion queen, Fátima Lopes (Rua da Atalaia 36, 351-21-324-0546; , does colorful and streamlined outfits for men and women. Design duo Storytailors (Calçada do Ferragial 8, 351-21-343-2306; , meanwhile, create flamboyant retro-bizarre clothes for women based on their own original fairy tales and myths.
MUSIC AND NIGHT LIFE
A former strip club, the venerable Cabaret Maxime (Praça da Alegria 58, 351-21-346-7090; was reopened two years ago as a bar and nightclub dedicated to staging some of Lisbon’s most adventurous and alternative acts.
With numerous concert rooms, art spaces and conference areas — as well as a bookstore, bar and restaurant — the newly restored weapons factory known as Fábrica Braço de Prata (Rua da Fábrica do Material de Guerra 1, 351-9-6735-4817; is a hotbed of culture in Lisbon.
SETH SHERWOOD, based in Paris, is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.
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