National Gallery - Alexandros Soutsos Museum
Greece's national collection of modern and older art, in a building doubled in size and reopened in 2021.
The National Gallery grew out of a collection of 117 works assembled in 1878 and was given its double name after the lawyer Alexandros Soutsos left his pictures and his fortune to the state in 1896. It opened as a museum in 1900 and moved in 1976 to a purpose-built home on Vasileos Konstantinou Avenue, opposite the Hilton. Its holdings of around 20,000 works range from post-Byzantine icons and El Greco to nineteenth-century Greek painters and contemporary artists.
After eight years of building work the central gallery reopened on 24 March 2021, the bicentenary of the Greek War of Independence, with its floor area roughly doubled to about 20,700 square metres. The project kept the protected shell of the 1976 building and added exhibition floors, conservation laboratories, an auditorium and a library. The institution also runs the National Glyptotheque at Goudi and annexes in Nafplion, Corfu, Sparta and Aegina.
Highlights
- Works by El Greco, including The Concert of the Angels
- Nineteenth-century Greek painting by Gyzis, Lytras and Volanakis
- European old masters from the Soutsos and later bequests
- Sculpture shown at the National Glyptotheque in Goudi
