Museu Coleção Berardo in Belém Cultural Center

In 2014, the Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon's Belém district was firmly established as Portugal's foremost institution for modern and contemporary art, operating from its expansive premises within the Centro Cultural de Belém. Under the direction of Pedro Lapa, who had taken over as art director in 2011, the museum housed over 1,000 works on permanent display alongside rotating temporary exhibitions. The permanent collection was arranged chronologically, guiding visitors through the century's pivotal movements — from Cubism, Dadaism, and Constructivism through Surrealism, Informalism, and Pop Art — with works by figures such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Bruce Nauman. The collection's post-1960 section encompassed minimalism, Arte Povera, and traumatic realism, and included striking objects such as six-foot robots built from flickering TV screens, a giant submarine suspended from the ceiling, and a life-size plastic sheepdog by Jeff Koons. The museum's temporary exhibition program in this period was among the most ambitious in the country. One exhibition running across 2013–14 explored a hundred years of advertising posters alongside autographed photographs of entertainment legends such as Laurence Olivier, Harry Belafonte, and Liberace — a pop-cultural counterpoint to the high-art permanent galleries. The museum also mounted a show featuring 90 drawings and paintings by the Portuguese artist Raúl Perez, whose work carries traces of late Surrealism. Throughout the Berardo Collection's span of more than seventy artistic tendencies, it allowed for different and updated readings on the state of contemporary art, reinforcing the museum's strong museological and didactic character.