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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The present sorrows of Beirut call to mind an underknown legacy of that city's last spell of ruin and its history of cosmopolitan ferment--the Dahesh Museum, a sleek institution in the I.B.M. Building, on Madison Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street, which is devoted to mostly nineteenth-century, mostly French academic art. It was envisioned for Beirut in the nineteen-seventies by the Palestinian-born Salim Moussa Achi--also known as Dr. Dahesh, which translates from the Arabic as "Dr. Wonder"--who was an enthusiast for Jean-Leon Gerome, William Adolphe Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, and other long-devalued Salon heavyweights, casualties of modernism, and who bought masses of art by lesser academics, likely at fire-sale prices. In 1975, as civil war descended, he sold his collection to a Saudi-American family in Connecticut named Zahid. He died during a visit to New York, in 1984, at the age of seventy-five. The Zahids opened the museum, in quarters on Fifth Avenue, in 1995.
The museum's current exhibition has another timely resonance. "Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists and the Rediscovery of Egypt" memorializes the disastrous French military occupation of 1798-1801. Bringing along teams of scientists, scholars, and artists, Napoleon's folly reaped material for a twenty-three-volume opus, "Description of Egypt"...
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