Shattered by blast, landmark Beirut museum tries to rebuild

BEIRUT (AP) — The artist meticulously cuts small pieces of yellow and red glass, then lays them in a pattern to recreate the stained-glass windows that were the trademark of Beirut’s Sursock Museum, shattered in last year’s port explosion.

Conservators, hunched over with magnifying glasses, fill lines of paint loss caused by the explosion with their brushes and weave together tears thread by thread under microscope. Other workers delicately piece back together broken shards of ceramics.

“It has been very hard to see my work of 30 years on the ground, back to being sand ... But it is important to rebuild the museum,” said Maya Hussaini, the artist who worked on the stained-glass windows during a major renovation at the museum that finished in 2015 and is back rebuilding them now,

“I had to go back to my archive to dig out my designs to bring it back to how it was,” she said.

Perched on the hills of the Achrafieh neighborhood hundreds of meters from the Beirut Port, the 60-year-old Sursock was the beating heart of Beirut’s creative scene. The country’s only modern art museum, it boasts a collection of Lebanese art dating back to the late 1800s.

It has long provided a rare public and free space for art, not even closing throughout Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.

Restorers and artists have been working to revive that role after the museum was decimated by the Aug. 4, 2020 port explosion.

The explosion ripped through the three-story building, unhinging the doors, wrecking everything down to the fourth underground level. Windows shattered, including the stained-glass windows of its façade. The art collection was badly hit.

At least 57 of the 130 pieces on display were either broken or torn, including Dutch artist Kees Von Dongen’s portrait of Nicolas Sursock, after whom the...