In 2019 the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum and the Art Library will have been open for 50 years. Gulbenkian was known as ‘Mr. 5%’, who wanted ‘only the best’, but this conference seeks to go beyond the biographical, or the anecdotic, and to consider Gulbenkian in the light of a wider context, with papers that reflect new research into the ways in which collectors worked, their networks, and their relationship with their collection, its accessibility and its future, and that go beyond single-case studies of individual owners, seeking instead more transversal studies into how collectors worked and how they mirrored the period in which they lived. The questions of the role played by museums, by art agents and intermediaries, as well as by the markets, will also be addressed.
