A Guide to the Benaki Museum

When I was writing the first short guide to the Benaki Museum, in 1980, I had to make an almost superhuman effort to articulate a vast material into discrete chapters with a comprehensive and coherent line of reasoning. At that time the arrangement of the objects in the Museum was based on the principle of exhibition units by kind, which was, of course, completely contrary to my own views and vision. Today, after the enlargement of the Museum's premises and the radical remodeling of the original building, but above all the reorientation of the Museum's aims and the fundamental change in the spirit of the exhibition unit to another, is much smoother and less contrived. In consequence, the conciseness of the texts and the brevity of the description required for the new guide have demanded far less intellectual expenditure on my part. [...] Angelos Delivorrias