Art on Display 1949-69
MASP, São Paulo, 1968
Lina Bo (1914-1992) moved to Brazil from Italy in 1946 with her husband, the art historian who was to become the first director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Pietro Maria Bardi commissioned his wife to design two presentations of the collection before it was installed in the new building, which she also began to design in 1957. This was eventually opened in 1969. In this project, they both wanted something new and active, something which represented the monumental, but also the popular, in the true sense of the word.
This third installation is the one which has become famous, and which we replicate part ofhere; but it is worth noting the previous projects. MASP was created in 1947 (a true post-war museum) and housed at first in the Rua 7 de Abril. The first design by Bo Bardi used floor-to-ceiling aluminium poles to display the paintings. The next, in 1950, used thin metal supports stabilised with cables, as well as some light screens. She also designed the installation for the collection when it was shown at the Fundação A. A. Penteado in 1957-9. Clearly, she knew the collection well.
In these years, Bo Bardi was also designing other exhibition and museum projects. All of this led her to gradually radicalise a conception which had surely begun in Italy, but was rethought in the context of Brazil. The five years Bo Bardi spent in the north-east of the country especially led her to rethink cultural experience in terms of simplifying the means. She now consciously put Europe behind her, and began to think of the museum as a school which represented the child-like element in the adult. She also talked about the way visitors look at a painting as if they were looking at a shop window during the sales.
Bo Bardi explicitly chose the easel because it is a working instrument, the place where the painting is born in the air, saying that she wanted paintings to be seen as works. This non-hierarchical approach is what made the 1968 installation so striking; its ostensibly democratic approach is almost aggressive. Indeed, Bo Bardi had spoken of wanting to create a shock that would provoke visitors to curious and critical reactions.
The glass easels were designed from around 1963. They arose perhaps from the fact that the concept of the building evolved from an original sketch featuring a glass ceiling and opaque walls to a design with glass walls and a solid ceiling. Earlier sketches try out supporting more than one picture, an idea which was later abandoned. Despite the impression of mutability they give, the glass easels stayed in place for almost 30 years, until Bardi's death, although some substitutions had begun after he left the board in 1996..
Text adapted from the catalogue accompanying the Art on Display exhibition.