Dear European painter: in this museum in Brazil, women, Afro-descendants and indigenous people have taken your word away

The Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo (MASP) is considered the center of Western art in Brazil or the institution with the most important collection of European art in the Southern Cone.

In other words, until 2015, when the current artistic director, Adriano Pedrosa, arrived, the history of art in this gallery was told from the perspective of Modigliani (with five works), Van Gogh (three pieces), Picasso (three paintings) or Gauguin. (two cloths).

The official version, white and colonial.

Eight years ago, indigenous people, Afro-Brazilians and women took the floor.

Before restoration and decolonization became a trend in art, the MASP had already opened the debate.

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"This museum is diverse, inclusive and plural, and has the mission of establishing, critically and creatively, dialogues between past and present, cultures and territories, based on the visual arts," reads a poster.

And upon entering the second floor, where the permanent collection is displayed, this objective is confirmed: the first paintings represent the feminist struggle, the protagonists are Afro-descendants, and the handicrafts rescued in showcases are creations of the native populations of Brazil.

They are all pieces of contemporary art that the MASP has been acquiring in recent years due to the emptiness that existed in a collection where the classic European men ruled, for whom space has now been left from the middle and towards the end of the collection. room, with some 200 exhibited works.

These are the pieces that were largely acquired by Pietro Maria Bardi, a collector, journalist and dealer of Italian origin who in the forties, after the Second World War, began to buy works by great European artists "at a gift price", they say in a visit to the museum of the strategy of which he was its director.

Bardi paid $40,000 for Van Gogh's

and

, by Velázquez, works that at the end of the nineties, when he died, were valued at 30 million dollars.

Another large part of the museum's holdings comes from collections of Jews who fled Nazism on their way to America.

View of the São Paulo Museum of Art from Paulista avenue in the Brazilian city. EDUARDO ORTEGA / MASP

All the pieces are displayed on large methacrylate panels that are fixed on cement blocks, structures devised by Lina Bo Bardi, the architect who designed the building in 1947. These kinds of large frames were recovered in 2015 with the original intention of their creator. : questioning the traditional European museum model.

Here it seems that the art is suspended in the air, it is mobile and malleable (the structures allow the collection to be reorganized every two weeks), each one chooses the path they want to take.

The MASP rewrites the history of art starting with the artists, but it also blows up linear museology.

And it does not follow a chronological route to the letter either, it begins with the present towards the “whiter” past, although with licenses.

The transparent frames have another function: they allow you to see the back of the paintings, all that information that traditional museums do not show, where the pieces hang on the walls.

And it is there, at the rear, where Pedrosa, following Bo Bardi's guidelines, has placed the cartouches.

The three-dimensional effect that MASP intends to achieve is as follows: two figures representing the devil in African culture are exhibited in a showcase.

The glass allows you to see in the background the painting

by Renoir, where two smiling little girls are represented.

One of them died in the Auschwitz death camp.

The visitor will first see the African pieces;

behind, the painting of the impressionist painter.

Then you will be able to read all this information on the cartouches, which you will have to look for on the back.

And in the end, he will have another version of the story.

Kássia Borges Karajá, member of the Karajá community, and one of the three indigenous commissioners of MASP. Lela Beltrão

The museum will once again invite you to reflect on two pieces placed, in this case, one next to the other.

There is the idealized version of the death of an indigenous woman signed by Victor Meirelles and, next to it, the critical perspective of the artist and activist Denilson Baniwa, with a collage that

the deforestation of the Amazon, on which he has placed the silhouette of a indigenous murdered as if it were a crime scene.

This is the year that the museum has dedicated to indigenous stories and in 2024 those of sexual diversity will arrive.

As Pedrosa recalled in an interview in EL PAÍS, the museum has hosted indigenous art in its rooms in individual or collective exhibitions.

That is why they do not hesitate to bring out the colors of the great masters.

One of the two paintings by Gauguin from the MASP, which represents the indigenous women of Tahiti, will stop hanging in this room in a few weeks to form part of an exhibition with which the museum wants to criticize the colonial vision that the painter printed on these communities.

Those who are going to rethink this perspective are the three indigenous curators that MASP incorporated in 2022. The appointment of the trio reflects the growing strength and relevance of indigenous art in museums, galleries and fairs in Brazil.

The last São Paulo Biennial, in 2021, took special care to invite them and give them a prominent role.

This museum took that step before and tries to maintain a more fluid dialogue with its compatriots, not just with the so-called great masters.

Interior of the São Paulo Museum of Art.MASP

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