Inauguration of the Lasar Segall School of Art, in São Paulo, in 1933. From left to right: Paul Rossi Osir, Guilherme de Almeida, Hugo Adami, Vittorio Gobbis, unidentified, John Graz and Lasar Segall. Seated: Esther Bessel, Jenny Klabin Segall, Mussia Alves Pinto and Anita Malfatti

In March 1913, in a rented salon at No. 85 Rua São Bento in São Paulo, Lasar Segall displayed his art, which is considered by many to be the first exhibition of modern art in Brazil. The Russian artist was then only 22 years old, and had come to Brazil to visit his brothers and sisters who already lived there. He used the occasion to display, in São Paulo and later in Campinas, a wide range of work markedly influenced by German Impressionism and Dutch painting, which he had studied the year before on a visit to the Low Countries. Despite its departure from academic art, the model to which the São Paulo public was accustomed and which Segall had already rejected, the show was well received and 21 works — or about half of the exhibited works — were sold.

To celebrate the centennial of this quiet reception, which helped to pave the way for the artist, who shortly thereafter would come to play a central role in the history of Brazilian art, the Lasar Segall Museum has scheduled a series of celebratory activities. These will bring to light both the renowned works of the artist, with the exhibition 50 works from the collection, and his profile as a collector, with the exhibition and virtual dissemination of the Lasar Segall Photographic Archives, in addition to making the museum’s vast archive of documents and correspondence available to the public.

“Fortunately, he kept everything, leaving behind important documents on the cultural and artistic history not only of Brazil, but of the many places he visited,” says Vera d’Horta, a curator at the Lasar Segall Museum, who since 1986 has been working on the Segall archives, and was responsible for coordinating the recent digitization of the archive, which can be accessed through the museum’s Web site (www.mls.gov.br). So far almost 6,000 of the approximately 10,000 documents in the museum’s database have been digitized. “It’s a never-ending job,” she admits. This material is organized into five different groups: correspondence, texts, prints, personal documents and business documents. An initial list of all of this material organized by the author’s name is already available, and the goal is to be able to search it by subject as well. This will happen in the near future.

Two other innovative aspects under development in this database, which hopefully will be available soon, are the ability to view images of the retrieved works and have access to translations of iconographic materials. This is important because it can help to locate new works, and the Segall archives contain a wealth of information in several languages: Russian, Portuguese, German and even Hebrew and Yiddish. Interest in this rich collection has already increased thanks to the new virtual research tools. According to d’Horta, the number of researchers has quadrupled since the  material has been made accessible on the Internet, even without the official release.

This is a vast and diverse archive, which by its sheer size far exceeds a mere biographical function or complement to the field of art history. For example, among the documents collected by Segall there are records of Tsarist Russia; letters from colleagues who expressed their amazement at the artist’s plan to visit Brazil; catalogs of exhibitions held in Germany; correspondence with artists such as Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Otto Dix; or the notebook kept by his widow, Jenny Klabin, on the travels and interviews he conducted in search of the material that make up the collection that would come to be the Lasar Segall Museum. It was established in 1967, 10 years after the death of the painter, and it largely depends on the continued interest in his work. This very rich set of documents becomes even more relevant when combined with the 3,000 works in the collection, which has been almost entirely restored and photographed, and the 5,000 photographs that he collected throughout his life — 500 of which can already be found on the Internet — which have been the subject of little study up to now (www.museusegall.org.br/AFLs).

Lasar Segall and his Dresden Academy colleagues on one of their outdoor painting excursions, 1911

The photos, which also led to a new publication, are quite varied in nature. Some are from anonymous sources, in addition to works by the artist himself, and there are even examples of important works by Brazilian, Argentine and European photographers, such as Hildegard Rosenthal, Annemarie Heinrich, Sasha Harnish, Benedito Junqueira and Hugo Erfurth. Segall is known to be the author of some of these images, because he used photographs as a means of solving problems with composition. Worthy of notice are some striking photos, such as the beautiful portrait of the painter as a young man, dressed in typical Russian clothes, or the photo of an outdoor painting session with colleagues from the Dresden Academy in 1911, carrying a nude model on his shoulders, a kind of visual manifesto of the principles of freedom and the avant-garde movement in progress at the time.

Jorge Schwartz, Professor of Spanish American literature at the University of São Paulo (USP), who directs the Lasar Segall Museum, regards him as a sort of phoenix of Brazilian modernism, an artist who is constantly being reinvented, who always comes back with renewed strength and prestige at various times in the history of Brazilian art.

Known as the principal master of expressionism in Brazil, admired as the author of some of the most poignant works about the horrors of war and anti-Semitism, diligently researched for having developed a style absolutely his own while in dialogue with the tradition of painting, revisiting genres such as portraiture, still life and landscape — with a certain fascination for the new possibilities brought about by the tropical Brazilian scenery — and dedicated to a wide range of languages ​​(painting, sculpture, engraving and drawing), Lasar Segall is among the most viewed and studied Brazilian artists. The events surrounding his work occurred without large gaps in between.

This ongoing exchange with the general and specialized public culminates in interesting results for the museum’s research work, since contact with researchers from around the world allows gaps to be filled, which will be extremely useful in creating the catalog raisonné of the artist. So far, only Tarsila do Amaral and Cândido Portinari have managed to have all their work in repertory. Work on the Segall production continues, despite the lack of sponsorship for this project. Among recent discoveries made ​​by the museum are two unpublished drawings found recently in Germany, as well as paintings in private collections in Brazil. “Many works have been lost, having moved from one owner to another,” explains Schwartz. The museum has also just obtained, thanks to a long-term loan from a private collection in Rio de Janeiro, the only one of Segall’s engravings it had not yet acquired, dated 1917. “We need to rebuild the most well known iconography,” he added.

In fact, it was thanks to this Sisyphean task, a search of private collections outside of Brazil, that one of the most important works of the Russian artist was able to be recovered. Its value lies both in the unique quality of the canvas and its enormous historical value. This is the oil-on-canvas work Eternos caminhantes (Eternal walkers), painted by the artist in 1919 — the year he founded the Dresden Secession with nine artists, including Otto Dix and Conrad Felixmüller — and later acquired by the Museum of the City of Dresden. The Nazi government then removed the painting from the collection and put it on display in the famous Degenerate Art Exhibition held in Munich in 1937 to denounce the supposed decadence of modern art. The exhibition featured a total of 10 works by Segall. After World War II, the painting was discovered in a private collection and brought to Brazil after the artist’s death, at the request of his widow, Jenny Klabin Segall.

The painting is an extremely synthetic and geometrized representation of a group on pilgrimage, with links to other works of the period, such as the engraving Mulheres errantes (Wandering women), and evokes the exodus theme, the persecution of the Jews, which he would further develop, whether through representations of a more emotional and intimate nature such as Família (Family) or Meus avós (My grandparents), or through visceral protests against the war, such as in the anthological works Pogrom and Navio de emigrantes (Emigrant ship), considered by critics as a sort of Brazilian Guernica. In March 2014, Eternos caminhantes will be included in a show at the Neue Gallery in New York, which will attempt to reconstruct the Degenerate Art Exhibition. In September, that same museum will exhibit a self-portrait of Egon Schiele, 1912, on loan from the Association of Friends of Segall. This is the only authenticated work of Schiele in Brazil. One of the most important works of Segall’s constructive expressionism, Eternos caminhantes, is one of the highlights of the exhibition on display at the Lasar Segall Museum in Vila Mariana, São Paulo, alongside other works of the artist, such as Paisagem brasileira (Brazilian Landscape), Rua (Street) and Encontro (Encounter).

This last painting, 1924, is doubly important, first as a testimony to Segall’s compelling interest in photography and secondly as material he used as a work tool. A picture of him on the day of his marriage to Margaret, his first wife, in exactly the same position as the boy in the painting, belongs to the collection. The painting, which had been done in Brazil, has a small but symbolic difference. In the painting, the artist darkens his skin, in a sort of homage to the tropics, whose landscape began to seduce him as a reason to work in Brazil, soon after arriving there for the second time in December 1923, this time to stay permanently. In 1927, he became a naturalized Brazilian citizen and never left the country, except for a period of study in Paris between 1928 and 1932.

If, at the time of his 1913 stay, Segall was still a young man trying to invent his own style, an artist who had not yet discovered the expressive radicalism of distorted and jagged forms, of synthetic and familiar traces of primitive art, and of contrasting and intensely dark colors that were to mark his more pure Expressionist phase, by the time he landed in Brazil in 1923 he already had his own style. And by then the country was more open to appreciating a more radical modern art. It was Anita Malfatti who had already paid the price with the show in 1917, by daring to break with the pattern of realistic representation and then being subjected to virulent criticism from an authority such as Monteiro Lobato. Professor Schwartz wonders, with some irony, “if Segall had introduced his angular, dramatic and intensely chromatic works on his first visit, he would have saved Malfatti.” But in fact it was she who paved the way for the Expressionist Segall of 1923.

Other factors made the passage less turbulent for Jewish immigrants. These included the support of elite figures such as Senator Freitas Valle and art patron Olívia Guedes Penteado, and his marriage to Jenny Klabin, and also the fact that modern art had already been given its official birth in Brazil, with the celebratory rite of the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) of 1922 — in which neither Segall nor Tarsila do Amaral, the two Brazilian artists most radically involved with modernist experiences, participated. He also had the decisive support — even if somewhat solitary — of Mário de Andrade, the only critic at the time to pay attention to the work coming from Germany (unlike most of those who wrote about and created ​​art in the period, who directed all their attention to the School of Paris). The relationship between the two, as well as the important dialogue between Andrade and Portinari, are vital to an understanding of the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s in Brazil, and will be the subject of an exhibition scheduled to open in March of next year at the Lasar Segall Museum. The exhibition will then travel to the Castro Maya Museums in Rio de Janeiro.

In addition to talent and social skills, the artist had the commitment of his family to build an institution capable of sparking interest, research and dissemination of his work.

Project
Systematizing and digitizing documents of the Lasar Segall Archive (No. 2009/54777-0); Coordinator Vera d’Horta/Lasar Segall Museum; Grant Mechanism Infrastructure Program 6; Investment R$105,459.89 (FAPESP).

What lies behind the Mona Lisa’s smile? The answer would probably disappoint fans of secret codes. The smile is actually an attempt by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) to push back the boundaries, bringing art and science closer during the Renaissance. In addition to his work as a painter who wished to explore scientific issues, Leonardo wanted to create “visual science.” Anatomy was the field that he chose for his synthesis of art and science, as revealed in the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: anatomist, being held in London. It displays more than two hundred Da Vinci drawings of the human body and will remain open until October 7. Another example of Da Vinci’s chosen field is the book A natureza, a razão e a ciência do homem: a questão dos estudos de anatomia de Leonardo da Vinci [The nature, reason and science of man: the issue of the anatomical works of Leonardo da Vinci], by historian Eduardo Kickhöfel, a professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). The book includes the publication, with comments, of Leonardo’s “anatomical” series. The comments analyze the artist’s position as an anatomist in the history of natural philosophy, helping to describe how the words “art” and “science” were developed.

From 1490 and 1513, the painter dissected more than 30 bodies and accurately portrayed what he had seen. This was a true treatise which, had it been published, would have changed how anatomy was studied in Europe many years before the publication of De humanis corporis fabrica by Vesalius (1543). “There were no anatomical drawings in Leonardo’s time. Anatomy was always taught by using textbooks, such as the book by Mondino de Liuzzi, a fourteenth century anatomist. Mondino de Liuzzi’s book was read during demonstration classes held at universities. As Vesalius would do years later, Da Vinci advocated direct experience and created a style of painting that was so firmly based on the natural sciences that it became a science in itself. There is nothing in the Italian Renaissance that resembles his legacy,” says Eduardo. “Most of the structures he described would only be depicted centuries later. If he had published his treatise on anatomy, nowadays he would be considered one of history’s foremost scientists,” says historian Martin Clayton, curator of the exhibition on show at London’s Queen’s Gallery.

It is difficult not to be impressed by Da Vinci’s technique, as the drawings reproduced on these pages show. Clayton is especially impressed by the image of the baby in the uterus, an exception in this series of anatomic drawings, because Da Vinci used color. “The shade of red suggests the baby’s potential for life, even though this drawing is based on a dissected pregnant cow,” says the curator. Da Vinci came close to discovering circulation of the blood one century before Harvey did. And though he had learned Latin on his own, Leonardo had never felt comfortable with the language of contemporary scientific texts. He resented his status as an ‘inferior’ person in relation to university professors, even though he boasted that he was a ‘disciple of experience’,” Clayton says.

This “shyness,” coupled with his perfectionism and difficulty to reconcile his observations with established beliefs, as well as some bad luck, prevented him from concluding his treatise. After his death, the manuscripts – by means of complicated transactions – ended up in the hands of King Charles II, in 1690, and were stored in the Royal Collection. They were only published in 1900. Therefore, Da Vinci’s power to affect the progress of anatomy was already disappearing. “Nonetheless, in his time, he strengthened the transition of a culture of memory and instruction to a culture of discovery and invention, which generated tension between authority and experience, an issue that was addressed in Vesalius, and which reached its peak with the condemnation of Galileo,” says Eduardo Kickhöfel. “There are many reasons why Leonardo never completed his project. But basically, the culture of that period didn’t accept the synthesis, as proposed by Da Vinci, between art – which produced something by using imperfect and corruptible material – and science – which demonstrated, by means of texts, the eternal and immaterial principles and causes. Leonardo’s ‘art-science’ with its drawings and texts was an effort to ‘produce-demonstrate’ something unthinkable for his contemporaries,” the researcher points out.

This entailed huge effort. “You can be held back by feeling like vomiting. The fear of living at night in the company of these dead men, dismembered and dissected, is terrible to bear,” Da Vinci wrote next to a drawing. He had the habit of writing in the third person, to explain the difficult task of dissecting bodies at a time when there was no refrigeration or other forms of preservation. However, there was no lack of bodies. Many corpses were delivered to artists, but physicians got only two corpses a year. “At the time, medical studies consisted of texts read in Latin in class by professors, who had no contact with corpses; bodies were dissected by barber-surgeons. The objective was not to correct tradition or conduct independent studies, but to confirm doctrines and theories,” says the researcher. Artists, on the other hand, were merely interested in the superficial description of the body to then produce drawings or sculptures. “It is hard to imagine that a medical school would ever have considered resorting to an artist’s work to illustrate a book on anatomy.” However, according to Aristotelian tradition, highbrow knowledge was not close to the senses: it was the vita contemplativa.

The values of the vita activa only became popular in the mid-fourteenth century; knowledge gradually began to focus on the life of man in a moving society. “Nevertheless, prejudice against manual activities remained and science was basically expressed through texts, though some physicians had begun to conduct dissections and to migrate to a culture of discovery and invention, as indicated by several books from the late fifteenth century, containing a few rough sketches of anatomic features,” Eduardo points out. Some overlap between the sciences and the arts – such as painting and sculpture – began to surface timidly. However, the objective was to explain to what extent science was inserted into the works thereby raising the artisan’s social status. In 1435, architect Leon Alberti, in his treatise De pictura, described an imaginary painter who was an educated man and created his works of art based on the knowledge of principles and causes: “First, the painter places each bone of the animal in its proper position, then its muscles and then its flesh,” he wrote. “He wanted reality, but not the description of parts of the body, because science and art were not united,” Eduardo points out.

Sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, who, like Leonardo, was an uneducated artisan, wrote the treatise I comentarii between 1447 and 1455. Here, he told his colleagues that they should learn anatomy; more specifically, that they should only learn about the bones and the muscles because “we do not need to know much about the other medical things.” “Ghiberti was aware of the limits of the tradition he was part of,” the researcher points out. Leonardo was aware as well, but decided to go beyond them. In 1489, Leonardo started his search for a skull. In spite of his impeccable sketch of the head, he attempted – by means of his drawings – to find what Aristotle referred to as “common sense;” the search for the exact position of the “soul” next to a “scientific” observation is a characteristic of the paradox of his relationship with anatomy, which resembles a mosaic of old and new concepts. “His project, dated from 1489, was to produce a catalogue. This project had already revealed the tensions that persecuted him: the tension between the textual tradition and anatomy dissections, the basis of true knowledge; the tension between repetitions of tradition and the fantasies of his time and discoveries, such as the mechanical conception of the human body, only arrived at in more recent times,” Eduardo analyzes. His other “sins” included the fact that he “admitted” to know about the circulation of the blood.

The existence of one-way valves was incompatible with ancient beliefs that the heart only pumped blood in and out of the ventricles, generating heat and the “vital spirit.” “He was unable to reconcile what he had observed with that which he believed was the truth, and thus came to a stalemate,” says the researcher. At the same time, after dissecting the corpse of a very old man, he wrote the first comments in the history of medicine on coronary occlusion and atherosclerosis. His detailed description of liver cirrhosis was only confirmed in the nineteenth century. However, his discoveries are less important than his conception of anatomy, which linked the university and the artist’s studio. He innovated in the sense that he showed anatomy-related topics as progressive preparation for “visual science” opposed to merely textual science.

“He didn’t illustrate anatomy-related topics; he conceived them through drawings, in line with the spirit of his training at the studio of Verrochio, within a semi-illiterate context, in which the common expression was visual and not oral. Leonardo identified art and science in a pioneering way and reflected on the mechanical conception of the body,” says Eduardo. Unlike Alberti, in whose opinion investigating what the body looked like was sufficient for a painter, Da Vinci believed that depictions of affection required knowledge of their causes. “Alberti’s painter strived to be eloquent and believable, while Leonardo’s painter strived to convey the truth in the sense of demonstrating topics of natural philosophy in line with the Aristotelian model, according to which feelings are the foundation of all cognition. He insisted on the need for experience.” The distinction between art and science was blurred.

“The expression ‘demonstrate’ is a common word in Leonardo’s studies on anatomy and its meaning is similar to ‘figure’, with products that were ‘drawings-concepts’ that depicted the vera notizia or intera cognizione of parts of the body, treated as mechanically as possible. They were the precursors of several ‘mechanicians’ of the sixteenth century, and pointed to the science of the seventeenth century,” explains the researcher. His art was a science.

However, there were problems in his methods. He would begin with an investigative experience, the contact of the senses with anatomic material. Through his investigative experience, he became knowledgeable about the forms and functions of body parts. To this end, he had the help of the texts he had read, or he may have had contact with anatomy experts (such as Marcantonio dela Torre, professor of anatomy at the University of Padua). This knowledge gave rise to a constructive experience, i.e., the re-depicting through drawing and writing, actions that were usually conducted far from the anatomic material. “Leonardo drew many bodies without ever having seen them. He believed that once a certain level of knowledge was achieved it was no longer necessary to have any contact with the bodies. Leonardo’s constructive experience was intended to be a science and the results were syntheses based on various private dissections and not copies of reality. This allowed for the existence of a ‘visual science,’ a code of knowledge based on drawings of concepts that could be acknowledged by their observer.”

“The main idea of his treatise was: for the anatomist, the visual experience is fundamental, but the creation of knowledge has to happen later, without direct contact with the anatomic material, in order to control the results of this creation,” says Eduardo. The researcher believes that Da Vinci drew many forms that lacked the visual experience, thus generating artificial or fictional results. “If he had seen the body parts and drawn them at the same time, he could have compared the dissection and the sketch, which would have made it possible to get a ‘better view.’ The distance between the two experiences – viewing and drawing – allowed him to synthesize body parts, thus creating ‘drawn concepts.’ On the other hand, this distance caused him to become vulnerable to erroneous theories, whether his own or tradition-related ones, usually a combination of both,” the author points out. “When he depicted his knowledge of anatomy, he generated ideas for new investigations and new demonstrations. Leonardo would probably not have achieved what he achieved if he had only read about and dissected bodies; his discoveries and demonstrative methods were refined throughout the years.”

There were no common interests between artists and anatomists from universities until the mid-sixteenth century. “If there had been, anatomic illustration would have been developed many years before Vesalius’ work.” There was no room for a form of knowledge based on natural sciences that had to be executed together with art; in other words, a science that produced appearances, even idealized ones, was a contradiction in its own terms,” the historian explains.

Leonardo dared to do what other artisans had not and attempted to bridge the distance between the arts and the sciences. By inserting knowledge of natural philosophy into painting, he changed the meaning of painting. Painting began to represent more knowledge, in a cultural context that did not allow the existence of a science whose results dispensed with discourse. “The technical objects which he worked on in the manner of an ‘engineer’ were models for him to think about the body as a set of levers and their drivers,” the researcher states. During the Renaissance, the idea of man as a mechanism was in line with the context of a culture in which machines were beginning to be part of daily life.

Ironically, last month Italian archaeologists found an altar that possibly held the remains of Lisa Gherardini, the alleged model of the Mona Lisa. The altar lies in the Convent of Saint Ursula, in Florence. Leonardo would have enjoyed seeing up close the bones that created history’s most famous smile.

Trilha 4

Test tubes are essential laboratory research tools. Pipettes and tips can quantify millimetrical measurements to prepare various solutions. And entire universes can be found behind the scientific facets of small bottles.

When in Anita Colli’s hands, these three objects become art. In her experiments with volumes made from waste materials, the artist discovered that scientific equipment can have good chemistry in art galleries or on the living room as well.

Since graduating from the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1965, Anita has worked as a physician. After retiring in 1998, she first devoted herself to painting workshops. She did portraits and abstract paintings, but discovered that she felt more connected with the three-dimensional surfaces.

In 2010, she made her first collages with materials she found at home. The artist keeps pieces made from stove parts, remote controls, thread spools and gas valves, all of which have been treated with red, green and gray monochromatic spray in her collection. Due to their similarity to robots, Anita’s husband Walter ended up giving them an affectionate nickname they still carry today: “killer machines.”

Anita began her exploration with pieces made ​​from wine bottle corks and continued with wire and other scraps from technological equipment. She finally reached the translucent laboratory materials, usually made ​​of plastic with red, green and blue details.

Fixed around one or two axis, the juxtaposition or joining together in a chain of these objects gives rise to forms between the organic and geometric. These pieces are filled with a constructivist heritage. Or, as the curator of her latest exhibition, held in the Unimed Paulistana gallery, Waldo Bravo wrote, “an option for concrete and rational thinking, based on the clustering of multiple objects.”

In Bravo’s opinion, as they are multiplied in Anita’s work, the laboratory parts “also multiply their meanings.” Anita has five main series. Girolos [spinners], with pieces fixed usually around one axis; Anelídeos [annelids], made ​​from round shaped objects fitted into each other; Cirandas [ring a ring a rosy], with tubes articulated at two axes forming circles; Labyrintos [labirinths], generally with spikes fitted onto a fixed support; and Tramas [wefts], resembling shutters.

Ciranda 1

According to the artist, her initial idea was to “take these objects away from their daily uses, giving them new meaning.” She could not imagine what the result of her exploration would be and continues to be surprised by the associations made ​​by those who come into contact with her art.

In general, these associations indicate organic figurations. “Having spent years working with medicine, this imagery certainly stayed with me,” she says. Although made ​​from geometric volumes, the arrangements may form images similar to, for example, amoebae. Or remind one of skeletons. Or represent DNA sequences. According to Bravo’s analysis, these associations at some point remind us of the work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920-1988), who, as from the 1960s, dedicated herself to her famous series named Bichos [animals].

Bravo explains that Clark’s bugs were also made ​​from articulated geometric figures, the difference being that they were metal. The curator also found a common link with the work of the American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976), famous for his mobile sculptures. Most of Anita’s work can be hung so that it moves with the wind. In the Transformações [transformations] exhibition, the objects were also presented on supports similar to tables. All of them can be manipulated so that the public can reinvent each composition in their own way.

Photo taken and colored by Rorivaldo Camargo and submitted by Elson Longo, both from Liec/Unesp

Detail of the educational exhibition Sculpture adventure, shown at the museum’s headquarters on the university campus

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) has a new home. It has just inaugurated its headquarters in Ibirapuera Park, where it will occupy a 35 thousand square meter building that in the past housed Detran (the traffic department), and has been totally renovated to turn it into an exhibition space. The institution now faces the challenge of occupying and reviving this privileged space, without forgetting that it is still first and foremost a university museum, whose main mission is to stimulate research and reflection about Brazilian modern and contemporary art, based primarily on its valuable collection of roughly 10 thousand works. The core of excellence in this collection are the paintings and sculptures donated to the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1963 by Ciccillo Matarazzo, originating from the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) and from his private collection, in addition to which there have been a number of acquisitions and donations over the course of its half century of existence.

It is based on this substantial and varied set of works that all of MAC’s actions are conceived, setting it apart from the model that is becoming increasingly ingrained in Brazil of offering a varied menu of exhibitions, acquired as closed packages on the international art circuit with the aim of attracting an ever larger public and sponsorship. “A contemporary art museum, such as MAC-USP, should have its own collection as a point of reference. This is what will help give a historical perspective to the works of art that are exhibited at the museum,” states the institution’s director, Tadeu Chiarelli, when describing the direction adopted for the museum under his management.

During this new phase, of the gradual occupation of the museum’s new headquarters, all the scheduled exhibitions will follow this principle. The first of these shows, “The three-dimensional in the MAC’s collection: an anthology,” opened in January and brought together 18 of the collection’s works of art. In the middle of this year, each of the museum’s five curators will propose an exhibition to interpret the works of artists represented in the collection: Rafael Costa will be reviewed by Helouise Costa; the show dedicated to Julio Plaza will be under the curatorship of Cristina Freire; Carmen Aranha will concentrate on the works of Leon Ferrari; and Ana Magalhães and Kátia Canton are developing an exhibition of the works of José Antonio da Silva and Di Cavalcanti, respectively. Other exhibitions, of a collective nature or emphasizing the works of specific artists (such as Carlito Carvalhosa and Mauro Restiffe) will be presented bit by bit, significantly enlarging the occupation of new installations and MAC’s presence on the São Paulo exhibition circuit.

"São Sebastião (Marighela)", work by Sergio Ferro (1969/1970), was the highlight of the exhibition "One day it will have to be over", of the cycle of exhibitions about art during the military period

According to Chiarelli, it is clear that MAC is also interested in increasing its number of visitors, but it does not need to be overly concerned about the size of the public, as it is not dependent upon sponsors for funds in order to survive. “This means that we can focus more on the quality of the public’s experience when they visit the museum,” he adds. Therefore, in the case of MAC, educational work is not limited to giving guidance or providing one-off information to visitors, and the emphasis in the collection goes way beyond the matter of the  programming of exhibitions. Distinctive aspects, related to education and research, also characterize the complex organizational life and the various projects developed by the teams of curators.

As Ana Gonçalves Magalhães explains, “teaching, research and curatorial activities are and should be integrated, which means that, perhaps the first form of extroversion of the research takes place via the training of professionals in the areas related to the museum.” This training is of an interdisciplinary nature and at various moments involves other related units. Each curator develops projects with a broad impetus, with support from institutions of development, such as Fapesp.  Ana Magalhães, for instance, has been working on updating the museum’s catalogue and reassessing some works based on scientific studies conducted jointly with USP’s Physics Institute. Since the mid-1990s Kátia Canton, MAC’s longest serving curator-teacher, has been focusing on monitoring young contemporary production and its relation to the production that preceded it. This research, named Contemporary Heritage, has already yielded a series of exhibitions and publications. Cristina Freire is dedicating herself to studying conceptual art; Carmen Aranha works with the mediation between art and audience; and Helouise Costa is focusing more strongly on the field of photography.

Overview of the exhibition "Modernisms in Brazil", on show in the area that the MAC occupies on the third floor of the Bienal

In addition to the specific research lines, the team also conducts a few projects of a collective nature and with a significant capacity for multiplication. Examples of this are the cycle of shows about Brazilian art during the military period, developed jointly with Ana Magalhães, Cristina Freire and Helouise Costa – two out of the three exhibitions have already been held and a third one is being prepared – and the event “MAC under construction,” on show at the museum’s Ibirapuera headquarters. This initiative brought together different aspects of the museum’s operation, serving almost as a metaphorical synthesis of its different vocations. By means of the exhibition of 19 works of art from the 1970s and 1980s, by artists such as Leon Ferrari, Nina Moraes and Alex Vallauri, and over the course of the last few months a series of discussion have been held between the public, the artists and specialists from MAC and from other museums on to how to restore/preserve contemporary works of art, made from extremely fragile or perishable materials.

More recently, the museum has sought to become closer to young artists, which has resulted in attitudes such the cycle “MAC meets the artists,” which offers weekly public discussions from the new generation of artists at the University Campus auditorium. However, opportunities have also been created for young students and researchers, in the form of internships, exhibitions of work or curatorial assistance.

Although it is often valued for the modernist riches that it houses, MAC has, throughout its history, lived up to the term ‘contemporary’ in its name. From its earliest days, the institution was conceived as an “experiments laboratory” by Walter Zanini, its first director. Aracy Amaral, who was in charge of the museum during the early 1980s, believes that MAC’s commitment is “to support new artistic trends while also updating its collection,” despite warning of the difficulties of updating this collection – particularly in the international field – due to prohibitive market prices.