São Paulo begins the path to combat the tourist gaze on art
If visiting an art museum has become a tourist pilgrimage, guided by headphones and Instagram-like apps that lead directly to the most talked-about work, the brand-new annex of the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) is different. Here, visitors have to think for themselves.
The 14-story black glass building on Paulista Avenue in the Brazilian megalopolis is connected by a 40-meter tunnel to the iconic museum designed by modern architect Lina Bo Bardi 80 years ago. And both buildings still bear a trace of the great Italian-Brazilian architect's revolutionary philosophy.
“Visitors have direct access to the artwork, without context or information about the author, title, or date.”Bo Bardi (1914-1992) challenged the mechanical way of viewing art in museums. He created spacious spaces where visitors wouldn't have to follow predetermined routes. This idea was embodied in MASP's famous glass easels—a sheet of glass inserted into a concrete base with the painting inside—which create a sense of art suspended ethereally in space and time.
“With the label mounted on the back of the easel, visitors have direct access to the artwork, without context or information about the author, title, or date,” MASP director Adriano Pedrosa explained to Estudio Arquitectos magazine when the concept was presented at the Venice Biennale last year. The easels allow for “juxtapositions and dialogues” so that “the public can choose their own path.”
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Likewise, in the five new exhibitions in the new annex, open until August 8, the public is left to form their own opinions. In the exhibition commemorating the history of Bo Bardi's MASP since its opening in 1958, Tarsila do Amaral's dreamlike Solitary Figure —the most surreal mane of all, blowing in a nonexistent wind—appears alongside Adriana Varejão's anti-colonialist Wounded Painting and Anita Malfatti's Interior of Monaco , with their "paintings within the painting."
The works—hung on the wall of the apartment building converted into a museum by architects Martin Corullon, Gustavo Cedroni, and Julio Neves—are three paintings by the 20th-century Brazilian avant-garde. But the corresponding information is almost hidden several meters away. One is forced—how horrible!—to look at the painting before reading anything in a display without chronology, crowded with different styles, and photos of the first iconic building under construction in the 1950s and of Bo Bardi and her husband, the museum's first director, Pietro Maria Bardi.
The 14-story black glass building on São Paulo's Paulista Avenue is connected by a tunnel to the museum.
Leonardo FinottiWithout an easy script, it fulfills one of Bo Bardi's axioms: "Time is not linear, but a wonderful confusion," a phrase that inspired a video exhibition in the new annex starring actress Fernanda Torres ( I'm Still Here ) and her mother Fernanda Montenegro.
This is repeated in another room dedicated to a dozen Renoir paintings taken from the MASP's enormous collection, more than eleven thousand works from Van Gogh and Velázquez to icons of Brazilian modernism such as Candido Portinari and Lasar Segall.
When faced with the paintings mounted on easels similar to those in the original MASP—the labels well hidden on the back—the tourist-viewer must find their own connection to the painting. They exchange glances, for example, with Little Girl with a Sheaf (1888), without knowing who Renoir is or why he painted it.
Only then will he take a look behind the painting to read about the context: the influence of Cézanne on the twenty Renoirs in the MASP collection purchased during and after World War II by the museum's famous patron, media mogul Assis Chateaubriand, a friend of the Bardi couple.
Dismantling preconceived hierarchies, desacralizing art, and empowering the viewer are elements of the radical philosophy of Bo Bardi, born in Rome and naturalized Brazilian after emigrating to São Paulo at the end of World War II. A member of the Communist Party—like her more famous contemporary, Oscar Niemeyer—Bo Bardi railed against the elitism that dictated the relationship between art and museums. But her ideas may now perhaps be useful in changing art's relationship with the obedient gaze of museum tourism. Of course, the small number of tourists in São Paulo—2.2 million last year compared to 15 million in Barcelona—also helps in this regard, in the vast city of 22 million inhabitants.
Read alsoThe innovation of freestanding easels was made possible by the MASP's avant-garde architecture, a glass box suspended on a concrete structure with its iconic red facade. A room with a surface area of over a thousand square meters and no adjoining walls, it dispenses with walls. "It's very spacious, with the paintings displayed more or less side by side on the easels. Without walls or divisions, it creates a diaphanous impression, very different from what was seen in museums at the time," said Renato de Azevedo, a Brazilian art critic based in Paris. "Perhaps the MASP was a distant precursor to spaces like the Tate Modern."
The original easels are so sought-after that the MASP (National Museum of Natural History) put them up for sale. One sold for $60,000 at the Basel Fair in Miami. The legality of selling other easels considered national heritage by the Brazilian government is currently being disputed.
Although he championed the visitor's "own path" in museums, Bo Bardi understood that, paradoxically, the freedom to forgo predetermined routes requires training and education.
Hence his other great idea, raised in an essay about his other work, the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia: "We believe that the current meaning of the word museum is inappropriate; we want to give it another meaning. That's why schools will soon 'move into the museum.'"
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