Social Web
Museum History - 1945
1945
It was the sculptor Diogo Macedo who, as director, after extensive remodelling of the structure and interior, opened the museum daily to the public in 1945, with its own entrance in Rua Serpa Pinto. Having been involved in the modernist movement and then later an art historian, his appointment was expected to usher in a new era at the museum. A programme of temporary exhibitions was implemented, as well as research on artists represented in the collection in the form of short monographs published by the museum. However, no clear definition of a modernist stance was forthcoming, and the pernicious commitment to late-naturalism decontextualised from its time was continued. Some works by artists that emerged in the latter half of the 1940s were acquired, though in an unclear and unplanned fashion.
Thus, up until 1959, the museum was outdated and conservative and had little in common with other museums across Europe. The political appointment of the painter Eduardo Malta in that same year, despite general protests by the art community and critics, nevertheless placed further emphasis on a backward-looking approach that had catastrophic consequences for the collection’s modernist position and its respective and necessary adjustment to the international art scene. A catalogue was produced, but the nazi principles on which the collection’s presentation lay was heavily condemned by the leaders of the very regime that had appointed the director in the first place. In 1970, Maria de Lourdes Bártholo, a conservative by training, was appointed director of the museum, which was in an advanced state of disrepair. Over the following 17 years, the building only underwent some very superficial restoration work. The collection extended up to the contemporary era, but the criteria governing representation of the diverse movements, trends and leading figures in Portuguese art, which from the preceding decade onwards had undergone profound quantitative and qualitative transformations, were not in the least equated and neither did the museum’s acquisitions define a consistent and broad understanding of contemporaneity.
