Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea
Museu do Chiado

1994

With the Chiado fire in August 1988, and even though the museum escaped unscathed, the works of art were removed as a precautionary measure. It was decided by the then secretary of State for Culture, Teresa Gouveia, that the collection’s home should be rethought. The French government put forward a project to renovate the museum by the architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, who, with a team led by the art historian Raquel Henriques da Silva, redefined the museum in the form it has exhibited since its re-inauguration on 12th July 1994.

The project sought to integrate the building’s existing historically important spaces into a neo-modern architectural language, enhancing the autonomy of the planes that constitute the suspended walkways, the floor itself and the ceilings and the sudden walls that define great vertical extensions. With an original and economic range of materials and colours, its discreet austerity establishes a full dialogue with the building’s functions.

When the museum reopened, a catalogue entitled Museu do Chiado, Arte Portuguesa 1850-1950, produced by Pedro Lapa, Raquel Henriques da Silva and Maria de Aires Silveira, presented the most consistent and coherent nuclei of its extensive collection, over two thousand items, with individual studies on each work, as well as respective bibliographies and historical backgrounds. Given the collection’s failings with regard to its representation of art from the latter half of the twentieth century, the museum’s acquisitions policy focused on the seminal works of the movements of that period. A systematic programme of temporary exhibitions on Portuguese artists that had emerged during the least well represented decades in the collection was put into place, alongside a strong emphasis on the studies and research presented in the respective catalogues. A programme of contemporary art aimed at emerging artists, whose work was based on interpretations of the museum’s collection, was set up and allowed the acquisition of varied works that initiated an updating of the collection’s body of contemporary art. Since the reopening, the museum’s lack of space, both for the collection and the temporary exhibitions, has become notorious.