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Museum History - 1998
1998
At the end of 1998, Pedro Lapa, a member of the museum’s reorganisational team, became director. The programme of temporary exhibitions took on greater importance and the focus moved to four specific areas, directly or indirectly related to the chronological scope of the collection. Thus was begun a series of retrospective exhibitions on 19th century Portuguese artists. Continued were the museum’s large retrospectives on Portuguese modernist movements and artists, with the first catalogue raisoneé on a Portuguese artist, Joaquim Rodrigo. In parallel, large exhibitions on the artists and movements at the historical forefront were co-produced with other prestigious international museums. The Interferências (1998-2002) programme ran parallel to the above exhibitions and presented work specifically produced for it by contemporary Portuguese and international artists. Another aspect to which this programme gave particular importance was the format of the publications that accompanied the exhibitions and that presented in-depth scientific and essayistic analysis.
The acquisitions policy has been developed along two lines in order to mitigate the shortcomings referred to in the collection, and the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the 1990s, are now already significantly well represented. A start was also made at incorporating other artistic genres into the collection, such as photography and video, media which are heavily exploited in contemporary art. Several of the museum’s custodians more actively involved in giving the Museu do Chiado – National Museum of Contemporary Art the resources its title would suggest have greatly contributed to this process.
The lack of space has been one of the factors that has most hampered the implementation of the wide range of activities that the museum has sought to develop. The chance to exhibit its collections in a continuous manner, or to develop temporary exhibitions of the scale desired, or even develop pedagogic activities, all these aspects of a museum’s activity are subject to limitations for which a solution is long overdue.
