ABSTRACT
The modern art museums of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, founded in the mid-twentieth century, were all established by private individuals and with independent monies. Yet each institution played many important civic roles and received considerable funding from their municipal governments. As a result of such diffused institutional power, tensions have existed for decades between these quasi-private museums and the governments that have intermittently supported them. This chapter considers the complex, contradictory, and nebulous configuration between private museums and the Brazilian government, focusing specifically on Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM). It sketches the story of its founding in the late 1940s and early 1950s and three pivotal moments in the institution’s history: 1953, when the museum secured land for its campus on the Aterro do Flamengo; 1970, when the museum hosted the XIX Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna; and 1978, when a fire destroyed 90 percent of the collection. This chapter also addresses implicit methodological challenges for scholars working in Brazil. In the case of MAM, the archives are not only incomplete, due to the fire and other obstructions, but also only partially catalogued, making a definitive chronological narrative impossible. Thus, anecdotal information taken from interviews, albeit subjective, becomes crucial to constructing a version of the institution’s history. Here, an unpublished interview with Carmen Portinho, the museum’s first executive deputy director, from the archives of the Fundação Nacional de Arte, provides an informal history, supplementing the stories in this text.
