The Love/Hate relationship: MAM-Rio and the Brazilian Government

• In Event: Negotiating Identity: The Art Museum in Latin America

Abstract

In the early hours of July 8, 1978 a security guard at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro noticed a small fire coming from the exhibition galleries. The flames raged for forty minutes before firefighters arrived to extinguish them, resulting in the destruction of approximately ninety percent of the permanent collection. Although there is no documented proof, the fire is widely believed to have been caused by arson, an act of retaliation perpetrated by the military regime then in power, which viewed MAM as a shelter of freedom. At the heart of this catastrophe lies a fundamental tension that has existed for decades in Brazil between private museums and the governments that have supported them. Indeed, this was a significant reversal of the very positive and supportive relationships that most Brazilian art institutions enjoyed with government organizations when they were founded in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The museums of modern art in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, as well as the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Bienal de São Paulo, were all founded by private individuals and with independent monies, yet they played important civic roles in their respective cities and received considerable funding from their municipal governments. This paper considers the complex, contradictory and nebulous configuration between private museums and the Brazilian government, focusing specifically on Rio’s Museu de Arte Moderna and highlighting a handful of episodes, both positive and negative, when public and private concerns clashed at the museum.

Author

• Aleca Le Blanc, University of California Riverside