Dis/Solution: Lina Bo Bardi’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo*(Excerpts)

Stephen Mark Caffey  

Gabriela Campagnol

The Exhibition Scheme for MASP in Context

‘…a painting is born in a free space—that is on an easel—its original state can best be evoked when exhibited on tempered plate glass fixed on a concrete base, rather than against an opaque wall’.[1]

Lina’s hovering pinacoteca installation for MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo) echoes the hover of the building itself, affording the interior space of the structure a substantive rather than adjective property. This is the space of neither/nor, of liminality, of becoming, of transition, of dissolution, of absence, of suspension, of the pause, of silence, of the void. Through the execution of Lina’s vision, the exhibition space took on a sensory quality comparable to John Cage’s 4’ 33”, performed by a full orchestra as four minutes and thirty-three seconds of complete silence.[2] In Cage’s three movements of instrumental and vocal silence, the random, ambient noise of the music hall and its occupants serve as content, with each performance and each recording of the work differing dramatically from all others. Lina’s choice to affix the paintings and works on paper in the MASP collection to glass easels with concrete bases rejects the institutionally sanctioned (and ever-contentious) dialogue between painting and wall, replacing the artificial and superficial dialogue with a series of glancing encounters with multiple works simultaneously occupying the viewers’ peripheral visual fields and with the other viewers moving behind and between the glass easel to activate the space among the levitating products of artistic labor (Figure 1, Figure 2).

Figure 1: Lina with one of the glass panel installations(photograph Lew Parrella, 1967, Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, São Paulo, Brazil collection. All rights reserved).

Figure 2: View of the pinacoteca (photograph Paolo Gasperini, 1968, Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, São Paulo, Brazil collection. All rights reserved).

In formal terms, each easel comprised four components: a cast concrete base (40 × 40 cm) supporting a 16 mm tempered glass panel with four holes, to which was secured a single painting. As would be the case if the works were hung on a wall, viewers had full access to the ‘content side’—the obverse in the case of Lina’s glass easel. On the reverse side of the support appeared labels, the smallest of which approximated conventional museum wall text panels, the largest roughly matching the dimensions of the object displayed. At their most spare, the labels identified the artist, title, medium and dimensions of the work. Some labels of this size allowed the viewer to see most of the back side of the work. More text-intensive labels, which included explanatory ‘reproductions, engravings, maps, graphics and documents’, completely obscured the backs of some works.[3] Lina expressed confidence that her ‘design of a panel-easel in the MASP art gallery is an important contribution to international museum management’. To quantify her success, Lina cited the ratio of the thousands of visitors who visited MASP each weekend to the ‘dozen complaints’ she had received about the exhibition scheme.[4]

Lina arranged the glass easels in the MASP second-floor exhibition room in an irregular grid pattern, all facing toward the entrance to the space with each attached work presented at ‘eye level’ so that the viewer could always see multiple objects placed at varying distances. However, no viewpoint allowed an MASP visitor to see all of the works at once; nor did any position permit the viewer to see only one of the paintings. As Shuman Basar notes, ‘the glass supports disappeared at a distance, giving the impression that the paintings were hovering in magical, liberated suspense: an orchestration of dogged rationality bordering on the (poetically) pathological’.[5] The resulting assemblage reads as a single work of art, the whole of which could only be experienced by moving through and around the individual components. And just as viewers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art look through Marcel Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)’ (1915–23) to see other viewers on the other side of the work (and thus experience the intimate disorientation of a chance encounter), each visit to MASP would have emerged as a different permutation of chance elements.[6] 

Lina and Pietro chose the presentation sequences for each of the rows of paintings; the intent was an emphatic ‘leveling’ of the objects. This was achieved by rejecting such conventions as chronology, attribution, artistic movement, artist oeuvre, national identity, medium, size, market value, art-historical significance and geographical origin. The MASP installation made no distinctions between Brazilian vanguard painter Flávio Rezende de Carvalho’s Sleeping Nude (1932), Pierre-August Renoir’s Pink and Blue (1881) and van Gogh’s Schoolboy (1888). Lina’s ‘crystal easels’ created a perception of simultaneity across the movements and periods represented by collection, and an unusually free course of reception for the visitor.[7] With her carefully scattered glass stele, Lina disfigured time and deranged space, insinuating the art of the past into an ‘eternal present,’ concretizing André Malraux’s ‘imaginary museum’ in one grand, wild, fanciful provocation.[8] [9]

Situated against historical conventions of academy, gallery and museum display practices, the audacity of Lina’s museological intervention at MASP becomes clear. Until the late nineteenth century most collectors, dealers, gallery owners and curators displayed paintings floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall and frame-to-frame. Johann Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi (c. 1775), François-Joseph Heim’ Charles V Distributing Awards to the Artists at the Close of the Salon of 1824, and George Scharf’s 1828 Exhibition at the Royal Academy illustrate the practice in Italy, France and England during the period in which European art patronage expanded well beyond church and state (Figure 3). 

Figure 3. François-Joseph Heim’ Charles V Distributing Awards to the Artists at the Close of the Salon of 1824 (1825) oil on canvas, 173 × 256 cm. Louvre, Paris.

In London the practice of exhibiting one work per wall space first appeared in the one-man show mounted in a room at 28 Haymarket by the American-born painter John Singleton Copley in May of 1784, but the practice did not ‘catch on’ among other artists and institutions.[10] [11] The most influential permanent break with the frame-to-frame tradition occurred on 1 May 1877, when London’s Grosvenor Gallery opened its doors to the public, having hung the paintings with ‘broad spaces’ between, purportedly at the insistence of the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler (New York Times 28 April 1877). Some historians attribute to Whistler Grosvenor Gallery owner Lindsay Coutts’s decision to allow the pictures more space than was, at that time, the norm:

 ‘Whistler’s influence has been…marked in picture galleries. When he began to exhibit, galleries were decorated anyhow and pictures hung as close as they could be fitted from floor to ceiling, artists caring little how they were hung so long as their work was on the walls. …“A beautiful picture should be shown beautifully,” he said; “therefore it must be hung so it can be seen, with plenty of wall-space round it…”’[12]

The approach accomplished two objectives: first, refining the visual encounter with the paintings by allowing the viewer to engage with each as a discrete gesture of creative expression without the distractions of surrounding works; and second, the elimination of the hierarchical organization that placed the most prominent painters at the center of each wall and – in the case of London’s Royal Academy – above or below ‘the line’ that indicated their esteem (by the members of the hanging committee, at least) and thus their value.[13]

Despite the shift occasioned by the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition scheme, the Royal Academy continued to display paintings frame-to-frame until well after its move from Somerset House to Burlington House in 1868 (Figure 4). Writing in 1892, a contributor to The British Architect reported that Sir James D. Linton, ‘president of two art institutions’ had finally concluded that such ‘spacing would be the system of the future’.[14] In addition to spacing, the Grosvenor Gallery also instituted the practice of grouping works by artist (rather than by hierarchical arrangement) and introduced electric light into the exhibition space for the first time, altering the appearance of works that had been produced in naturally lit artists’ studios.

Figure 4 William Powell Frith, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 (1883) oil on canvas, 23 5/8. 44 7/8 in. Royal Academy of Art, London.

Lina introduced the display system at MASP in direct contradiction of the practices that predominated among all art exhibitions well into the twenty-first century. Almost all art exhibition venues had adopted the practice of separating and spacing works—a practice that continues to predominate in the twenty-first century. At MASP, just as the glass easels democratized the viewing space, the natural light that flooded into the pinacoteca treated equally the paintings that were produced before the advent of electric light and those that were produced with an incandescent bulb illuminating the production space.

In the mind of the ‘jealous conservative with his old-fashioned, academic beliefs’, the exhibition scheme at MASP was an act tantamount to desecration. Pietro extolled Lina’s ‘futuristic background and visionary ideas’, explaining that the revolutionary approach to the display of the paintings was the only option for a museum that ‘belongs to the people’.[15] [16] [17]  Through MASP Lina clarified a number of the aesthetic, curatorial and political impulses that informed her work as architect, artist and activist. As a member of the Communist Party and an adherent to the theoretical and critical positions of Antonio Gramsci, Lina held in marked disdain monarchical and capitalist socioeconomic hierarchies; this disdain permeated Lina’s consciousness, driving her decisions at all levels of the design process.[18] [19]Corollary to this perspective was Lina’s collectivist approach to aesthetic decision-making and curatorial expression. 

Over a period of twenty years Lina conversed with colleagues in the fields of architecture and design and consulted with Pietro as she crystallized the ideas that would manifest as the radical MASP strategy. While working with Gio Ponti in Milan in the 1930s, Lina had actively engaged in the emerging polemics of exhibition practice, a mode of expression that provided most young modern architects their only opportunity to present their own work to the public.[20] For the Avenida Paulista space Lina’s approach transcended the inspiration that she had taken from Albini’s designs for Scipione & Black and White Exhibition at Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera in 1941, producing an unprecedented, unparalleled and unsurpassed intervention.

Theoretical and Critical Perspectives

The Italian Rationalists in Milan in the 1930s and 1940s and the Surrealists in New York in 1942 had challenged the institutional rigidity of museal practice before MASP opened its doors to the Brazilian public in 1968, but none succeeded so completely as Lina in liberating the museum from its function as a treasury-reliquary-mausoleum conceived to address, valorize and reassure cultural elites.[21] As Olivia de Oliveira notes, Lina ‘dechristianized’ the museum experience, making all works equally accessible to both the uninitiated and ‘the ordained’ by ‘removing the “aura” from the pictures’.[22][23][24] Lina contested the traditional valuation of paintings as luxury goods and precious objects, preferring instead to present them as the products of artistic labor, as ‘trivial items’ linked to quotidian life.[25] 

In Lina’s curatorial calculus, the installation became – in senses literal and figurative – a destabilized field of cultural production.[26] Lina’s approach eliminated hierarchies of chronology, movement, material and artist, metaphorically leveling and literally elevating the works in the MASP permanent collection. By affixing all labels to the backs of the easels, Lina’s plan forced viewers to walk around the object in order to learn the name of the artist and other pertinent information. The tactic also meant that the frame, the nails or staples, and any transport and customs labels would be visible along with the artist’s name, title of the work, date, medium, dimensions and accession information. Finally, the fact that a viewer could not see the work and the wall text at the same time meant that the object and its metadata had to be viewed separately in time and in space.

With Lina’s intervention, the impoverished rubber tapper would experience the paintings in the MASP permanent collection in the same way as the wealthiest of Paulistanos and visiting Europeans: as objects—objects liberated from hierarchies of space, time, connoisseurship and scholarship; objects produced by the labor of artists; and objects standing united in protest against the museological and museographical hierarchies and relegations that dominated exhibition practice in Europe and the United States. As Daniela Sandler notes, ‘there was no prescribed path from artwork to artwork. Visitors should build their own path, and each visit or itinerary could create new and unexpected connections’. With boisterous crowds gathered in manifestação beneath MASP echoing the syncopated rows and columns of cavaletes de vidro that hovered above them, the view from outside the museum would provide a vision of solidarity: people and art in protest; structure, space and display as uprising. From within the structure, the ‘rectangles of glass sticking out of their concrete bases, echoed the materials and volumetric relationships of the cityscape outside…joining the gallery space’ with the chaotic, bustling high-rise city of São Paulo on one side and the Anhangabaú Valley on the other.[27]

Perhaps more than any other institution of its kind, Lina’s MASP demands a sort of rhizomorphic sampling of twentieth-century theoretical and critical mechanisms through which to regard its meanings.[28] Writing about the work of architect Stephen Holl, architect and historian Shima Mohajeri articulates a series of points that one might reasonably apply to the experience of Lina’s fenestrations of space and of time. Adapting the position of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who wrote six years before MASP opened on Avenida Paulista), Mohajeri suggests Holl’s Experiments in Porosity:

bring in the idea of spatial depth infused with time. The porous layers in space indicate the simultaneity of presence where [the] body moves through depth in time. That is when the body experiences the event of time and space in its continuity. The spatial porosity is a method for destabilizing the outlines and limits while displacing them back and forth in-between spaces. This continual closing and opening of space provides a room for the body to discover its own visibility among the invisibles created by the empty voids. Thus, the porosity in space will appear as a result of an uninterrupted flow of interpenetrated events within the spatial depth.[29] [30][31]

In the MASP pinacoteca, one moved in and around and through and between the phenomenological field and the dematerialized temporal and spatial boundaries of the transparent floating box hovering above the void. For the viewer accustomed to conventional European and American exhibition practice, MASP indeed destabilized the outlines and limits of the aesthetic experience. Those viewers whose first encounters with museums and with early-modern and modern European art and with Brazilian modernist painting occurred at MASP experienced an essentially unprecedented form of visual-cultural engagement with neither comparative nor contrastive referent—one wonders about their first impressions of conventionally exhibited works after having been visually acculturated to Lina’s program.

Rather than experiencing the museum as a sedentary space striated by paintings hung wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling or by linear constructs of artistic movement and art-historical chronology, the uninitiated viewer exchanged nomadic gazes with the objects on display, never able to see the object and its mediating, filtering label at the same time.[32] The resulting disconnection deterritorialized the works, separating them from their semiotic systems, effectively and affectively and neutralizing the semiospheric authority of such classifications as Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, French, Italian, etc.[33][34] 

Through this catalyzing mechanism of performative (dis)engagement, the novice who might have been otherwise alienated by the aura of each discrete expression of Euro-imperialist academic hegemony in the MASP collection welcomed and was welcomed by each work as a product of artistic labor. Conversely, the strategy intentionally alienated those among the ordained who had been conditioned by the institutional mandates of European museological and museographical convention to seek disciplinary reassurance through the ritual privileging of wall label text. Lina’s installation allowed for both the uninitiated and the willing a smooth, nomadic space within which to ‘restrain from all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to linger within the truth that is happening in the work’, rectifying and revivifying the ‘vital relationship’ between viewer and object.[35][36]  Thus Lina’s approach generated the free field within which viewers from various backgrounds representing the full range of exposure to the fine arts could become the willing guardians of her installation.[37]

[1] H A LaFarge, ed., Museum of Art São Paolo. (NewYork: Newsweek, 1978), 178./163

[2] O F de Oliveira, Subtle Substances: The Architectureof Lina Bo Bardi. (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2006), 259. 

[3] LaFarge, ed., Museum of Art São Paolo. (NewYork: Newsweek, 1978), 163.

[4] M C Ferraz, ed., Lina Bo Bardi. (Milano: Charta/Instituto Lina Bo e P.M.Bardi, 1994), 100.

[5] S Basar, “Whitewash: The Role of the Modern Gallery Setting as a Site of Artistic, Architectural and Curatorial Adventure.”( Modern Painters April 98–101): 100.

[6] C Veikos, “To Enter the Work: Ambient Art.” Journal of Architectural Education , 2006, 59(4): 71–80.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1531-314X.2006.00056.x.

[7] Anelli, R 2009b Gosto Moderno: O Design da exposição e a exposição do design. ARQtexto 14: 92–109.

[8] A Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire. (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1965).  

[9] C E Comas, Lina 3x21. ARQtexto 14: 168.

[10]Saunders, R 1990 Genius and Glory: John Singleton Copley’s‘The Death of Major Peirson’. American Art Journal22(3): 4–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1594564.  

[11] E B Neff, E B and K H Weber, American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

[12] E R Pennell and J Pennell, The Whistler Journal. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. 1921), 304. 

[13] D H Solkin, Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art and the Courtauld Institute Galleries, 2001). 

[14] T R Davison, ‘Municipal Art Galleries’. The British Architect, 1982, 37(2): 149. 

[15] LaFarge, ed., Museum of Art São Paolo, 9. 

[16] de Oliveira, Subtle Substances: The Architectureof Lina Bo Bardi. 276. 

[17] L Bo Bardi, Explicações sobre o Museu de Arte. O Estado de São Paolo, 5 April, 1970.

[18] M C Ferraz, ed., Lina Bo Bardi. 117.

[19] L Bo Bardi, Stones Against Diamonds. (London: AA Publications, 2013), 15.

[20] S Leet, Franco Albini. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 21. 

[21] T J Demos, “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ 1942.” October 97(3), 2001: 91–119.

[22] Bo Bardi, Explicações sobre o Museu de Arte. O Estado de São Paolo, 5 April, 1970.  

[23] O F de Oliveira, Subtle Substances: The Architectureof Lina Bo Bardi. (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2006), 276.

[24] W Benjamin, Illuminations. (London: Fontana, 1968).

[25] O F de Oliveira, Subtle Substances, 276. 

[26] P Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 

[27] D Sandler, The Other Way Around. In: Lu D ed., Third World Modernisms. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 47. 

[28]G Deleuze and F Guattari, 1987 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3-25. 

[29] S Mohajeri, The Time of Place in Architecture: The Simultaneity of Spatial Depth and Steven Holl’s Design Method. In: International Merleau-Ponty Circle Conference, Mississippi State University, 9 September 2009, 6. 

[30] S Holl, Experiments in Porosity. (Buffalo: Buffalo Books, 2005).

[31] M Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. (New York: The Humanities Press. 1962).

[32] G Deleuze and F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.1987) 474-500. 

[33] J Lotman, On the Semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies, 2005, 33(1): 213.

[34] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (New York: Viking, 1977).

[35] M Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971 ), 66. 

[36] T Adorno, Prisms. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982).

[37]  M Heidegger, On the Origin of the Work of Art. In: Young J and Haynes K (Eds.) Off the Beaten Track. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23.

*本文转载于Caffey, S M and Campagnol, G 2015 Dis/Solution: Lina Bo Bardi’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies, 13(1): 5, pp. 1-13,

 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jcms.1021221

文中注释和插图依节选内容编号，与原文不同。

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时间：2018. 09.09 - 12.30

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