ThefoundingofMAM

The creation of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro is yet another moment in which the city renews its landscape and expands its dialogue with the world. The result of the growth of national collecting of modern artists during a postwar period in Europe, the founding of an institution that would collect and exhibit 20th-century art, especially avant-garde art, finally led the Rio de Janeiro visual arts scene to shift its academic emphasis away from the Escola and the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes toward a new moment.

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph of a vehicle with a large panel on the back. On the left, we see a person sitting on the tractor, looking at the panel. The panel displays the text "MUSEU DE ARTE MODERNA" in large, clear letters. In the background, we see an open landscape with some distant structures and mountains on the horizon.

In dialogue with the creation of museums with the same profile in other cities (its model was the founding of MoMA in New York in 1929), MAM was born as a civil entity, whose group of Rio-based intellectuals – such as president Raimundo Castro Maya, along with Manuel Bandeira, Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, and Quirino Campofiorito – drew up its founding charter in 1948. In 1951, the year of the first São Paulo International Art Biennial, MAM was already holding exhibitions – initially in the Banco Boa Vista building (a design by Oscar Niemeyer), located on Avenida Presidente Vargas, near Candelária. In 1952, still without a permanent home, it moved into Palácio Gustavo Capanema, the modernist building of the Ministry of Education. That same year, it obtained a donation from the city government and authorization from the City Council to occupy a forty-thousand-square-meter plot of land, located on the landfill of Santa Luzia beach, on the edges of Guanabara Bay.

Its Executive Director and strong figure of the newly created institution, Niomar Muniz Sodré, commissioned architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy to design the new, permanent headquarters, completed in 1953. With construction beginning on December 9, 1954, its first building complex – the famous School Block – was inaugurated with President Juscelino Kubitschek in attendance on September 27, 1958. Until the completion of the Exhibition Block in 1967, all of the museum's events — exhibitions, courses, seminars, and the film library — took place in that space.

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph of a modern building. On the left side, we see an open space with plants and a paved area. In the center, there is a large building with a glass facade and metal structure. On the right, there is an external staircase with side railings. In the background, we see a city with several buildings and trees.

With Niomar's active leadership and the involvement of various segments of Rio's cultural scene, MAM soon became an epicenter of art, culture, and knowledge, hosting major exhibitions by international names that brought the local art scene up to date. Its common spaces, such as the famous café and canteen, along with the various courses and lectures offered, expanded exchanges between generations and fields – like the productive dialogue that developed between the visual arts, design, and film. In the following decades, MAM remained a fundamental space for the city's aesthetic and intellectual production, turning its privileged location amid modernist buildings and gardens – even more so after the opening of the Parque do Flamengo complex (popularly known as Aterro) – into a field of public experimentation frequented by the whole population.