MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo)

MASP, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, was founded in 1947 by media magnate Assis Chateaubriand and Italian curator Pietro Maria Bardi, who assembled a collection of European painting, including works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, and Van Gogh, largely through postwar-era acquisitions when many European works were undervalued. The museum's current building on Avenida Paulista opened in 1968, designed by architect Lina Bo Bardi in raw-concrete Brazilian Brutalist style: a red-painted concrete-and-glass volume suspended eight meters above an open plaza on four massive concrete pillars, leaving the ground level free as public space. Inside, Bardi's original glass-easel display system holds paintings upright on freestanding glass panels rather than mounting them on walls, letting works be viewed from both sides and removing the visual hierarchy of a conventional gallery hang; the system was restored in a 2015 renovation after being altered for decades. The collection, one of the largest holdings of Western art in the Southern Hemisphere, spans European Old Masters through Brazilian modernists such as Tarsila do Amaral and Cândido Portinari, with rotating thematic exhibitions supplementing the permanent display. The building itself, an icon of Avenida Paulista and of Brazilian modernist architecture, is as central to the museum's identity as the collection it houses.