As of April 30, the Museu da Casa Brasileira (MCB), the only one in the country dedicated to architecture and design, will be evicted from the address it has occupied for more than 50 years, the Crespi Prado mansion, a large neoclassical-style mansion. on Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima, in the west zone of São Paulo.
Responsible for the management of the MCB since January last year, the Fundação Padre Anchieta (FPA) ended the administration agreement with the institution to which the museum belongs, the Secretary of Culture and Creative Economy of the State of São Paulo. It was valid until 2026.
As it also owns the mansion, the foundation decided to evict the museum, whose collection consists of furniture and historical design objects, such as armchairs and crockery, as well as paintings by unavoidable artists in the country, such as Candido Portinari and Di Cavalcanti.
The decision was disclosed in a press release sent to the press at the end of this Friday night, the 31st. Brazilian house”, but does not specify what the new address will be.
The museum has no plans to reopen after it closes at the end of April, but the mansion will be transformed into a cultural space “that will embrace all types of art”, in the words of the foundation, and will remain open to host exhibitions and events. The Capim Santo restaurant will also continue to operate.
The foundation and the secretary of Culture did not respond to questions from the Sheet about what led to the breakup of the partnership. They restricted themselves to saying that there was no problem in relation to the agreement and that the decision was made in agreement.
The rupture marks the first major change that the government of Tarcísio de Freitas, of the Republicans, promotes in relation to the 62 cultural institutions that are under the command of the government of São Paulo, among them Pinacoteca and Osesp.
The eviction, however, had already been rehearsed for almost five years, still under PSDB management, with Geraldo Alckmin at the helm, when the foundation informed the museum that it did not plan to renew the mansion’s lending contract, which would expire in 2021.
There are those who consider the Museu da Casa Brasileira to be inseparable from its headquarters. The mansion was donated to the foundation by Renata Crespi in 1968, five years after the death of her husband, Fábio da Silva Prado, former mayor of São Paulo.
The widow, immortalized in a bust sculpted by Victor Brecheret, not only established that her old house be used for cultural purposes, but also donated a collection of furniture and objects that is considered the original seed of the museum’s collection.
Design professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at USP, Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos Santos says that the mansion is a central element of the Museu da Casa Brasileira, of which she was once the curator. Author of a book that is a reference in the area, “Modern Furniture in Brazil”, she considers that “it will be very difficult for another space to cope” with housing the institution.
“The museum’s architecture characterizes the identity of a period and of a Brazilian social class — the aristocracy. The mansion is a living document, because, in contrast to some of its simpler pieces, it shows the contradictions and inequality of Brazil.”
The collection, by the way, will be dismembered. That’s because the pieces donated by the Crespi Prado couple belong to the foundation, in a lending arrangement with the family, while the rest, acquired over the last 50 years, is property of the state government.
The Secretary of Culture told the Sheet that his pieces will be kept in a technical reserve and taken to the museum’s new address as soon as it is reopened. The foundation, in turn, said that its part of the collection will remain on display in the mansion.
Technical director of MCB, Giancarlo Latorraca, in turn, sees the change with good eyes. He says that while the tension created by the aristocratic architecture with other pieces is interesting, the museum is not dedicated to 20th century furniture.
He recalls that, in fact, the MCB’s first headquarters were in a building on Nottingham Avenue, in Campos Elíseos, in the center of São Paulo — that is, it already had a life outside the mansion on Faria Lima. “Now, it’s like the museum is moving out of the lease and into a home of its own,” he says.
Transforming the mansion into a cultural space was an old desire of the foundation, which already planned to expand the use of the place to house the museum and other exhibitions at the same time, among them one dedicated to “Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum”.
Behind the scenes, it was circulated that the TV Cultura program, which the foundation owns, could even have a museum inside the mansion. The FPA says that the series could be the subject of temporary exhibitions at the site, but that the creation of a museum dedicated to the work of Cao Hamburger and Flávio de Souza is ruled out.
Regardless of the reason for the changes in space, the fact is that the children’s program, created in 1994 and shown with original episodes until 1997, could exponentially increase FPA’s collection with the mansion.
Exhibitions that reconstruct environments where characters like Nino, a 300-year-old child, and the witch Morgana, his great-aunt, lived, had unprecedented success in the last decade.
The Museum of Image and Sound, which housed the first assembly, received 410,000 people in six months, a record that is maintained until today and made MIS the most visited museum in the state of São Paulo in 2015.
The success was even greater in the second show, which was on display for 11 months at the Memorial da América Latina between 2017 and 2018. In all, there were 821,000 visits, with tickets sold at R$20 —a value that rose to R$48 in the last year, when the exhibition returned, occupying Santana Parque Shopping.
The MCB exhibitions, in turn, will suffer the impact of the change. For this semester, an exhibition was scheduled with new works by John Graz, a Swiss artist and designer who is considered the introducer of art deco in Brazil. It will be postponed until the museum reopens.
The MCB also planned, for this month, an exhibition on the history of radio and phonographic memory, considering the 100 years since the creation of the first Brazilian station in April 1923. This must be maintained, according to the FPA.