Month: October 2013

We are sorry that the blog has been so empty this week- we´ve been rushing around trying to get everything finished and say proper goodbyes to everybody at the Pinacoteca!

We will give a proper full account of our last few days at the Pinacoteca and our last week in South America from the week commencing Sunday 27th October!

We are off to Buenos Aires this evening so we are frantically packing and tidying as Tatiana will pick us up to go to the airport in fourty minutes!

Thank you all for reading up until now! Please come back next week if you´re interested in how our placement ended!

Until then we will leave you with a little taster of our last day!

This week we have been very busy with technical visits, we have visited four very different studios.

1. MAB – Museum of Art in Brazil
2. MASP – Museum of art in Sao Paulo
3. MAS – Museum of Scared art
4. Raul private conservation Studio.

I will write about the first two today and Grace will write about our second visits tomorrow, our last ever day at the Pinacoteca.

Something that has made all of our technical visits slightly more funny is the way that Brazilians pronounce words with an extra eee sound at the end of a word, for example my name is Isabelle but Brazilian´s pronounce it Isabell-y. When we visited the MASP, MAB and MAS, everyone said to us that we were going to visit the MASP-Y, MAB-Y, MAS-Y and as you can imagine we got very confused as to where these places were!

It also adds a wonderful afternoon highlight when we do not just go for coffee break, we go for COFFEE BREAKY!

As you can probably see that the Brazilians love an abbreviation!

When we arrived at all of the museums they took down our ID/Passport number when we entered; at MAB we had armed guards escort us through the turnstile! It makes you quite uneasy when you feel like you are being tracked everywhere you go.

1. MAB

http://www.faap.br/museu/

We were not allowed to take photographs for security reasons, so I am afraid you will not be able to see the MAB.

This is a small private museum with only three exhibition areas, well I say small but all three of these areas are massive one of them is about the half the size of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London, this is currently exhibiting Klaus Mitteldorf´s photography in a exhibition called ´Work` 1983-2013.

We were shown around by two lovely ladies, who both spoke very good English, they showed us around all of the areas of the museum from the stores to the exhibition areas. Their lab is very small and a singular lab, they do not undertake any conservation or restoration work at the museum its self, only minor interventions, everything else is contracted out to private conservators. The only conservation work the team carries out is preventive, for example at the moment they are taking down an exhibition and also changing all of the storage systems to be able to accommodate recent acquisitions.

There are only 11 people working within the whole museum a director, a curator/museologist, 4 in the restoration department, 3 people in the education department, a producer and a secretary. This is very small indeed; we could not believe that the whole museum is run by such a small amount of people, especially seeing as their collection and temporary exhibitions always include very famous artists, both worldwide and Brazilian.

2. MASP

http://masp.art.br/masp2010/

The MASP is the main museum for art in Sao Paulo; it is on the busiest street of Sao Paulo and holds a collection of 8,000 works from some of the world’s most famous artists including Monet, Rembrandt, Goya and Rafael.

But the strangest thing is the MASP only has one conservator, one curator and one technician in charge of this fantastic collection!

Karen, the conservator was very nice, kind and spoke to us in very good English. She showed us the lab that they used as an office and store room more than for practical works as once again the museum only carries out minor interventions and contracts out work to private conservators.

She also showed us around the exhibition areas; here she talked through all of the pieces that have been restored. One piece by Poussin that was completely resorted by a conservator from the Louvre in Paris, the final piece is outstanding and a must see at the MASP. But I feel as though they should make this a focal point, this wonderful painting was ripped, frameless and has major losses then conserved back into full glory only 3 years ago, but unfortunately there was not a sign or picture about its previous state. The museum also works a lot with exchanges, for example the Rafael – Resurrection of Christ – went on loan to the National Gallery in London for a special exhibition. The MASP loaned it to the National Gallery if they completed some conservation work on it while it was in London.

The MASP is a private museum that uses private investors to invest money into the collection to fund the restoration of the worst deteriorating and most important objects. Karen has put together a portfolio of the works needing conservation or restoration detailing each pieces needs, some only need new frames other need complete restoration, then she puts the cases forward to possible investors. She said that this has been quite successful so far, but there is still a lot of work that needs attention or to be presented better.

In the lab they also had a Cézanne, both Grace and I were probably too excited by this as we could have literally touched it! It is in the labs at the moment as a conservator from the Metropolitan museum in New York is doing some research into Cezanne´s use of graphite, very interesting.

We have found it very interesting to visit two other museums in Sao Paulo, to see the difference in how each museum works and how they cope with so few staff to help with the collections. We can see now that the Pinacoteca is the best museum in Sao Paulo to work at for its resources into conservation and restoration, we feel very lucky to be working in such a great place.