In the afternoon, we went to meet Danilo Santos de Miranda, the founding Director of SESC Pompeia, a charismatic ex-Jesuit who has run its organisation since 1984 and who worked with Lina Bo Bardi on its formation.   It is an astonishing cultural complex, mostly consisting of adapted industrial buildings, but with two huge buildings on the south west corner of the site designed by Bo Bardi.

This is the main avenue of the complex:-

The theatre:-

And the new buildings:-

We spent the morning in Oscar Niemeyer’s adventurous Bienal building in the Parque de Ibirapuera.   It was originally designed as a pavilion for industrial fairs with a huge amount of flat space on three floors, none of it air conditioned, and was only first used for the third Bienal in 1957.   It has been curated this year by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, who has invited seven artists, including two Brazilians, to make their own interventions/installations:-

We spent the day at MASP.

Exploring the nature of the relationship between the tough, brutalist, concrete frame and Lina Bo Bardi’s idea of a hanging garden, as shown in her child-like drawings:-

The amazing system of display on the top floor, which has recently been reinstated:-

And the red scissors in the gallery downstairs:-

As someone who has been keen on upmarket food in museums, I can’t help but admire the more democratic tradition represented by the basement restaurant in MASP – cheap, self-service, for citizens and tourists alike, and still with Lina Bo Bardi’s simple stools:-

I am not normally prone to vainglory, but felt a brief frisson when I spotted my book on East London in a bookshop, Prince, on the smartest and most fashionable street in São Paulo:-

I have come too late to São Paulo to join the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, which was opened – but not to the public – on 7 November 1968 by Queen Elizabeth II, no less.   One slightly wonders what she was doing visiting Brazil so soon after the arrival of a military dictatorship.   It was presumably on the Foreign Office’s, and maybe the CIA’s advice. The idea for MASP came from Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand, a newspaper magnate, who had hired Pietro Maria Bardi, an Italian art dealer who had worked for Mussolini, to collect works of art for him when they were cheap in the aftermath of the second world war. But between Pietro Maria Bardi and his architect wife, Lina Bo, they created the most democratic and conceptually original museum of its time:-

Meeting a former pupil of Isaiah Berlin in Beijing reminded me of the commissioned portrait which Lucian Freud agreed to undertake in 1996 not long before Berlin’s death (he was a bit grumpy about not having been asked to undertake a commission much earlier in his career). I had not realised that there were multiple drawings (see below). All I remember is that they met for lunch in Wilton’s (Berlin had a set in Albany) and that the portrait was not completed to Freud’s satisfaction before Berlin died in November 1997. Instead of going to the NPG as had been intended, it was given to Lady Berlin and she in turn apparently left it to Wolfson.

https://betweentwocities.com/2012/01/12/lucian-freud-paints-isaiah-berlin/

We ended the day practising our calligraphy:-

And attending the grand ceremonial opening of the new CAFA Art Museum:-

In the afternoon of the CAFA Centenary Conference, we were encouraged to focus on the role and responsibilities of University Art Museums.   We started with Geoffrey Ward, the acting Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, talking about the role of the university museum as a social venue, followed by Ernst Vegelin, the Director of the Courtauld Gallery providing a spirited defence of the intellectual responsibilities of university museums, exploring the foothills as well as the mountain peaks of art history, anti-populist in its motivation, driven, like its academic peers, by new research, not visitor numbers. More common is the role of the University Art Museum as a bridge into the local community, as was vigorously expounded by Caitlin Doherty, the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida.

Meng Xianwei described an amazing project – the Museum of Contemporary Art at Qingdao – which combines a huge museum with an artist’s village, studios, a park, a wedding hall, dunes, an apartment block, and the Qingdao campus of CAFA, all designed futuristically by Jean Nouvel. An eco museum-cum-holiday resort. A public-private investment serving both the local community, artists and tourists.

Finally, Han Haiyan described the gestation of the CAFA Art Museum in Langfang, one part only of the International Cultural Exchange Center, a huge, new town building in best neo-expressionist style:-

We all piled on to the bus in the morning for what I thought was going to be the half a mile drive back to CAFA again, but turned out to be a mystery ride out beyond the 6th. Ring Road to Langfang, a new township southwest of Beijing, to a conference centre attached to the International Cultural Exchange Center:-

We returned to the topic of new digital developments in museums, including the National Museum of Singapore, where visitors are encouraged to copy photographs from a table where they are all displayed (no copyright) so that they don’t need to take photographs themselves. Not surprisingly, the most impressive and most fully digital museum presented was the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, where many of the displays are in new media, even when working with old media artists, including Michael Craig-Martin and William Kentridge.