Museum of Fine Arts of São Paulo
The collection began to be formed after the founding of the Academy of Fine Arts in São Paulo, the oldest college specializing in the artistic education of the state capital, established in 1925.[3] Created by the Gaucho politician, writer and musician Pedro Augusto Gomes Cardim, also founder of the Dramatic and Musical Conservatory of São Paulo and Paulista Academy of Letters, and established with the support of intellectuals such as Mário de Andrade and Menotti Del Picchia, the Academy was of great importance for the development of the São Paulo artistic environment at the beginning of the twentieth century when the incipient local artistic learning system was still largely based on informality.Consequently, it also diversified the collection (then under the custody of the Luciano Octavio Ferreira Gomes Cardim Library or dispersed throughout its facilities), which now encompasses copies of graphic arts and representative works of contemporary industrial "design."[1][5] In early 2007, a group of teachers presented to the board of Fine Arts which already held the status of university center, the proposal to create a historical and artistic museum based on the library's collections.As a university museum, the institution was also conceived as a didactic experimentation laboratory, integrated into the academic daily life, and a cultural diffusion space, promoting educational activities aimed at the general public.[1] Since its inauguration, the Fine Arts Museum of São Paulo has organized exhibitions of historical themes, aiming to give greater visibility to the trajectory of the university center.[1][5][6] The artistic collection brings together approximately 700 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawing and engravings, dating mostly from the 20th century, encompassing the period that goes from the academicism to the contemporary art, mainly of active authors in São Paulo.[3][6][16] Painters and sculptors linked to the academic tradition are represented, such as Oscar Pereira da Silva, Rafael Galvez, Paulo Vergueiro Lopes de León, Tulio Mugnaini, Alfredo Oliani , Vicente Larocca, José Wasth Rodrigues and Luís Morrone (most notably a bronze study of the Monument to Pedro Álvares Cabral, in Ibirapuera Park), artists of undefined style or known to synthesize, to a greater or lesser extent, academic characteristics with modern influences, such as Julio Guerra, [Colette Pujol, Lívia Guimarães Lopes and Ricardo Cipicchia, modern painters such as Cícero Dias and others linked to the Paulista Artistic Family (namely Clóvis Graciano) and contemporaries such as Flávio Imperio, Renina Katz, Takashi Fukushima, Waldemar Lamb and Antônio Bandeira.Noteworthy is a set of drawings by the Dener Pamplona de Abreu, an icon of Brazilian fashion from the 60s and 70s, as well as the Vicente Di Grado Collection, composed of over 300 books illustrated by the former student, teacher and director of the Fine Arts.