Museums in March

This is a super quick post, mostly for the photos, on a couple of museum visits …

Museu de Arte Popular (March 1st)

This museum building is the re-use of the Pavilhão da Secção da Vida Popular (1940), part of the Exposição do Mundo Português. The colorful interior murals attest to this history. The Museu is currently exhibiting two shows.

"Um Cento de Cestos" (one hundred baskets) is a deep dive on Portuguese basketry and several related weaving crafts – examples include fish traps, floor coverings, and traditional rain gear. The exhibit does an excellent job of showing the process and explaining the craft, from types plant stocks to contemporary developments. Several of the crafts-people to tell their own stories, and are seen in large portraits behind the displays.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second show, "Siza + Souto de Moura", features two architectural restoration projects photographed by António Júlio Duarte and André Príncipe.

The Cloistro do Rachadouro (seventeenth century), at the Mosteiro de Alcobaça (twelfth century), is a rehabilitation  from a nearly ruined state to a five-star hotel (opened 2023), designed by Eduardo Souto de Moura.

The restoration is documented in a beautiful book, Rachadouro Cloister of Alcobaça Monastery (co-authored by Luís Peixoto, who we know from Journey to Portugal Revisited).

 

 

 

The second site is the Fundação Gramaxo in Maia, designed by Álvaro Siza Vieira (2021). A new building for exhibits and events is inserted into a park, incorporating the existing agricultural infrastructure.

 

 

 

Casa das Histórias Paula Rego (March 13th)

The Casa (opened in 2009) is a well-known museum building designed by Souto de Moura. The building is recognized for its two pyramidal towers and its striking terra-cotta color. It houses the personal collection of the artist Paula Rego.

There is a low gate house and a deep yard leading to the entrance, which is set behind a screen of tall, leggy trees. 

 

On exhibit today is "Mudam-se as Histórias, Mudam-se os Stilos" (stories change, styles change), a broad selection of Rego's work – from book illustrations, to printworks, to weavings, to large canvasses. Here is a quote from the show catalog:

Here, from the very beginning of her artistic career, stories functioned as genuine realistic structures that did, however, awaken in the artist a vision which disrupted the stability or universality of some of these narratives.

During the 1960s, Paula Rego developed a personal figurative language to express her extreme emotions and sensations, with her work reflecting the complex dimension of the questions that she struggled with while growing up and at the beginning of her adult life: the rigidity of the political and social reality of a manifestly patriarchal and Catholic dictatorial regime, which brought with it sensations of fear, anxiety, aggression, rage and repressed sexuality that she felt the need to respond to or confront through her painting.

 

 

 

 

The galleries are on a grand scale, with broken corners, thick edge surfaces, and diagonal entries. Things come together, just not in the expected ways; shapes shift and split. The energy of the architecture feeds on and reinforces the energy of the images, yet the artwork remains the primary focus.

Paula Rego painted in order to tell a tale, and she was simultaneously a character and a narrator of timeless stories, reinscribing them in her own time.

The narrative dimension is always present in her work, organised through the vivaciousness and solidity of her imaginary world. It was through the vast universe of stories - traditional Portuguese folk tales and fairy stories; novels from Portuguese and English literature, theatre plays or adaptations of these stories for Walt Disney films - that her figurative research into the realm of fantasy and imagination gained a greater importance in her work.

 

 

 

 

The show concludes in Sala 0, the largest gallery and the organizing 'center' of the other galleries. At the back, a video tells the Paula Rego's story:

Her rebellious personality and her fight for a free and autonomous expression led her to declare her independence from the artistic movements of her time and to constantly redefine the nature of her figurative language. This distinctive trait also obliged her to constantly subvert the conventions and limits imposed by any kind of artistic tradition or the constraints of a specific technique.

 

 

Under the large towers, we find the loja and the cafetaria; the cafe leads out to a small terrace and the open lawn. Souto de Moura writes about the design in "Cascais Arquitectura, CA:05" (CM de Cascais, 2009, trans by Apple's MacOS):

I decided to make the exhibition spaces with various scales. In this way, the exhibition can contemplate from smaller engravings and drawings of Paula Rego to her paintings or those of her husband, Victor Willing, of frankly larger dimensions.

The organization of this set of solids was a complex exercise. It ran the risk of excessive individualization of the volumes to produce a caricatured result. In the end I chose to unify the shapes, building them with the same material, concrete, and giving them a unitary expression, reinforced through the stereotomy of the wooden formwork and the design of the spans.

 

 

 

I chose to locate the museum on this terrace, allowing the almost complete maintenance of the existing green mantle. I was designing the building almost like an archaeologist, from the emptiness of the tennis courts. Between the lush forest and the trees to be preserved it was making the shape, initially quite mischaracterized. It can be said that the building resulted in a kind of positive of the negative of the trees.

At the same time I thought that the museum should not behave like a kind of chalet hidden in the middle of a garden. I understood that it was necessary to strengthen its public character. If it weren't for the pyramids, the museum would disappear behind the trees. 

The choice of this color also has to do with the effect of the old clay tennis courts. I think the red of the museum will contrast well with the green of the surrounding vegetable mass.