Fulvia and Adolpho Leirner Collection

The Fulvia and Adolpho Leirner Collection represents the complexity that the modern taste assumed in Brazil. It includes traditionally valorized genres such as paintings and sculptures, but also furniture, tapestries and decorative objects designed mainly by the John and Regina Graz duo and by the latter’s brother, Antonio Gomide.

This set constitutes a notable – and unique – example of Brazilian artworks in art deco style, which materialize the search for a synthesis by which decorative standards of a modernity stemming from international sources are coupled with the local desire to construct an autonomous Brazilian repertoire.

These objects were acquired in the 1960s and 1970s. Fulvia and Adolpho understood, like few others at that time, that the modern experiment could be seen as a social phenomenon molded in a vital relationship between artistic objects and daily life. Art should no longer be something inaccessible, cloistered in museums, but should rather become present in the streets, disseminated on the façades of houses, in consumer objects, in the design of automobiles, airplanes, ships, furniture, magazines, books, textile patterns, posters and cinema.