Acquisitions of the collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts after 1940

This exhibit presents some of the acquisitions from after the creation of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Brazil.

 The Museu Nacional de Belas Artes was established on January 13, 1937, through Law No. 378, signed by President Getúlio Vargas.

 In 1941, the MNBA acquired the painting Café by Cândido Portinari.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Carlos Martins and his team created the Engraving Cabinet of the Museus Nacional de Belas Artes with the aim of updating, organizing, treating, reprinting, studying and exhibiting the museum's engraving collection.

Currently, the Engraving Collection is made up of more than eight thousand and seven hundred items, featuring important Brazilian artists.

Another relevant acquisition this same year, the four works created by Portinari for the Mayrink Chapel, located in Floresta da Tijuca, in Rio de Janeiro.

Composing the Portinari collection in the MNBA collection, we have paintings, engravings, matrices and drawings, such as the studies for the War and Peace panels.

In them we can see the artist's imagination, with sympathy for simple and hard-working people, childish images.
Para conhecer mais sobre as obras de Portinari que integram o acervo do museu, acesse:

In addition to purchases and donations, the MNBA also receives some of the seizures made by the Federal Revenue Service, of works brought illegally to Brazil, whose buyers were not identified. Some of them are:

The museum has many more stories than those told here, but some of them have been erased, silenced or forgotten. Rescuing these stories is an urgent task for the museum and for a society that wants to be more fair and inclusive.