Berardo Collection

The Berardo Collection brings together a remarkable and significant collection of works from certain moments which marked the history of art of the twentieth century. Including creations by some of the great masters—such as Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Amadeo Souza-Cardoso, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Fernand Léger, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Larry Bell, Gerhard Richter, Julião Sarmento, John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, among many others—it boasts over 1000 works which allow for a broad and thorough reading of the evolution of the visual arts of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century.

On this floor, the exhibition commences with works from the beginning of the twentieth century and with the vertiginous succession of the so-called historical avant-gardes that moulded art history at the time: Cubism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Neoplasticism, Abstraction-Création, and Surrealism. These trends challenged traditional canons—the illusionist representation of the world through perspective—by virtue of new experiences, like the geometrisation of forms in non-figurative painting, collages, and assemblages, which completely altered the concept, nature, and function of the artwork. They no longer attempted to faithfully reproduce the reality of the world, but tried instead to give artists the possibility to express themselves and question the processes and purposes of art.

This display continues with the movements and groups of artists that emerged in the post-war period—the return to figuration, Informalisms, abstractions, Kinetic Art, Group ZERO, Spatialism, Neo-Dadaism, Décollage, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop Art—which bear witness to the tension between the tendencies of abstraction and figuration that pervade the art of the twentieth century. We can see artists who developed the investigations of the first avant-gardes and turned abstraction into the language of a new world order; and the reaction to this tendency of the artists of the new avant-gardes active in the 1950s and 1960s, who, in a context of consumerism, mass culture, and prosperous economic development in the West, were inspired by the gesture of Marcel Duchamp and the readymade, attesting to the new urban reality through their works.

At a time when there is such an abundance of temporary exhibitions, it is also very important to enable the rediscovery of the enormous richness of the Berardo Collection, and that in doing so we are able to captivate the different audiences who visit us. Displaying modern and contemporary art does not necessarily have to be something complex: it should also be a moment of coming together with the public, a time of pleasure and of dreaming.

Rita Lougares