Berardo Collection

The Berardo Collection brings together a remarkable and significant collection of works from different moments which marked the history of art in 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 the early twenty-first.

The exhibition, conceived chronologically, 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: Cubism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Neoplasticism, Abstraction-Création, and Surrealism. These trends challenged traditional canons—the illusionist representation of the world through perspective—in the pursuit of new experiences, including the geometrisation of forms in painting or the abandonment of figuration altogether, and the use of collage and assemblage, completely altering the concept, nature, and function of the artwork. Artists no longer attempted to faithfully reproduce the world, but rather to think about and represent it in ways that challenged the viewer, sometimes even questioning what we can understand as art.

Changes in the practice of painting and a new understanding of the image are visible throughout the exhibition, from the pioneering experiments of the Russian avant-garde to Marcel Duchamp’s ironic critique of the artistic object. The multiplicity of works presented offers broad contact with the thematic transformations and recurrences that artists mobilised: the representation of the body, the problematisation of aesthetic categories, and the progressive inclusion of the vernacular and even the banal in the artwork.

This display continues with the movements and groups of artists that emerged in the post-war period—from the return to figuration, Informalism, Kinetic Art, and Pop Art—which bear witness to the tension between the tendencies of abstraction and figuration that pervade the art of the twentieth century. In a context of consumerism, mass culture, and prosperous economic development in the West, a multiplicity of artistic proposals from the 1950s and 1960s were inspired by the gesture of Marcel Duchamp and the readymade, offering different testimonies of a new world, now dominated by images and television.

The Berardo Collection is joined by pieces donated by the National Museum of Ethnology, as well as a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois from the Holma/Ellipse Collection and a painting by Paula Rego from the State Contemporary Art Collection (CACE).

Rita Lougares