Dates / Schedules
Permanent exhibition Floor 2
The Museum ticket does not include the Patti Smith exhibition.
Exhibition
Exhibition
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, 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, 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
View of the exhibition "Berardo Collection from the First Modernism to the New Avant-gardes of the 20th Century". Photo by António Jorge Silva.
View of the exhibition "Berardo Collection from the First Modernism to the New Avant-gardes of the 20th Century". Photo by António Jorge Silva.
Opening hours
From Tuesday to Sunday | 10:00 am to 7:00 pm (last entry at 6:30 pm)
Closed on Monday
Free admission every Sunday until 2:00 pm for residents in Portugal*
Prices and Discounts
Discounts
Discount 50%
Visitors from 7 to 18 years old
Students
Visitors over 65 years old
Visitors with reduced mobility
Other discounts
20% — Lisboa Card
Free admission
- Children up to 6 years old
- Every Sunday until 2 p.m. for residents in Portugal*
- Companions of people with disabilities
- CCB Card
- Unemployed
- ICOM Members
- Former combatant
- Widow or widower of former combatant
* Residents in Portugal
Upon presentation of a Citizen Card of the Portuguese Republic.
If you do not have a Citizen Card of the Portuguese Republic, you must present an identification document and one of the following residence certificates:
- registration certificate for EU/EEA/Swiss citizen
- certificate of permanent residence for EU/EEA/Swiss citizens
- the residence permit for citizens of third countries.
Partners
Patron MAC/CCB
Image and Multimedia Partner
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