Founded in 1905 by the government of the State of São Paulo, the Pinacoteca is the city’s oldest art museum and one of its major cultural destinations. Its original collection began with 26 works: 20 transferred from the Museu Paulista and six acquired from artists active in the city. The museum has grown substantially since then. Its institutional page now describes a collection of about 11,000 works and a program that presents Brazilian visual art from the nineteenth century to the present, alongside temporary exhibitions and public activities.
The collection includes works by artists such as Anita Malfatti, Lygia Clark, Tarsila do Amaral, Almeida Júnior, Pedro Alexandrino, Candido Portinari and Oscar Pereira da Silva. That range gives visitors a way to follow changing approaches to Brazilian art rather than viewing a single school or period. The museum says it stages around 15 exhibitions and receives approximately 800,000 visitors a year; these are institutional figures, not a forecast of how busy a particular day will be. The galleries reward a slower visit, especially for travelers who want to connect individual works with the city’s history.
