Brazil's art, in a building made for itThe Pinacoteca de São Paulo is one of the most important art museums in Brazil and the oldest in the state, founded in 1905 and regulated as a state public museum since 1911. From above, its home is unmistakable: a severe rectangular brick palace beside the Jardim da Luz, next to the great train shed of the Estação da Luz, with two internal courtyards that the museum's most famous renovation turned into glass-roofed halls. The buildingThe main seat, now called the Pina Luz, was built in 1900 to designs by Ramos de Azevedo and Domiziano Rossi as the home of the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, the city's school of arts and crafts. Left partly unfinished in raw brick, it was transformed in the 1990s by the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, whose steel walkways and glazed courtyards became a landmark of modern Brazilian architecture and one of the reasons the museum is visited as much for its spaces as for its collection. The collectionThe Pinacoteca holds one of the largest and most representative collections of Brazilian art, with more than 12,000 works spanning mainly the painting of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among its holdings are the Brasiliana collection of works by foreign artists active in or inspired by Brazil, and the Nemirovsky collection, rich in masterpieces of Brazilian modernism. Three buildingsThe institution now occupies three sites clustered in the Luz and Bom Retiro districts. The Pina Estação occupies the former building of the DOPS political police, which also houses the museum's documentation centre; and the Pina Contemporânea opened in March 2023 on a plot adjoining the Parque da Luz. Seen together from the air, they mark how the museum has spread through this historic railway quarter of central São Paulo.
Highlights: Glazed courtyards; Brasiliana and Nemirovsky collections; Pina Estação and Pina Contemporânea
