Museum

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes was inaugurated in December 1896 in the Bon Marché store building on Florida Street, now the Galerías Pacífico. Ever since its inception, the Museum has been thought of as a space in which to house international art of all periods, and to promote and strengthen Argentine art, still in its beginnings at the time of the Museum's founding.

Around 1910, in the era of the Centennial of the May Revolution, the Museum already had in its collection pieces by masters such as Francisco de Goya, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

In 1911, the second home for Bellas Artes was inaugurated: the Argentine Pavilion, a monumental structure the country had used in the Paris World's Fair of 1889 and which was later moved from France and set up in Buenos Aires on Plaza San Martín. There new acquisitions were exhibited that rounded out the collection, including Édouard Manet'sThe Nymph Surprised, and Claude Monet's Banks of the Seine.

The institution was moved again in 1933, to its current location: the former Pump House in Recoleta, remodeled by the architect Alejandro Bustillo. This period saw the addition of outstanding paintings, among them, Paul Gauguin Woman of the Sea, Vincent van Gogh's Le Moulin de la Galette, and El Greco's Christ on the Mount of Olives.

The last decades of the 20th century took in major figures in international modern art. Among those added were Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lucio Fontana, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Henry Moore.

The history of local production as well is related in the Museum's galleries, which exhibit a vast panorama of Argentine art, with works by its leading representatives, such as Cándido López, Prilidiano Pueyrredón, Emilio Pettoruti, Xul Solar, Raquel Forner, Grete Stern, Antonio Berni, Alicia Penalba, Gyula Kosice, Marta Minujín, Antonio Seguí and León Ferrari. In addition, the Museum has outstanding holdings of other Latin American art, with an assemblage of pieces by Pedro Figari, Joaquín Torres García, Tarsila do Amaral, Diego Rivera and Jesús Rafael Soto, among others.

In its over 120 years, Argentina's Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes has built up an important collection of more than 13,000 pieces from different periods, both national and international, housed in one of South America's most noteworthy cultural institutions.