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Title`
'Guerreiro das artes - Warrior of the Arts', Istoé, 6 October 1999

Description
An obituary of Pietro Maria Bardi, creator of the Museum of São Paolo, MASP, Latin America's most important museum. A historian and art critic, art dealer, writer, journalist and museum director, Bardi's wife, architect Lina Bo Bardi, designed the São Paulo Art Museum which houses the most important collection of western art in Latin America, with four thousand works valued at US$1.5 billion, and which he directed for more than four decades.

Bardi helped found the museum in 1947 in partnership with another adventurer, the journalist and tycoon Assis Chateaubriand, the all-powerful owner of the Diarios e Emissoras Associados, the largest Brazilian publishing and radio empire of the 1930s and 1940s. oth met in Rome, introduced to each other by the then ambassador Pedro de Barros. Bardi and Lina were then invited to bring an exhibition of Italian art to Rio de Janeiro, where the couple arrived in 1946 aboard the ship Almirante Jaceguai. They ended up staying in Brazil. The meeting of Chateaubriand and Bardi marked the emergence of a mythological duo on the Brazilian art scene, with legendary cases of rascality in the acquisition of the rich Masp collection. Backed by the financial prestige of the businessman and by his own keen sense as an art expert, Bardi, now a naturalised Brazilian, returned to a devastated post-war Europe to search for works that began to fill the nascent art collection of the Museum. From 1947 to 1953, he bought gems at very low prices, such as all 73 bronzes from a series by the French sculptor Degas, bought for US$ 45 thousand - today, only one of the pieces, the Ballerina, is worth US$ 400 thousand -, as well as the canvases The Student, by Van Gogh, and The Count-Duke of Olivares, by Velásquez, acquired for US$ 40 thousand each and currently valued at US$ 30 million.

A convert to journalism, "a vice" that he cultivated until he was 92, with a weekly page in Istoé, he was a chronicler and editor for several Italian publications. Controversial, he was accused several times of buying fake works or using MASP as a business counter. His most famous challenge was the son of the owner of Diários Associados, Gilberto Chateaubriand, who repeatedly accused him of attributing authenticity to a large number of fake paintings and of combining his job as museum director with his profession as a dealer. Bardi never received any remuneration for his position, which he exercised with verve. In one of his ill-timed acts, he wrote the word shit in red as a protest against the graffiti on the museum's façade.

Article
To read the article see https://istoe.com.br/29216_GUERREIRO+DAS+ARTES/
It is also published on this site in full with an English translation at https://lootedart.com/news.php?r=V49DNO268891

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