Pietro Maria Bardi (

La Spezia La Spezia (, or , ; in the local Spezzino dialect) is the capital city of the province of La Spezia and is located at the head of the Gulf of La Spezia in the southern part of the Liguria region of Italy. La Spezia is the second largest cit ...

, February 21, 1900 –

São Paulo São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for ' Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the GaW ...

, October 10, 1999) was an Italian writer, curator and collector, mostly known for being the Founding Director of the

São Paulo Museum of Art The São Paulo Museum of Art ( pt, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, or ') is an art museum located on Paulista Avenue in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. It is well known for its headquarters, a 1968 concrete and glass structure designed by Lina Bo ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. Bardi started his career in the 1920s as a journalist, writing about art and architecture for newspapers like Gazzetta di Genova and

Corriere della Sera The ''Corriere della Sera'' (; en, "Evening Courier") is an Italian daily newspaper published in Milan with an average daily circulation of 410,242 copies in December 2015. First published on 5 March 1876, ''Corriere della Sera'' is one of I ...

. Between 1926 and 1930, Bardi's focus shifted "from journalism to the art market." In 1928 he opened the Galleria Bardi in Milan, which exhibited many artists of the

Scuola Romana Scuola romana or Scuola di via Cavour was a 20th-century art movement defined by a group of painters within Expressionism and active in Rome between 1928 and 1945, and with a second phase in the mid-1950s. Birth of the movement In November 192 ...

. Two years later he moved to Rome and opened the Galleria di Roma, where the Second Exhibition of Rationalist Architecture was held in 1931. "Throughout the 1930s, Bardi argued for the alliance of

Rationalist architecture In architecture, Rationalism is an architectural current which mostly developed from Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. Vitruvius had claimed in his work '' De architectura'' that architecture is a science that can be comprehended rationally. The for ...

and fascist politics in the pages of Milan newspaper ''L’Ambrosiano'', in the architecture journal ''Quadrante'' ... and in the Rome newspaper ''Meridiano''." Bardi visited Brazil for the first time in 1933 and permanently relocated in

in 1946 with his wife, architect Lina Bo Bardi. In 1947 he co-founded with

Assis Chateaubriand Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Melo (pronounced ), also nicknamed Chatô (October 4, 1892 – April 4, 1968), was a Brazilian lawyer, journalist, politician and diplomat. He was founder and director of the then main press chain o ...

the São Paulo Museum of Art, which he directed until 1996, stirring the Brazilian artistic community with his ideas about popularizing museums by making both modern and classical art more accessible. Hand-in-hand with this idea, he and his wife, Lina Bo Bardi, developed the concept of an open, wide exhibition space where paintings were fixed to acrylic pedestals, thus making the whole space visible at once and the works seemingly suspended in space. The substitution of traditional walls for the acrylic pedestals became a big point of debate. He died in São Paulo in 1999, four months before his 100th birthday.

References

1900 births 1999 deaths Italian art curators Italian emigrants to Brazil Brazilian curators Museum directors Italian magazine founders {{Brazil-bio-stub