Pietro Maria Bardi

Who was Pietro Maria Bardi?

Pietro Maria Bardi was the curator of the São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil. He was born Italian and stirred the Brazilian artistic community with his new ideas about popularizing museums by making both modern and classical art accessible to the masses. He was married to the architect Lina Bo Bardi.

Hand-in-hand with this idea, he had a conception of an open, wide space of exhibitions 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 acrilic pedestals is one of the big points of contention in the São Paulo artistic community.