Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires)

The National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA) is an Argentine art museum in Buenos Aires. Situated on Libertador Avenue, this museum has one of the most important art collections in Latin America. The MNBA inaugurated a branch in Neuquén in 2004.

History

Argentine painter and art critic Eduardo Schiaffino was the first director of the MNBA, which opened in 1896 in a building on Florida Street which today houses the Galerías Pacífico shopping mall. In 1909 the museum moved to a building in Plaza San Martín, originally erected in Paris as the Argentine Pavilion for the 1889 Paris exhibition, and later dismantled and brought to Buenos Aires. In its new home the museum became part of the International Centenary Exhibition held in Buenos Aires in 1910. In 1933 the museum was transferred to its present location, a building originally constructed in 1870 as a drainage pumping station and adapted to its current use by architect Alejandro Bustillo.

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The Neuquén branch of the MNBA

A temporary exhibits pavillion was opened in 1961 and a Contemporary Argentine Art pavillion in 1980. The 1,536 m² (16,500 ft²) hall is the largest of 34 currently in use at the museum, which totals 4,610 m² (49,600 ft²) of exhibit space. Its permanent collection totals 688 major works and over 12,000 sketches, fragments, potteries and other minor works. The institution also maintains a specialized library, totalling 150,000 volumes, as well as a public auditorium. The MNBA commissioned architect Mario Roberto Álvarez to design a branch in the patagonian region city of Neuquén. Inaugurated in 2004, this museum holds 4 exhibit halls totaling 2,500 m² (27,000 ft²) and a permanent collection of 215 works, as well as temporary exhibits and a public auditorium.

The ground floor of the museum holds 24 exhibit halls housing a fine international collection of paintings from the Middle Ages up to the 20^th century, together with the museum's art history library. The first floor's 8 exhibit halls contain a collection of paintings by some of the most important 20th century Argentine painters, including Antonio Berni, Ernesto de la Cárcova, Benito Quinquela Martín, Eduardo Sívori, Alfredo Guttero, Raquel Forner, Xul Solar and Lino Enea Spilimbergo. The second floor's two halls, completed in 1984, hold an exhibition of photographs and two sculpture terraces, as well as most of the institution's administrative and technical departments.