Bo Bardi was an equal appreciator of the high and the low in a way that feels distinctly modern today, and difficult to conceive of in the 1950s. She created spaces unlike many modernists of her age: full of light, referencing the wattle and daub shelters and wooden floors and thatched roofs of rubber tappers as easily as the creations of Gio Ponti and Le Corbusier. Bo Bardi collected and displayed medieval and renaissance works alongside contemporary ones, pieces she made, and those that were brought over by famous artist friends and found on the streets or in marketplaces. She was a proponent of Brazil’s indigenous artworks when few collectors even classified them as such.
At MASP, Bo Bardi famously created crystal easels to display works that encouraged a new way of seeing, interacting with, and showing art. The effect, which is like standing in a forest of floating masterpieces, was revolutionary. Where else can you see the backside of a Matisse, or a Renoir, or a Goya, as easily as the front? Where else would they be displayed in the same room as a Guerilla Girls poster?
She built Casa de Vidro for herself and her husband, the writer and curator Pietro Bardi, in 1951, on a former tea farm situated in what had once been a rainforest surrounding São Paulo. Until her death in 1992, Bo Bardi made Casa de Vidro both her home and a meeting point for artists, architects, and intellectuals. The day of The Square’s debut, the lush aerie was as alive as ever: filled with art and some of the artists who had made it. Works belonging to the Instituto Bardi hung alongside those selected by curator Mari Stockler. Blazy and Bottega took a back seat in the program’s proceedings to participate as attentive listeners, allowing the artists and their works to speak for themselves.
For The Square, “the idea is: what if Lina Bo Bardi had survived into modernity, what work would she have brought in here?” said Stockler. “What would that say about Brazil today?” Stockler went about combining the Instituto’s collection with contemporary pieces by Brazilian artists like Allan Weber, Mestre Guarany, Cristiano Lenhardt, Davi de Jesus do Nascimento, Gokula Stoffel, and Vivian Caccuri. On hand for the first day of The Square, the artists were eager to discuss the broader themes of their work. These ranged from racial profiling by police, to climate justice, and grasping for utopia. The program had been divided into four “paths” to explore different aspects of Brazilian culture as related to Casa de Vidro and its former inhabitants: including tours of the interior (“The Glass House in Three Times”); the exterior and gardens (“Geometry and Spirituality”); the influence of various pivotal art movements, including neo-concrete, modernism, and Tropicália (“Tropical Roots”); and a sound tour focused on the main composers and performers in the emergence of bossa nova (“Soiree in Lina’s Hall”). Much like a crystal easel, these paths provoke multiple looks at any given angle, or added dimensions to a given idea. “Time is a spiral,” said curator Keyna Eleison, who moderated the first panel discussion. “The future is influencing the past here.”
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