Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires)

Argentine painter and art critic Eduardo Schiaffino, was the first director of the museum, which opened on 25 December 1895, in a building on Florida Street that 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. Following the demolition of the pavilion in 1932, as part of the remodelling of Plaza San Martín, the museum was transferred to its present location in 1943, a building originally constructed in 1870 as a drainage pumping station and adapted to its current use by architect Alejandro Bustillo.

The museum was modernised both physically and in its collections during the 1955–'64 tenure of director Jorge Romero Brest. A temporary exhibits pavilion opened in 1961, and the museum acquired a large volume of modern art though its collaboration with the Torcuato di Tella Institute, a leading promoter of local, avant-garde artists, and elsewhere; a contemporary Argentine art pavilion opened in 1980. This 1,536 square metres (16,533 sq ft) hall is the largest of 34 currently in use at the museum, which totals 4,610 square metres (49,622 sq ft) 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 specialised library, totalling 150,000 volumes, as well as a public auditorium. The museum commissioned architect Mario Roberto Álvarez to design a branch in the Patagonian region city of Neuquén. Inaugurated in 2004, this museum has four exhibit halls totaling 2,500 square metres (26,910 sq ft) 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 20th century, together with the museum's art history library. The first floor's eight 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, Sarah Grilo, Alfredo Guttero, Raquel Forner, Xul Solar, Marcelo Pombo 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.

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  Dutch Renaissance, The Birth of Virgin Mary, Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, late 15th or early 16th century
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  Flemish Baroque, Allegory of Fortune and Virtue, Rubens, 17th century
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  Dutch Baroque, Portrait of Young Woman, Rembrandt, 1634
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  Dutch Baroque, Landscape with the Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg, Aelbert Cuyp, 1645
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  Flemish Baroque, Portrait of Margarita Gonzaga, Frans Pourbus the Younger, 1603
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  Spanish Baroque, An astronomer, Jusepe de Ribera, 1617–1652
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  Spanish Baroque, Saint Francis in Meditation, Francisco de Zurbarán, 1632
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  Mexican Baroque, The Conquest of Mexico. Table VIII, Miguel Gonzales, 1696/1715
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  Dutch Impressionism, Le Moulin de la Galette, Vincent van Gogh, 1886–1887
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  French Impressionism, Portrait of Ernest Hoschedé and his daughter Martha, Édouard Manet, 1876
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  French Impressionism, The Bridge at Chatou, Claude Monet, 1875
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  French Impressionism, The Banks of the Seine, Monet, 1880
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  French Impressionism, Dancers and Two Yellow Roses, Edgar Degas, 1898
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  Argentine Impressionism, The Haystacks (The Pampa of Today), Martín Malharro, 1911
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  French Post-Impressionism, Portrait of Suzanne Valadon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1885
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  Argentine Post-Impressionism, The Presentation, Valentín Thibon de Libian, 1918
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  Scottish academic art, Master Cathcart and Dog, Henry Raeburn, 1810
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  French academic art, The First Mourning, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1888
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  Argentine naturalism, Portrait of Manuelita Rosas, Prilidiano Pueyrredón, 1851
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  Argentine naturalism, Interior view of Curuzú looked upstream, Cándido López, 1891
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  Argentine naturalism, The return of the malón, Ángel Della Valle, 1892
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  Argentine naturalism, After the Battle of Curupaytí, López, 1893
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  Argentine naturalism, Without bread and without work, Ernesto de la Cárcova, 1894
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  Argentine naturalism, A Stop in the Countryside, Prilidiano Pueyrredón, 1861
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  French naturalism, The Surprised Nymph, Édouard Manet, 1861
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  Argentine naturalism, The Maid's Awakening, Eduardo Sívori, 1887
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  Argentine symbolism, Nocturnal, Martín Malharro, 1910
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  German symbolism, Batsheba, Franz von Stuck, 1912
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  Argentine return to order, Annunciation, Alfredo Guttero, 1928

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Argentina).

• Official website
• Asociación Amigos Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (in Spanish)
• Virtual tour of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes provided by Google Arts & Culture