Museu de Arte Popular

On the edge of the Tagus, the Popular Art Museum preserves one of the clearest images of how Portugal chose to represent itself in the twentieth century. The building grew out of the pavilions of the Popular Life Section of the 1940 Portuguese World Exhibition and opened as a museum in 1948, reshaped by Jorge Segurado from a programme defined by Francisco Martins Lage and Tomás de Mello. What makes it singular is not only its collection of ceramics, textiles, musical instruments and agricultural tools: it is also the mural compositions and the dialogue between modernism and tradition, designed to give form to a rural, colourful and idealised country. To step inside is therefore to encounter both an ethnographic collection and a historical document about the aesthetics and political vision of the Estado Novo. Beside the Espelho de Água and the Monument to the Discoveries, the building still suggests that popular memory can also be staged.