Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires)

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MNBA Front

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

The painter and art critic Eduardo Schiaffino was the first director of the MNBA which opened in 1896 in a building in Florida Street which today houses the shopping mall Galerías Pacífico. In 1909 the museum moved to a building in Plaza San Martín, originally erected in Paris as the Argentine Pavillion 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 transferred to its present location, a building originally constructed in 1870 as a drainage pumping station and adapted to its current use by the architect Alejandro Bustillo.

Today the ground floor of the museum houses a fine international collection of paintings from the Middle Ages up to the 20th century, together with a library specialising in art. The first floor contains 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. On the second floor is an exhibition of photographs.