The National Museum of Contemporary Art

Born from the division of the collections of the former National Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology, from which it inherited all works after 1850, a date that, according to contemporary criticism, constituted the chronological hinge of modernity. Provisionally installed in the Convent of S. Francisco, in a space adjacent to the Academy of Fine Arts, the museum occupied the old halls where the exhibitions of romantics and naturalists had taken place, in the heart of Chiado, a space frequented by the gatherings of the generations that were represented here . A simultaneously opportune and symbolic location, this double circumstance ended up determining the confirmation of the museum's location in this space, definitively consecrated with its reopening in 1994, completely renovated under a project designed by French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte following the tragic fire that in 1988 affected the Chiado area. With an important and significant collection, representative of the complexity and diversity of national artistic movements and practices from 1850 to the present day, the Museum honors the assumptions that were present at its foundation and remains dynamically committed to the present and the future.