Home, collecting and decoration: the Brazilian Baroque style at the Eva Klabin House Museum and the Açude Museum

Abstract

What place a collector’s house museum occupy in the history of art? Musealized houses are environments of memory that comprise pieces of furniture, objects of decorative arts and works of art that shelter ways of living and testify to the permanence of a taste: they are the choices and arrangements made by the collector for the gaze experience. Translated into mise-en-scène, they create visual narratives through the collection’s expography, provoking associations with its surroundings and with the practices and styles of decoration. In this paper we will analyze the trajectory of two musealized residences that house collections, where we observe the presence of the decoration style called Brazilian Baroque, as well as the historical context where this design of visual relations establishes connections with the ambiences built by its owners: they are the Casa Museu Eva Klabin and the Museu do Açude.Throughout the article we will observe how the process of musealization of collector’s houses and the reformulations projected of expographies can engender or make invisible looks and readings for a collection.