Museu de Arte Contemporânea MAC/CCB

The space you’re stepping into has a name that changed as often as the art it housed: the Berardo Collection Museum, then the MAC/CCB, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea, and Centro de Arquitetura. Its story begins with a private collection that would outgrow any one wall and end up reshaping a civic cultural hub. It starts with a handshake in 2006.

After a decade of negotiations, the Portuguese government struck a deal with José Berardo, the patron whose name would become inseparable from the collection. Berardo agreed to loan his modern and contemporary holdings to Lisbon’s Centro Cultural de Belém for the long term, with the state picking up the display costs. The works themselves remained owned and managed by the Berardo Collection Association, a separate entity designed to hold and safeguard the assets.

The formal birth of the institution came with a decree—Decree-Law 164/2006—when the Foundation of Modern and Contemporary Art was created on August 9, 2006. Inauguration followed on June 25, 2007, and the museum carried Berardo’s name in recognition of the collection that made its existence possible. From the outset, the collection occupied a commanding, almost clinical, linear display: austere white walls arranged to guide visitors through a chronological survey of Western art from surrealism through pop, hyper-realism, minimalism, and conceptual art.