On April 10, Sotheby’s Paris will hold a sale dedicated to Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt, a Brazilian businesswoman and journalist and the founder of Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro. Bittencourt, who died in 2003, was a prodigious collector of mid-century Modernist masterpieces, including works by Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Max Ernst, as well as leading Brazilian artists of the era including Almir Da Silva Mavignier and Franz Krajcberg. For those unfamiliar with Bittencourt, that may soon change. Later this year, according to Sotheby’s, a biography by author Ricardo Cota will be released. Titled A Mulher que Enfrentou o Brasil (The Woman Who Faced Brazil), the book will tell how Bittencourt both shaped Brazil’s modern art scene and courageously defied the Brazilian military dictatorship of the ’60s and ’70s. In the 1940s, while Brazil’s cultural establishment remained skeptical of modernism, Bittencourt founded the MAM with little funding and against stif...
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