Da arte rústica à arte nacional: o Museu de Arte Popular

The identity building carried out during the period known as Estado Novo (“New State”) by António Ferro, diretor of the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (National Propaganda Bureau), focused on the search for differentiating elements. In this sense, popular culture and, in particular, folk art, proved to be fundamental elements in the definition of the Portuguese culture and nation. In July 1948 was inaugurated in Belém the MAP – Museu de Arte Popular (Folk Art Museum) on Ferro’s initiative. It became the point of arrival of a state program based on the demotic heritage and the past, which had been advancing since 1935. The MAP presented itself as a hybrid, a place where traditional objects coexisted with modernist stylizations of popular elements – the expression of a national decorative art based on folk art. This article seeks to understand the role of the MAP in the regime’s propaganda regarding national identity, by investigating the purposes of its creation and the notions of Portuguese Folk and Nation which it conveyed. To this end, the methodology adopted was based on the analysis of the documentation regarding the MAP in the SNI Fund of the Torre do Tombo archives, and of printed sources (daily newspapers and periodicals), which allowed us to understand how the imagistic representations promoted by the Bureau, through the MAP, were received. Taking as a working hypothesis the idea that the Museum was never truly a museum, nor intended to be one, it is believed that the answer to some of the questions raised will allow us to understand the extent to which the Folk Art Museum was (yet another) instrument for (re)creating the national identity