The story
Amedeo Modigliani painted only one self-portrait, in 1919, the year before he died in Paris at 35. It hangs in São Paulo, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, which locals call MAC USP. He shows himself seated with a palette in hand, drawn out in the same elongated manner he gave his sitters.
The museum was created in 1963, when the industrialist Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, president of the city's Museum of Modern Art, transferred that museum's collection to the university, together with the private collections of himself and his wife, Yolanda Penteado. With that gift a university took on one of the major holdings of European and Brazilian modernism in Latin America.
Since 2012 its main home has been a building by Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil's leading modernist architect, at the edge of Ibirapuera Park. It was put up for the 1954 celebrations of the city's 400th anniversary and later housed the state traffic department before its conversion into galleries. Among the works to look for are A Negra, Tarsila do Amaral's 1923 portrait that became a key image of Brazilian modernism, and a bronze cast of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, the striding figure by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni. From the top floor, a terrace looks out over the park and the city skyline.
