The Minister of Culture said this Sunday in Mafra that she will forward this week to the Attorney General’s Office the report by the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage (DGPC), which concludes that there are 94 missing Portuguese state works of art.
“The report and all its attachments will be sent to the Attorney General’s Office this week so that it can carry out the due diligence,” Graça Fonseca told the Lusa agency, at the end of the inaugural concert to restore the bells and chimes of the Mafra Palace, in the district of Lisbon.
More than 90 works from the state’s contemporary art collection remain to be located, most of them since 1992, according to a DGPC report, in which an exhaustive inventory of all 170 works was made.
Graça Fonseca stressed that, “since the 1990s, there is information about works to be located”, and that “since the early 2000s, several commissions and working groups have been created to take inventory of the State collection”.
According to the minister, “the last known report is from 2011, which shows the number of 170 works to be located”. In addition, Graça Fonseca pointed out that “since 1992, 49 works of art have yet to be located”.
According to the minister, through the work of the DGPC it was “it is possible to clarify and record the situation of 62 works of art”.
In 2017, the Government determined that the DGPC would be tasked with locating and inventorying the Ministry of Culture’s Contemporary Art Collection, known as the “SEC Collection”.
According to an order published that year, the DGPC should “proceed with the location and inventory of the works of the SEC Collection”, and with the “analysis and evaluation of the existing protocols, deposit, lending and assignment”.
Begun in 1976 and, as a result of the successive creation, extinction and fusion of various services and cultural organizations, the collection consists of more than a thousand works of art which are spread over several institutions and bodies, following the signing of deposit, lending or assignment protocols.
According to the Ministry of Culture, about 80% of the collection is deposited in four institutions: Serralves Foundation, in Porto, Centro Cultural de Belém, in Lisbon, Aveiro City Hall / Aveiro Museum and in the Portuguese Center of Photography / Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries.
The remaining 20% are spread over about a dozen “typically public places”, the result of loan policies applied over the collection’s four decades of life.
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