National Museum of Fine Arts

The museum describes its own holdings as built in two parallel tracks: a nineteenth-century European collection assembled in waves timed to national centenaries (1910, then the 1932-33 move into the present building), and a national collection - from Candido Lopez's war paintings and Eduardo Sivori's 1887 scandal-piece through to Xul Solar, Antonio Berni and the museum's twentieth-century Argentine holdings - that its own history page describes as a vast panorama of Argentine art built around the country's major artists. The museum's own figure for its total holdings is more than thirteen thousand pieces across national and international, historical and contemporary art.

The museum a visitor walks into today on Avenida del Libertador was not built to hold paintings. The building began in the 1870s as a pumping station for Buenos Aires's waterworks, in the Recoleta district, and it was not until 1932-33 that the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes moved in, after the architect Alejandro Bustillo remodelled the old pump house for museum use. That was the museum's third home. It had opened on 25 December 1896 in the Bon Marche department-store building on Calle Florida, now the Galerias Pacifico shopping centre, following a founding decree signed on 16 July 1895 by President Jose Evaristo Uriburu and his instruction minister Antonio Bermejo. The decree gave the new institution three jobs at once: a proper home for works already donated by private collectors, a pedagogical role, and an official showcase for a national art that the decree's own text said had not yet been given the institution it deserved. The first director was the painter and critic Eduardo Schiaffino, and the founding collection, built from donations by Adriano Rossi and Jose Prudencio de Guerrico, numbered 163 pieces.

In 1909 the museum moved a second time, into the Argentine Pavilion, a monumental structure Argentina had built for the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition and then re-erected on the Plaza San Martin. It stayed there until the move to the former pump house in 1932-33, and that building, extended in stages through the twentieth century (a 1961 temporary-exhibition pavilion, a 1980 wing for contemporary Argentine art), is what a visitor sees today: a low, colonnaded, oxblood-red facade set back from the avenue, with a ground floor and first floor of galleries, a second-floor temporary-exhibition hall, and two open-air sculpture terraces.

The museum's own account of its history is organised around the national anniversaries that pushed its collecting forward. By 1910, the centenary of the May Revolution, the collection already held pieces by Francisco de Goya, Joaquin Sorolla, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The move into the Argentine Pavilion the following year brought Edouard Manet's La ninfa sorprendida and Claude Monet's Orillas del Sena into the collection, both bought as the museum broadened its holdings of French nineteenth-century painting. The 1932-33 move into the former pump house brought a further wave: Paul Gauguin's Mujer del mar, Vincent van Gogh's Le Moulin de la Galette, and El Greco's Jesus en el huerto de los Olivos all entered in this period. The later twentieth century added Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lucio Fontana, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and the sculptor Henry Moore, rounding out an international collection that now runs from the twelfth century to the present.

Running alongside it, in the museum's own telling, is the history of Argentine art itself: Candido Lopez, Prilidiano Pueyrredon, Emilio Pettoruti, Xul Solar, Raquel Forner, Grete Stern, Antonio Berni, Alicia Penalba, Gyula Kosice, Marta Minujin, Antonio Segui and Leon Ferrari, plus a Latin American grouping of Pedro Figari, Joaquin Torres Garcia, Tarsila do Amaral, Diego Rivera and Jesus Rafael Soto. Across a hundred and thirty years the museum has built a collection its own history page puts at more than thirteen thousand pieces, which it calls one of the most important cultural institutions on the continent; independent tallies put the total nearer 12,700 works, of which under 700 are counted as major, catalogued pieces and the rest are sketches, fragments and minor pieces.

Not every acquisition arrived quietly. Eduardo Sivori painted Le lever de la bonne (El despertar de la criada) in Paris and showed it at the 1887 Paris Salon before sending it home to Buenos Aires, where he knew it would provoke argument. The painting shows a young domestic servant, seated on the edge of an unmade bed, turning a stocking right-side out before putting it on: a plain, unnarrated body, its hands and face darkened by outdoor work, its legs and feet rendered with an unflattering, naturalist precision that Argentine critics called indecent and, in some newspapers, pornographic. The Sociedad Estimulo de Bellas Artes, which Sivori himself had helped found, chose to exhibit the painting anyway on 22 August 1887 and opened an album of support that drew more than 250 signatures from artists and writers. The museum's own catalogue entry calls it the first avant-garde gesture in the history of Argentine art, and the painting, inventory number 1894, now hangs in the nineteenth-century Argentine galleries.

Candido Lopez fought in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay; at the Battle of Curupayti in September 1866 a grenade severed part of his right arm. He taught himself to paint left-handed, resuming his art career around 1869. He had no formal training as a painter before the war - he had worked as a photographer, soldier, shoemaker and rural labourer - and, commissioned by the former president Bartolome Mitre, he set out to record the war in around a hundred planned paintings, of which he completed fifty-two between 1888 and 1901, using a flat, descriptive, almost cartographic style derived from European military battle painting rather than from any school he had studied in. Despues de la Batalla de Curupayti, painted in 1893, was donated to the museum by Lopez's direct descendants in 1968. The museum's own commentary on the painting places Lopez's amateur, artisanal approach to war painting in the same regional tradition as Juan Manuel Blanes's earlier battle scenes, and reads his choice of style as itself a comment on how the Paraguayan war sat at the end of an era of civil wars in the Rio de la Plata.

The museum's history includes a still-unsolved theft. In the early hours of 26 December 1980, during Argentina's military dictatorship, four thieves entered through scaffolding left up for renovation work and took sixteen paintings and seven porcelain and jade objects, valued at the time at around twenty million dollars. The stolen paintings were by Matisse, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin, Degas, Rodin, Boudin and others; almost all of them had been donated to the state by the collector Mercedes Santamarina in 1970, and none of the works was insured. Only three paintings were ever recovered: Renoir's Retrato de mujer, Gauguin's El llamado and Cezanne's Recodo del camino, found in Paris and repatriated on 23 November 2005, twenty-five years after the theft, after a British art-recovery specialist traced them to a seller trying to place them with a Paris gallery. No one was ever convicted. Journalistic accounts published since have reported that five museum employees were detained and tortured during the original investigation and that the museum's curator was abducted; one author has theorised that the theft was connected to the military government's efforts to trade art for weapons abroad during the same period as the Falklands conflict, a claim that remains an author's theory rather than an established finding.

Entry to the Bellas Artes is free. The museum has introduced a voluntary-contribution system, asking visitors to give through a self-service kiosk in the entrance hall, with an online option to pay in advance and skip the queue; the money raised is earmarked for infrastructure and conservation. The museum is open Tuesday to Friday from 11:00 to 19:30 and Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 19:30, and closed on Mondays and a short list of national holidays. It sits opposite the Facultad de Derecho on Avenida del Libertador, reachable by Subte Line H to Facultad de Derecho or by any of nine bus lines that stop nearby. Beyond the galleries, the museum runs an accessibility programme that includes ramps and a lift to every floor, wheelchairs on request, guide-dog access under Argentine law, guided tours in Argentine Sign Language, and an audio guide for blind and low-vision visitors; it keeps a specialist library, open by appointment; and it has run Bellos Jueves, a late-opening evening series of music, readings and work by younger artists on the ground floor and terraces, as a recurring monthly programme.

Visitors consistently single out the range of the permanent collection, from European Old Masters to Argentine modernists, and the fact that it is free to enter; the building itself, a converted 1870s pumping station, draws its own praise for scale and calm. The most repeated complaint is crowding, particularly on rainy days and weekend afternoons, when the ground-floor galleries fill up.