Midas: Museus e Estudos Interdisciplinares ()
Encenação do Estado Novo na exposição Quinze Anos de Obras Públicas (Lisboa, 1948)
Abstract
The exhibition Quinze Anos de Obras Públicas (1932-1947) (Fifteen Years of Public Works) was officially promoted in 1948, at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, presenting the progress made in the field of public works and communications since 1932. The exhibition occurred within the post-war context of legitimizing the Estado Novo dictatorship as modern and socially engaged, being framed within the recuperation and adaptation of 1930s propaganda strategies. In this paper, this exhibition is considered as a political exhibition, which acted as a support mechanism of the regime’s permanence. It is argued that it has conceptual similarities with exhibitions with identic themes promoted under Hitler and Franco. Two aspects relatively underexplored by historiography are analysed, through crossing of sources and bibliography and comparing with previous Portuguese political exhibitions: the resort to an executive committee close to the Government and to decorators with verified experience in line with official aesthetics, and the use of a previously tested exhibition language, though relegating the symbolic role of visual arts to a secondary plan. It is argued that these factors contributed to support the exhibition’s goal of transmitting feelings of collective belonging as combat to opposition movements, by highlighting the national-wide infrastructural progress (seen as the foundation of the then established rural improvement strategy) and the triumph of the regeneration obtained due to the regime’s action over the prior decadence.
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