The Library of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires was created in the sixties, a few years after the founding of the Museum, with the mission of gathering, preserving, organizing and disseminating the bibliographic, newspaper and documentary heritage specialized in visual arts of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The bibliographic collection has more than 7,000 volumes, including theoretical essays, catalogs of museum exhibitions and private galleries, and ephemeral materials about artists and events. In addition, there you can find all the publications published by the Museum from its creation to the present. The newspaper library is made up of 125 titles and more than 1,900 copies of Argentine and foreign periodicals specialized in art. Among the notable publications we can mention: See and estimate, Madí Art, Perceptism, New art, Boa.
The documentary collection concentrates voluminous funds of different origins and characteristics. On the one hand, there is the Institutional Fund of the Museum of Modern Art generated for decades by the institution itself, with its three large series: the Museum’s Activity Folders, the Envelopes of photographs and the Envelopes-file of Argentine and foreign artists. Meanwhile, the other funds were donated to the Museum by relevant personalities in the artistic field: these are the Personal Funds of the art critic José León Pagano, the collector Ignacio Pirovano and the artist Alberto Heredia.
The Biblioteca del Moderno is publicly accessible and free, its collections can be consulted by all those who require it, whether they are researchers, students or the general public.
During the current administration, a process of automation and standardization of its bibliographic catalog has begun, which is currently available online to facilitate searches and user access to information. At the same time, the Documentos del Moderno project began, which includes the tasks of classification and archival description of the different documentary collections, the implementation of a set of preventive conservation measures and the digitization and making them available for consultation on an Internet platform. This project is part of a broader initiative that involves the Heritage and Library areas and aims to articulate and interrelate documentary sources with the works in the museum’s collection.