conducted through consultations with specialists and institutions within Brazil and abroad, aiming to solve questions related to identification, attribution and authenticity of the pieces, beside determining their artistic and historic value. Restoration actions were also carried out in many pieces through agreements or collaboration of other institutions. The definition that best applies to the Ema Klabin Foundation is that of a "house-museum", where a "closed collection" is permanently arranged according to the taste and wish of its creator, thus preserving the original character, idiosyncrasy and personality of the collector. In recent years, the Ema Klabin Foundation has been making efforts at disseminating information about the collection, including by lending pieces for temporary exhibitions held in museums of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre. Pieces of the collection have also been shown in foreign exhibitions, such as Brazil through European Eyes, held in London, Brésil Baroque, held at the Petit Palais in Paris, Chaïm Soutine, held in the Musée d'Art Moderne de Céret and the Jewish Museum Vienna, and the retrospective exhibition Lasar Segall: un expressionista brasileño held at Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires. The house The headquarters of the Ema Klabin Foundation is located in a 4,000 square meters lot at Jardim Europa district, an upscale subdivision designed by Hipólito Pujol Júnior at the end of the 1920s, following the model of the British-style garden-cities in the adjoining district of Jardim América, projected by the English urban planner Richard Barry Parker in the previous decade. The house has a floor space of 900 square meters and was projected in the late 1940s by architect Alfredo Ernesto Becker. Its gardens were designed by Roberto Burle Marx. The house presents an eclectic style, blending modern and classic elements. It seems to be inspired by European palace pavilions, particularly by the Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, visited by Ema in her childhood and teenage years. It is a single floor building organized in a long semicircular gallery, facing the garden, around which all the rooms are distributed. Although it presents an impressive scale, as seen by the nearly five-meter-high ceilings, it possesses relatively few rooms. Collection African art The collection of African art comprises religious and ritual objects, executed in wood, ivory and bronze by distinct Ethnic groups of Western Africa, such as Ashanti, Bambara, Yoruba, Mossi, Dan, Baoulé, Bakongo and