Free entry ... one of the works at the newly opened Soumaya Museum in Mexico City.Credit: Bloomberg
Jo Tuckman views the art collection of the world's richest man.
The richest man in the world, the Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim, is famous for living rather modestly. But there was nothing self-effacing about the inauguration of the new museum built to house his vast art collection.
The 1500 guests who filled the vast atrium for the opening last week were a who's who of Mexico's business, cultural and political elite, including Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, Colombia's celebrated novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the British financier Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and US talk show host Larry King, sporting his trademark braces.
The 6800 square metres of exhibition space in the Soumaya Museum is mostly filled with works from Slim's 66,000-piece collection. Aside from the obligatory inclusion of paintings and murals by great post-revolutionary Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, the collection is dominated by European masters. There are works accredited to Tintoretto, Murillo, El Greco and Rubens, as well as a substantial number of Impressionist paintings by the likes of Monet, Cezanne, Degas and Van Gogh and a number of more modern pieces from Dali, Picasso and Miro.
The numerical and sentimental core of the collection is made up of sculptures by Auguste Rodin, the biggest outside France and a particular favourite of Slim's late wife.
A mural called Still Life by Tamayo will be displayed permanently in the museum's entrance alongside a copy of Rodin's The Thinker.
Slim also owns an important number of colonial coins and documents including letters from Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes.
The most valuable piece is believed to be a painting from Leonardo da Vinci's studio, Madonna dei Fusi (Madonna of the Yarnwinder).
It all adds up, says Larry King, to "one of the best art museums in the world". The museum is named after Slim's wife, with whom he had six children and started his art collection, and who died in 1999 of kidney failure.
The collection had been housed in another smaller museum in the south of Mexico City, which will remain open.
The new building is part of a major new development called Plaza Carso on the edge of the business district of Polanco that includes apartment blocks, a five-star hotel and malls filled with branches of Slim-owned companies.
True to his habit of putting family members in key positions within his empire, the new museum was designed by his son-in-law, Fernando Romero, a young Mexican architect who had never done anything on this scale before.
Shaped rather like a twisted cube that has been hit by several waves from different angles and covered by 16,000 shimmering aluminium hexagons, from the outside it is reminiscent of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. Inside, the use of sweeping ramps, as well as escalators and stairs, conjures elements of the Guggenheim in New York.
Entry to the museum will, the magnate promises, be free now and forever more.
One of his motivations for concentrating on collecting works by European masters, he says, is to provide those Mexicans who cannot afford to travel with an experience that would otherwise be impossible.
- Guardian News & Media
Sign up for the Traveller Deals newsletter
Get exclusive travel deals delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up now.