![]() Similarly, its costumbrismo, or costume paintings, capture the way Mexicans have decorated and dressed, stretching from buttoned-up Spanish gentry to elegant, high-fashion socialites in the 1960s.ĭel Valle said he wanted Kaluz, one of the city’s few privately run museums, to be a gift to the country that will be around long after he is gone. Many of the artworks predate the country’s widespread urbanization and offer bucolic views of now-bustling cities such as Puebla, Zacatecas and Cuernavaca. The art collection tells a corresponding tale, about how artists picked up the story after Mexican independence and used their brushes to chronicle an evolving national identity. “The only way to get to the Philippines at that time was through Acapulco and across the Pacific,” he said. Then they had to trek 300 more miles to meet the ship. “They stayed in that building in order to wait for La Nao de la China, which came to Mexico only twice a year.” “The friars came to Mexico in a ship, it took maybe three months, and they walked from Veracruz to Mexico City,” he explained in an interview. The carefully preserved 18th-century building was originally a residence for Catholic missionaries on their way from Spain to the Philippines.įor del Valle, the building serves as a way of linking the wider social history of Mexico, going back to the colonial era, to its art history, and that is important. The collection’s rich landscapes, dozens of oil-on-canvas paintings capturing the lush flora and volcanic peaks that define the country’s geography, transcend the personal aspects that also define Museo Kaluz: that the word Kaluz is derived from the second and third syllables of “Blanca Luz Perochena,” the name of del Valle’s wife, or that he was able to acquire one of the city’s most important landmarks to display his art. The holdings are nearly all paintings and overwhelmingly figurative and include well-known names including José María Velasco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco.Ī tour through the three-story museum, located along the city’s beloved Alameda Central park, reveals the collection’s intimate portrait galleries, brimming with faces of Mexicans rich, poor, white, brown, aristocratic and Indigenous, and documenting the country’s diversity. The billionaire’s tastes fall on the more traditional side. 7 on Forbes magazine’s list of wealthiest Mexicans.īut focusing on the benefactor might distract from the benefit Museo Kaluz has provided since it opened in 2020, serving as a public showplace for the 1,800-piece art collection del Valle spent five decades assembling. After all, the downtown Mexico City museum was founded, and is funded, by Antonio del Valle Ruiz, who ranks No. MEXICO CITY - It would be easy to think of Museo Kaluz as the very expensive hobby of an extraordinarily rich man. ![]()
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