In Mexico City, a Private Art Collection Evolves into a Public Museum

MEXICO CITY — It would be easy to think of Museo Kaluz as the very expensive hobby of an extraordinarily rich man. After all, the downtown Mexico City museum was founded, and is funded, by Antonio del Valle Ruiz, who ranks No. 7 on Forbes magazine’s list of wealthiest Mexicans.

But 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 Mr. del Valle spent five decades assembling. The billionaire’s tastes fall on the more traditional side. The holdings are nearly all paintings and overwhelmingly figurative and include well-known names like José María Velasco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco.

A 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 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 Mr. del Valle’s wife, or that he was able to acquire one of the city’s most important landmarks to display his art.

The carefully preserved 18th-century building was originally a residence for Catholic missionaries on their way from Spain to the Philippines.

For Mr. 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 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. “They stayed in that building in order to wait for La Nao de la China, which came to Mexico only twice a year.”

Then they had to trek 300 more miles to meet the ship. “The only way to get to the Philippines at that time was through Acapulco and across the Pacific,” he said.

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. Many of the artworks predate the country’s widespread urbanization and offer bucolic views of now-bustling cities like Puebla, Zacatecas and Cuernavaca. 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.

Mr. Del 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. He keeps the price of admission affordable, about $3 a person, and it is free if you live in the struggling Guerrero neighborhood just north of the museum.

“The intention of this collection and the museum is to elevate the cultural level of the people of Mexico,” Mr. del Valle said.

Museo Kaluz keeps its definition of “Mexican art” loose, and that is one thing that sets it apart as an attraction. Artists do not have to be Mexican, but they must have spent time in the country and made critical work there. That leaves room to exhibit rarely-seen painters, such as the Polish-born muralist Fanny Rabel, and Eugenio Landesio, an Italian who came to Mexico to start the first landscape painting program at the famous Academy of San Carlos.

Bringing recognition to artists who were overlooked by history is central to the mission. For example, the collection is rich with work by Gerardo Murillo Cornado, also known as Dr. Atl, who lived from 1875 to 1964 and whose emotional, Winslow Homer-esque landscapes have lately been reconsidered as some of the country’s best paintings. By hanging lesser-known talents alongside widely respected names like the Impressionist Joaquín Clausell, the architect and painter Juan O’Gorman and the modern-leaning Rufino Tamayo, Kaluz wants to lift up painters such as Francisco Romano Guillemín and Armando García Núñez.

To that same end, the collection features an abundance of 20th-century female painters, notable among them María Izquierdo, Mercedes Zamora and Olga Costa, and Angelina Beloff, whose skills are often overshadowed by the fact that she was the first of Diego Rivera’s four wives.

Another niche for the collection comes from its 400 pieces by artists who joined the exodus of intellectuals immigrating to Mexico during the Spanish Revolution beginning in 1936. As the museum’s display shows, the artists brought their European painting traditions with them but eventually become more “Mexican,” adopting bright colors and depicting regional traditions. One example: Roberto Fernández Balbuena’s 1965 “Músicos huicholes,” showing the folk musicians performing in a rural setting.

Museo Kaluz integrates its own historic setting into the museum-going experience. In addition to wandering through the galleries, which once served as bedrooms for the traveling Augustinian friars, visitors can linger in the two-level interior courtyard, the building’s central architectural feature and one of the best-preserved examples of colonial-era design in the city’s Centro area.

“We think that is what’s interesting for the public, not only for the Mexican public, but also for people who come here as tourists, that you get a very good vision of what Mexico has been and how it has been represented throughout history,” said the museum’s exhibitions coordinator Alan Rojas Orzechowski.

The museum, which offers tours in Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese, also has turned its roof into a cafe with plants, artwork and a walk-up counter that serves breakfast and lunch. The views of the Alameda and local landmarks, such as Templo de San Hipólito and the modern skyscraper Torre Latinoamericana, are notable.

Veka Duncan, who leads tours at the museum and serves as its media coordinator, points out that Museo Kaluz is still figuring out how it fits into Mexico City’s cultural scene. The place opened just before the coronavirus pandemic, so it has had a slow start with forced closings and reopenings.

But in late August it shut down for a few days to remake exhibitions, and the unveiling of the new shows in September served as its reintroduction to the public. The museum also cleared space to begin bringing in artworks outside of its own collection that will be “in dialogue” with its current holdings, she said.

That opens up a lot of possibilities for what comes next, and the museum is continuing to aggressively acquire more objects and mixing more living artists into its roster.

However, Mr. del Valle insists, Museo Kaluz will stick to its cautious mission of collecting and presenting only figurative art, and that will continue to define its personality.

“I do not understand, very much, this contemporary art,” he said.