ABSTRACT
While their counterparts to the south looked to Europe, Mexican collectors long focused on work by the muralists and other nationalist painters. Thus, Mexico’s federal museums remain comparatively weak in holdings of international modern art, with the important exception of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, founded by the painter Rufino Tamayo, which opened in 1981. Funded by the private sector, the Museo Tamayo was unlike the “house museums” previously established by other Mexican artists: it barely included Tamayo’s own art, instead featuring a collection he formed with his wife, Olga, of works by around 170 artists from the Europe, the Americas, and Asia. This chapter first examines the museum’s prehistory: why and how the Tamayos built their collection and the complex negotiations required to construct a new institution in Chapultepec Park. Then, it explores in depth the first five years of the museum’s operation (1981–1986), when the institution was funded almost entirely by the corporate sector. Despite a few precedents, this was an innovative arrangement in Mexico, where the federal government had long tightly controlled the principal art museums. In fact, the Museo Tamayo—and the permanent collection it houses—served as a philanthropic model at a time when Mexico’s art world was slowly, sometimes painfully, shifting from a state-financed monopoly to a system more open to private initiatives, artist-led or not, and from a nationalist to an internationalist outlook. It can be compared to similar artist-led museum initiatives across Latin America.
