The Soumaya Museum, Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim's art museum best known for its flashy facade, is one of a kind. The estimated 66,000 pieces of mainly European art it contains, reportedly worth $700 million, are not just expressions of beauty to please viewers, but also transformational tools to educate visitors about current events including democracy, immigration, health and tolerance.
"Museums should not be spaces [merely] to exhibit works from the past. Rather they should be active agents of social transformation in the 21 century," Alfonso Miranda Márquez, Director General of the Soumaya Museum, told me during a recent trip to Mexico City.
Since its inauguration in March 2011, an average of 1.3 million people a year have visited the Soumaya Museum, which features works by Rodin, Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Monet, El Greco, Dalí, Renoir, as well by Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco (sorry, no Frida Kahlo).
The vast majority of visitors are Mexicans, including large numbers of students from elementary school to college level, but there are also visitors from Latin America, Europe, Asia and, of course, the U.S.; average age is 30. Admission to the museum, which is open all year long, including major holidays, is completely free.
On the sixth floor of the museum sits the world's second largest collection of Auguste Rodin's work, boasting works like The Kiss as well as paintings and documents from the era.
The Soumaya Musuem also houses the only four paintings in Latin America by Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, including the Shepherd with a Flock of Sheep.
Critics in the Mexican art world believe Slim, the world's sixth richest person, is more of a bargain hunter than an aesthete. "He doesn't look for quality, he buys what is cheap," Rodrigo Rivero, a Mexico City art dealer, told The Wall Street Journal when the museum was opened.
But Miranda, the museum's Director General, said most of the art is acquired at auctions abroad, not in lots at bargain prices.
The Carlos Slim Foundation, which has a $5.5 billion endowment, according to Slim's spokesman, underwrites most of the operating expenses. Recently, however, the museum began generating income by renting the huge lobby, where Rodin's The Gates of Hell is located, and the 350-seat auditorium for events hosted by large private corporations.
During a two-hour guided visit last week, Miranda explained how the museum makes art accessible to people who otherwise have no means to travel to see paintings abroad. "One can travel to Venice without leaving Mexico," Miranda said, referring to a special exhibit of Venetian paintings.
For the museum, art is also a way to help people cope with health and physical conditions such a blindness, aging, Down's syndrome and other disabilities. The museum offers guided tours for blind people that allow them to touch the sculptures. It also brings artworks to senior homes. "We interact with all kinds of people," Miranda told me.
People with illnesses are introduced to the work of French painter Auguste Renoir, who continued painting even when his arthritis severely limited his mobility. "Pain passes, but beauty remains," Renoir is believed to have said.
The Soumaya Museum used Donald Trump's controversial August visit to Mexico to address the issue of democracy. After the Republican presidential nominee left, Miranda said the museum organized a workshop and forum for youth featuring The Thinker, the bronze sculpture created by Rodin.
Miranda explains: "From the time Rodin launched The Thinker, the press and the French libertarian forces at the end of the 19 century and beginning of the 20 century, took the sculpture as a symbol of democracy. The Phrygian cap represented free thinking."
The forum focused on the topics of freedom of opinion, the power of thought and actions related to those thoughts.
Yet, he cautioned: "The museum does not get involved in political issues, much less of other countries, but art is a way to provoke reflection, analysis and to stimulate critical spirit."
Slim's animosity toward Trump is no secret. Last year, Ora TV (digital network controlled by Slim) ended a project for producing reality-like shows on Trump's Miss USA pageant after the New York billionaire called Mexicans criminals and rapist. And last month, a Slim spokesperson denied Trump's charges that Slim is behind The New York Times' unfavorable coverage. Slim owns a 17 % stake in the media company.
The fourth floor of the museum houses an exhibit dedicated to Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer best known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book The Prophet. The museum owns the world's largest archive of Gibran's works, including the manuscript of The Prophet, his paints and brushes, and several self portraits.
According to the Somouya Museum, when U.S. President John F. Kennedy said the most famous phrase of his 1961 inauguration speech--"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country"--he was "paraphrasing" a 1925 letter by Gibran to Lebanese Parliamentarians. Some Gibran scholars dispute this theory.
Miranda told me that with the backlash against Arab immigrants provoked by the terrorist group ISIS, the Soumaya Museum decided to give prominence to Gibran, a Lebanese native who at the age of 13 immigrated to New York, where he died in 1931.
Miranda said that by highlighting Gibran's life work, the museum is sending the message that immigrants have made great contributions to the countries they immigrated to. "It's a live museum that talks about what's happening today," Miranda said.
The museum's fondness for Gibran is no coincidence: Slim's parents immigrated from Lebanon to Mexico around the time Gibran came to America.
The relaxing atmosphere inside the museum also differentiates the Soumaya Museum from its peers. There are fewer and less intimidating guards than in museums in New York or Washington D.C. You can get closer to the paints, touch sculptures and even take pictures of the exhibits, something often forbidden in the U.S.
"We trust our visitors. We haven't had one bad incident. Stories of violence don't reflect all of Mexico. Generalization doesn't help," Miranda said.
Twitter: @DoliaEstevez
