Mexico Guide
Mexico City
Museo de Arte Moderno
Opening time: Tues– Sun 10am–5pm
Price: M$20, free on Sun
Some 300m east of the Museo Nacional de Antropología on Paseo de la Reforma lies the Museo de Arte Moderno. This consists of two low circular buildings dedicated to twentieth-century Mexican and Latin American art. The majority of the galleries, along with a separate gallery reached through the sculpture garden, are devoted to temporary and touring exhibitions, which are usually well worth inspection. The permanent collection is housed on the ground floor of the Sala Xavier Villaurrutia, to the right as you enter, and should not be missed.
All the major Mexican artists of the twentieth century are well represented. Among several works by Siqueiros, the most powerful is Madre Campesina, in which a peasant woman carries her child barefoot through an unforgiving desert of cacti. There's a whole corner devoted to Orozco, and oils by Diego Rivera, notably a portrait of his second wife, Lupe Marín, painted in 1938, long after their divorce. Look too for Olga Costa's Vendedora de Frutas, whose fruit-seller surrounded by bananas, sugar cane, watermelons, pumpkins, pawpaws, soursops and mameyes, all painted in vibrant reds and yellows, is about as Mexican a subject as you could want. The star attraction is Frida Kahlo's Las Dos Fridas, which stands out even among the museum's selection of haunting and disturbing canvases by Kahlo. It is one of her earliest full-scale paintings, and one whose theme she was constantly to return to. In it, Frida is depicted on the left in a white traditional dress, her heart torn and wounded, and her hand being held by a stronger Frida on the right, dressed in modern clothes and holding a locket with a picture of her husband Diego Rivera as a boy. Alongside these great paintings are works by less well-known Mexican artists: José Chávez Morado with his beautiful Plantas y Serpientes, and an intriguing multiple self-portrait by Juan O'Gorman.