A silver-scaled asymmetric tower built by the richest man in Latin America, free to enter, next door to a serious contemporary gallery.
Two museums face each other across a plaza in Polanco, and they could not be less alike.
Museo Soumaya
Built by Carlos Slim, for years the richest man in the world, and named for his late wife Soumaya Domit.
The building, by his son-in-law Fernando Romero, opened in 2011: an asymmetric anvil shape clad in 16,000 hexagonal aluminium tiles, with no windows and no right angles. It is either striking or a mess depending on who you ask, and it is unmistakable.
Inside, a spiral ramp climbs six floors to a top-lit hall.
Entry is free, permanently, to everybody. That is the founding condition.
The collection
Around 66,000 works, and it is uneven — which is the honest thing to say about it.
The strength is Rodin: the largest collection outside France, over 380 works including a cast of The Thinker and The Gates of Hell, filling the top floor.
Also Dalí, a substantial holding; European old masters including Tintoretto, El Greco and Murillo; Mexican colonial art and religious silverwork; a Diego Rivera and Orozco holding; ivories; and a great deal of nineteenth-century academic painting.
Attribution on some pieces has been questioned by art historians, and the curation is generally described as a private collection displayed rather than a museum programme. Given that it is free and that the Rodin holding is genuinely major, that is a reasonable trade.
Museo Jumex
Across the plaza, opened in 2013, designed by David Chipperfield in travertine with a sawtooth roof, funded by the Jumex juice fortune of Eugenio López Alonso.
It holds one of the most important private collections of contemporary art in Latin America and runs a serious international exhibition programme — Warhol, Cy Twombly, Andreas Gursky, and major Latin American contemporary artists.
It is everything Soumaya is not: restrained, curated and rigorous.
Entry is inexpensive and free on some days; closed Mondays.
The plaza
Plaza Carso around them is a Slim development of offices, apartments and a shopping centre. It is not charming.
Practicalities
Polanco metro is a fifteen-minute walk, or take an Uber.
Soumaya is closed on no day of the week and gets busy at weekends. Jumex closes Mondays.
Allow ninety minutes each. Chapultepec and the Anthropology Museum are a short ride south.
More Museums
Museo Nacional de Antropología
One of the great museums of the world, holding the Aztec Sun Stone and the whole of Mesoamerica, under a concrete umbrella.
Museo Frida Kahlo
The blue house in Coyoacán where she was born, lived with Rivera, and died, kept as it was left.
Museo del Templo Mayor
The Aztec great temple, found by electricity workers in 1978 under the corner of the Zócalo, excavated and left open.