Moments from Museo Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo, one of Mexico's most significant twentieth-century painters, spent decades assembling a personal collection of international modern art, Picasso, Miro, Magritte, alongside major work by his own Mexican contemporaries, and in 1981 he donated the entire holding to the Mexican people specifically to build a museum that would sit inside Bosque de Chapultepec park, a striking, low, geometric concrete building that remains one of Mexico City's clearest examples of late-twentieth-century modernist museum architecture. The gesture was notable for its era: Tamayo built a genuinely international collection at a time when Mexican art was still largely defined, internationally, by the muralist movement of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, and his own abstracted, color-driven style deliberately charted a different course.

Because the museum sits within the same Chapultepec cluster as the Museo de Arte Moderno and the National Museum of Anthropology, it's easy to underrate on a packed day, but Tamayo's own paintings, alongside the international collection he assembled, make a strong case for a Mexican modernism that looked outward as much as inward. Give the permanent collection real time before moving on to whatever contemporary exhibition is currently installed in the temporary galleries.