Carlos Slim's Massive Art Collection Gets A New Home In The Stunning New Soumaya Museum

Written by Guillermo Sanchez Sunday, 19 June 2011 22:05

Mexico City, DF - When it comes to private art collections, the huge holdings of Roman Abramovich, Steven A. Cohen, and Eli Broad have nothing on Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man. A self-made tycoon, Slim, the son of a Lebanese immigrant, made his fortune in the Mexican telecom industry. With a collection of some 66,000 pieces of art, this month he opens a spectacular new, and free to enter, museum in Mexico City to display them. Designed by Slim’s 38-year old son-in-law, Fernando Romero, the six-floor, gigantic 183,000 square-foot Soumaya Museum in the city’s Polanco district is shaped like a tin cup that's received the 'Dali treatment', a twisting, sagging and melting aluminum covered structure that is almost impossible to describe.

In addition to being Carlos Slim's son-in-law, Fernando Romero is universally regarded as one of the finest young architects working today, formerly worked with Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, was the winner of the Mexican Society of Architects’ inaugural Young Architecture Award in 2009 and has created iconic buildings all around the world.

Engineering firm Ove Arup, who helped erect the Sydney Opera House, Beijing Olympics' Bird's Nest and Water Cube structures and Antony Gormley's "Angel of the North" were drafted in to help construct the new museum.




The new Soumaya (the museum previously occupied a smaller site in Mexico City from 1994 until it relocated to the new building), named after Slim’s late wife (it also means “little heaven” in Arabic) will open to the public at the end of March 2011. The first floor will feature Slim’s Auguste Rodin collection, the second largest outside of France; other galleries will showcase rare Mexican gold coins, pre-Columbian art, and works from Mexican painters Diego Rivera, Juan Soriano, José Clemente Orozco and Rufino Tamayo alongside European masters including Pablo Picasso, El Greco, Matisse, Monet, van Gogh and Salvador Dali.  “The museum will give us an opportunity to look at the vision of a man who isn’t just interested in one thing,” says the museum’s director, Alfonso Miranda Márquez. “It’s a collection of collections.”

This architectural landmark will no doubt strengthen Mexico City’s already formidable credentials as a cultural destination. It also seems that others are now seeking to emulate Slim, and in a plot adjacent to the Soumaya, Jumex juice heir Eugenio Lopez is in the process of building his own contemporary art museum designed by award-winning architect Sir David Chipperfield (responsible for the Tate Modern in London).

For many years, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim lived a deliberately understated lifestyle. He toiled in a windowless, bunker-like office surrounded by leather-bound history books, colonial-era paintings, and baseball paraphernalia. His most personal luxuries in the concrete structure appeared to be Cohiba cigars and monogrammed shirts. As his telecom empire expanded and his wealth ballooned, Slim spruced up his surroundings and accumulated an art collection that today includes 66,000 pieces, from 15th century European masters to the second-largest private collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin outside of France.




Now Slim, whose estimated $59 billion net worth makes him one of the world's richest people, is opening an art museum in Mexico City.Slim's Soumaya Museum is the latest eye-catching showcase for the art collections of wealthy patrons, a global phenomenon that José Maria Nava, head of the undergraduate architecture department at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, where Romero studied, calls "buildings as spectacles." Nava adds: "It's part of a trend that has become very common worldwide—architecture featuring very complex, undulating geometries made possible by computer-aided design, a kind of digital baroque."

Four years ago, Slim asked Romero to design a new building for the Soumaya collection, which had outgrown its 15-year-old home in a century-old converted paper factory in an older part of the city. "We wanted to translate his vision and his art collection and this historic moment when Mexico has become part of a more global economic network," Romero says of Slim, whose business empire spans all of Latin America. His mobile telecom company—just one of his many businesses—has nearly 200 million clients.

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