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 Vallarta Living | Art Talk | February 2007 
Outside Mexico City, The House That Art Built
 Lisa Rein - Washington Post
| | The colorful collection at at Museo Dolores Olmeda Patino in Xochimilco spans 400 years of Mexican history. (Tino Juarez) |
Mexico City is awash in murals and museums and crowds that can suffocate. But a Metro ride from its teeming streets and skyscrapers is a little-known museum with a trove of discoveries for art lovers in a setting so peaceful it startles.
This is the legacy of Dolores Olmeda Patiño, a glamorous collector of contemporary Mexican art best known as one of muralist Diego Rivera's patrons and last lovers.
Olmeda was intriguing in her own right. A self-made businesswoman, she assembled a collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, modern folk art and paintings by Frida Kahlo -- the largest group in Mexico -- that takes in 400 years of Mexican history. It's all displayed in a restored 16th-century hacienda set beside an expanse of plush lawns with wailing, strutting peacocks, geese, ducks and a pack of Mexican hairless dogs called Xoloitzcuintles wandering the grounds -- all Olmeda's pets before her death in 2002.
Inside, you wander through drawing rooms packed with Mayan incense burners, papier-mache skeletons, depictions of Acapulco sunsets and a spectacular Olmec jade mask, along with a cross section of the artistic life of Rivera and Kahlo, Mexico's most famous painters.
This sanctuary opened as a museum in 1994, and it's sequestered from the city's tourist circuit just outside the Periférico, the equivalent of Washington's Capital Beltway. But the trip south of the city is worth the effort. A Metro ride, a quick transfer to a light-rail line and a two-block walk past a car wash and giant green Pemex gas station, and you're there in about 10 minutes.
You can combine your visit with a cruise nearby on a hand-poled raft through the floating gardens of Xochimilco ("the place where the flowers grow"), a favorite weekend spot for locals and visitors. Hire a guide for a glide over the water in a brightly painted flatboat as a floating market offers drinks, food, crafts and even mariachi bands.
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Olmeda, who was 93 when she died, expressed a generation's search for its Mexican identity after the country's 1910 revolution. Indigenous art had begun to flower as Mexico cast European influences aside. Olmeda was born in 1908 to an art teacher and businessman, married an English magazine publisher, had four children and hobnobbed with Mexico's elite, from presidents to intellectuals. Along the way, she founded what became one of Latin America's largest construction companies.
She loved to be photographed and painted with the famous, and she liberally displayed these works throughout her home, the first stop for visitors touring the compound of colonial-era buildings called La Noria that Olmeda converted into her museum. She bought the property in 1962 and restored it as a place to live and display her glories.
At the shrine to Olmeda in her living quarters, a quick visit is all you need. The real treasures await in 12 elegant drawing rooms with ceiling vaults, hand-hewn wood beams and walls of stuccoed ivory. Funeral urns from the Mixtec and Zapotec cultures of Oaxaca, Emperor Maximilian's silver dining set, tomb offerings and engraved Palenque conch shells are among the 600 archaeological pieces on display.
Sprinkled throughout are 145 works by Rivera, who met Olmeda with her mother in 1919 when he was painting murals at the Ministry of Education. She was 10; he was in his 30s. A lifelong relationship started, interrupted for decades by the objections of Olmeda's first husband, who forced her to return a nude portrait of her that Rivera had painted. It now hangs in the museum, along with four of Rivera's self-portraits and numerous lithographs. There is also a series of 24 paintings of sunsets that Rivera created from the roof of Olmeda's summer home in Acapulco, where he retreated before his death from cancer in 1957.
Rivera appointed Olmeda trustee of his estate. On display in the museum are 42 works by his longtime partner before Kahlo, Angelina Beloff, many of them small, intricate drawings and engravings. The collection also includes 25 Kahlos, a tribute to the painter who was twice married to Rivera. Kahlo appears as the leading character in almost all of her work -- self-portraits of a life of pain that came from a debilitating trolley accident as a teenager.
But the vaunted Kahlos, which take up a separate room, were nowhere to be seen on a visit last spring. A sign said they were on loan temporarily to a collection in Lisbon. The paintings were replaced for about a year by reproductions. But the real Kahlos were en route home last week from the Pinacoteca Diego Rivera museum in Veracruz and are expected to be back on display this month.
The museum's biggest surprise is an expansive room of folk art that Olmeda searched out -- work by artisans working in Mexico's remote corners from the 1950s to today. What was an austere convent at La Noria centuries ago has been overtaken by bursts of hallucinogenic color, papier-mache dolls, ceramic dishes and bowls, tapestries, creations in tin and wood, and skeleton puppets used to celebrate the Day of the Dead, Mexico's annual November homage to relatives who have died. The quality of these masterpieces is enough to inspire an immediate trip to small villages to forage for more.
As you leave the Salon de Arte Popular, break for a coffee and a galeta (a light Mexican cookie) in the delightful tiled cafe. It will be served to you at white wrought-iron tables outside. From your tall, colonial-era wooden chair, you can take in the geraniums and purple bougainvillea along the low stone wall that winds toward the small but plentifully stocked gift shop. Step into the courtyard of stone serpents that look as if they're sunning themselves across the tile floor. Breathe deeply and take in the serenity before you prepare to negotiate your way back to the city.
Museo Dolores Olmeda Patiño (Av. México 5843, Col. La Noria, Xochimilco, 011-52-55-5555-1016 or 011-52-55-5555-0891,http://www.museodoloresolmedo.org/) is about six miles south of downtown Mexico City. Take Metro Line 2 to the Taxqueña station, then the light-rail line to La Noria station. The museum is two blocks south. Admission is about $3.20 (free on Tuesdays). To reach the floating gardens, change at Taxqueña to Tren Ligero at the end of the light-rail line.
Lisa Rein is a reporter for The Post's Metro section. |
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