Newsweek profiles the collection of Eugenio Lopez Alonso, heir to a Mexican juice fortune, who has taken on the roll of arts patron with the Jumex Collection:
Three or four times a year, the gallery launches new exhibits with lavish parties that last into the wee hours, complete with art-world big shots, live music and free-flowing alcohol. They—as much as the works they celebrate—bear the distinct mark of López, a well-known man about town who happens to own one of the biggest art collections in Latin America. Estimated to be worth between $50 million and $80 million, it encompasses more than 1,800 works by such artists as Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol, as well as by established and up-and-coming contemporary Latin American artists. “I believe I did something that was never done in Latin America,” says López, who began collecting in 1990 and opened his art to the public in 2001, once he’d amassed about 400 pieces. “I wanted to create an important collection for my country.” [ . . . ]
(More on the Jumex Collection after the jump)
López has also cultivated young Mexican artists such as Gabriel Kuri, Pablo Vargas Lugo and Abraham Cruz Villegas, who all work in a variety of media and are poised to succeed in “crossing over” into the wider art world, says López. Yet he collects art only according to what he loves—not by what has the potential to make it big. In his Mexico City penthouse overlooking the smoggy skies, a giant bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois is perched on the wall between famous paintings by the likes of Paul McCarthy and Minerve Cuevas, which are changed monthly. [ . . . ]
Gregorio Luke, former director of California’s Museum of Latin-American Art, says López’s commitment to cutting-edge Latin American artists is already paying off. “A lot of people think that Mexican art begins and ends with Frida Kahlo and the muralists,” he says. “We’re beginning to see young Latin American artists included in the artistic dialogue.” Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan, who is responsible for La Coleccion’s Jumex’s current exhibit, “An Unruly History of the Readymade,” which features modern interpretations of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades by 80 artists, credits López with putting together an “extraordinary” collection and scoffs at accusations of his dilettantism. “It’s simply impossible that someone with no knowledge, taste or love of contemporary art could put that together,” she says. “The collection speaks for itself.”
A Labor of Love (Newsweek)
