Museum for Gelman collection opens in Cuernavaca

Among the delights of travel is to come upon a superior museum that was planned as a coherent whole. One such museum opened recently in the mountain town of Cuernavaca, about 40 miles south of Mexico City. The Centro Cultural Muros is devoted primarily to the modern and contemporary Mexican art collection assembled by Jacques and Natasha Gelman. This collection is quite separate from the superb group of 85 works by 20th-century European masters that Natasha Gelman bequeathed to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art upon her death in 1998.

The Gelmans wanted their Mexican collection to be held in trust for the public and shown as a single unit. They had developed it in close partnership. After Jacques's death in 1996, Natasha went on buying, working in collaboration with Robert R. Littman, an American scholar and curator who had arrived in Mexico in the 1980s. Now president and director of the Vergel Foundation, which owns and manages the Gelman collection, Littman was previously director of the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, and later of the contemporary art museum of the Televisa media company. He and Magda Carranza, a colleague at the Televisa museum who is now curator of the Gelman collection, are trustees of the Morelos Park Foundation, a private cultural foundation supported by two major business concerns, Costco de Mexico, the retail giant, and Comercial Mexicana, a supermarket chain, which acquired the land and building that now house the Gelman collection. Holding two seats on the Morelos Foundation's board of five, Littman and Carranza are in charge of programming--additions to the collection, exhibitions, other esthetic decisions--of the Centro Cultural Muros, including the outdoor spaces. The Gelman collection is on extended loan to the Centro, with a five-year contract renewable to 20 years. The Vergel Foundation receives a fee for exhibiting work there, the net proceeds of which are used to enhance the collection.

The core of the Gelmans' Mexican collection originally comprised some 90 pieces, including key works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Carlos Merida and Rufino Tamayo. Since Natasha Gelman's death, Littman has continued to acquire works, shifting the focus primarily to contemporary examples. These acquisitions were made possible in part by revenues from a touring exhibition of the Mexican works, which went to major venues around the world while the collection was seeking a home. Today, the collection has more than tripled in size.

The question of how to house the Gelman collection and keep it intact was solved in 2002, when the Morelos Park Foundation took possession of the grounds of the former Hotel Casino de la Selva, in Cuernavaca, and purchased and renovated the structure; Mexican architects Alejandro Bernardi and Francisco Guzman transformed the building to provide 50,000 square feet of exhibition space on two levels, expressly tailored to the Gelman collection. Directed by Susan Grilo, the Centre) Cultural Muros also encompasses an open-air theater, and two restored murals painted in the 1940s and '50s by Josep Renau and Jose Reyes Meza, which were part of the original hotel-casino and inspired the new museum's name.

Visitors who walk into the Gelman collection today see an ensemble that is in effect, though not in name, a small-scale national gallery of modern and contemporary Mexican art. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are its principal figures. Works by Rivera include his large Portrait of Natasha Gelman (1943) and his well-known Calla Lily Vendor of the same year. There are five self-portraits by Kahlo, dated between 1937 and 1943. Affording a revealing comparison are the color photographs of her made between 1938 and '46 by her longtime friend and lover, Nickolas Muray. Frida's father, Guillermo Kahlo (1872-1941), is represented by a small group of his photos showing church interiors and other Mexican architectural landmarks. Born in Germany to Hungarian Jewish parents, he emigrated to Mexico in 1891. In 1901 he set up as a photographer and photojournalist, and eventually became an official photographer of the Mexican cultural patrimony. Also of special interest are works from the 1950s by Emilio Baz Viaud, who conveys the nuances of everyday life in his watercolor portraits.

Among the contemporary works are major pieces by Gabriel Orozco, Francis Alys, Nahum Zenil and Pablo Vargas Lugo. A standout is Betsabee Romero's poetic Tires for a Pavement with Memory (2000), five taxicab tires each engraved with a different design. An element of wry mischief characterizes a monumental "necklace" by Silvia Gruner, 500 Kilos of Impotence (or Possibility), 1997, made of volcanic rock and steel cable. The esthetics of negativity are explored in Nothing Boxes (2003), by Stefan Bruggemann--56 cardboard boxes each labeled "nothing." Temporary exhibitions are currently under consideration, including, in June, a Janet Cardiff sound installation, and a fuller view of the photos of Guillermo Kahlo (the collection owns 200), who is spoken of as "Mexico's Atget."

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