(en español)
Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño
Every house museum is a kind of mausoleum, but the Mexican variety tends to contain actual ashes. Here, the guide leads you through a creepy retinue of ivory figurines and airbrushed / facelifted portraits (of Diego Rivera’s patroness / mistress) before helpfully pointing out the relevant vase: There she is on the left there, just past the red velvet bed, next to the photo with John Paul II.
After seeing an overabundance of the muralist’s easel paintings (indifferent renderings of state executions and girls in bikinis) along with a four-foot bronze bust of the master himself—which contains the dust of his illegitimate and unacknowledged daughter—you start to hallucinate: the ghostly martyrs of Liberation Theology are riding down from Ajusco’s distant peak, careening towards the estate on a huge stampede of tuskless elephants.
La Casa Azul
Frida’s own remains are across town, at her famous blue house. A hyperactive security system beeps constantly as you are ushered past Frida’s urn, Frida’s wheelchair, Frida’s easel, and a conspicuous number of Frida’s husband’s drawings. There are some pictures of hers as well, none as haunting as the portraits above her headboard: Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were apparently hung there to revolutionize her dreams.
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo
The guides are as cheerful and explicit as the art is morose and opaque. The architecture is spare: geometric light on tall white walls. Having seen perhaps too much art, you wander down one of several concrete hallways, mumbling your way towards the central paradox of modern life: Have we finally created a place of limpid, unadorned freedom, or are we trapped in a transparent, monotonous prison?
Nobody answers, but you emerge into a pretty nice cafeteria: uniformed waiters, standing all in a row.
La Casa del Arte Popular Mexicano
The conventional methods of chronological or geographic display are both relaxed here; the various objects are arranged mainly for show. Surprisingly, the groups of skulls, pots, blankets, and crucifixes all manage to keep their dignity in the stark white galleries. What goes on in the gift shop is another story.
Museo Nacional de Antropología de México
Like almost everything in Mexico, this grand museum asserts the presence of several cultures simultaneously. The ingenious structure shows the remnants of ancient civilizations on the ground floor, with their contemporary analogues displayed in life sized dioramas directly upstairs; an underworld of skeletons, broken urns, and stone weapons is mirrored by a heaven of mannequins, clay pots, and crepe paper streamers.
I pictured the American version of this museum, where instead of the Maya under their descendents in Chiapas, one would see a very different two-story display: Below, centuries-old artifacts from the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe; above, the dismal scenes at Foxwoods. Of course, the upper floor this imaginary building would have to be left mostly empty.
Palacio Nacional
The first mural alone is so grand, so intricate, so enormous, that you immediately forget any measured opinion you had about its maker. You forget Siquieros, Orozco, Tamayo; you forget Picasso and the famous Italians; you forget Frida. This is not “Twentieth Century Mexican Muralism.” As long as you stay here, Diego Rivera has his own century, his own country, his own incomparable art!
Outside in the main square, stiletto heels click past men with no limbs; green soldiers and green taxis encircle the pink tourists; diesel and incense mix above the cathedral. Soon, everyone will be wearing light blue surgical masks, but right now they are oblivious, briskly passing countless vendors, protestors, and teenaged lovers tangling in the afternoon haze. Magical realism seems a redundant term.