World’s richest man’s museum opens to the public in Mexico City
Mexican tycoon and art lover Carlos Slim Helu, who topped the Forbes Billionaires List 2011 for the second year in a row with a fortune of $74 billion., has now given his home city Mexico City a new art museum – the Soumaya Museum. Named after his late wife, the Soumaya Museum is now open to the public, and will house around 60,000 works of art by renowned artists like Rodin, Leonardo da Vinci and other European artists, as well as those by Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Six exhibit rooms of the museum make it one of the biggest in Latin America. The new Soumaya Museum is located in the new Plaza Carso, west of Mexico City. Carlos Slim, 71, told journalists at a recent news conference…
The Soumaya museum has been made up with the purchase of separate pieces and complete collections. A large percentage of foreign works were bought in Christie's and Sotheby's auctions.
Carlos’ architect son-in-law Fernando Romero has designed the museum, which is part of an 800-million-dollar urban development called Plaza Carso. Only a few billionaires, other than Carlos Slim Helu in the world have their own museum. Some of them include…
• Billionaire Eli Broad’s museum called “The Broad” is under the works in Los Angeles. The museum will house his collection of contemporary art. He already owns the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.
• Industrialist Mitchell Rales houses his collection of Richard Serra sculptures and works by artists including Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg in his Glenstone Museum Foundation in Potomac, Maryland.
• Investor Ronald Lauder owns the Neue Galerie museum in New York that displays German and Austrian art.
• French billionaire Francois Pinault owns the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
• Reinhold Wurth has his 14,000 works of art placed inside his 'Wurth Collection' museum in the southern German city of Kunzeslau.
