The Soumaya Museum

The Soumaya Museum is a private museum and a non-profit cultural institution. The Soumaya includes two museum buildings in Mexico City – at Plaza Carso and Plaza Loreto. The institute also operates a house museum dedicated to the collection of Guillermo Tovar de Teresa in the colonia Roma.

The museum collection includes some 66,000 works. Among the collection are sculpture from Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, 19th- and 20th-century Mexican art, and an extensive collection of European old masters. Masters of modern Western art include Auguste Rodin, Salvador Dalí, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Tintoretto.

Within the Soumaya Museum:

• The Entrance to the museum is an asymmetric, high-ceiling vestibule devoted to temporary exhibitions, events, and the permanent exhibits of large-format works like Rodin’s The Thinker, Río Juchitán, the last mural by Diego Rivera, Still life by Rufino Tamayo, Day and night by Rufino Tamayo. A Pieta, cast in bronze in the 19th century by the Ferdinando Marinelli Artistic Foundry, is from the original marble by Michelangelo.
• Level 1 contains gold and silver works, mostly decorative arts, collections of coins, medals, and banknotes. These date from the colonial period to the post-revolutionary era. There are also objects in ivory, silk, and precious stones for religious and civil use.
• Level 2 is devoted to galleries for temporary exhibitions.
• Level 3 galleries contain the European and Novohispanic Masters. European artists include the Cranachs, Tintoretto, el Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Murillo. Colonial works are by, among others, Villalpando, Juárez, Cabrera, and Páez.
• Level 4 galleries contain Imressionist to Avant-garde works. There are also landscapes from 19th-century Mexico by Chapman, Rugendas, Egerton, Linati, Baron Gros, Löhr, Landesio and Velasco. These are accompanied by works from European movements and vanguards. Among them, Manet, Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Vincent van Gogh, Vlaminck, Marc Chagall, and Joan Miró.
• Level 5 is also devoted to galleries for temporary exhibitions.
• Level 6 is devoted to works by Rodin and his pupils and associates. Camille Claudel and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle are represented. Salvador Dalí sculptures are also exhibited on this level.

Visits to the museum are often combined with trips to the nearby Jumex Museum, the Inbursa Aquarium, and to the Plaza Carso shopping center.