The Gelman Collection, Museo de Arte Moderno de México, Mexico City

The Gelman Art Collection is take your breath away amazing to behold. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. More on this museum later, but man oh man this is worth the trip to see. Here is a bit about the reason it hasn’t been available for public viewing: For the first time in 20 years, the Gelman Collection, perhaps the best private collection of modern Mexican art, is on view at the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Mexico City. The 68 objects that make up the temporary exhibition have been locked away since the death of Natasha Gelman in 1998. In the intervening decades the collection has become the stuff of legend here in Mexico, with whispers of the murder in 2013 of the notary who witnessed Natasha’s contested will; suits and countersuits over the means by which an elderly and diminished Mrs Gelman came to leave her Riveras, Kahlos, Tamayos and Izquierdos to a relatively unknown curator in New York named Robert Littman; and the disappearance of a large group of pre-Columbian treasures from the Gelman apartment in New York, whereabouts still unknown.

We were lucky to see the Chester Dale Collection of largely Impressionist Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (Diego Rivera painted his portrait as well) years ago and this gives me the same feeling of awe. The Gelman’s lived with these treasures.