The Soumaya Museum opened in Mexico City in 2011, funded by the billionaire Carlos Slim, who repeatedly topped the lists of the richest people on the planet. The museum is named after Slim’s late wife, who bore him six children.
Like almost any modern museum, you have to start from the outside to see the Soumaya: the building, which houses the collection, looks like a skewed hourglass, lined with either steel bee honeycomb or snake scales. Remarkably, there is not a single window in the building.
In addition to an extensive collection of works by contemporary (including Spanish and Mexican) artists, the museum holds a good selection of earlier works, in particular paintings by the French Impressionists.
It features the personal collection of Carlos Slim, the museum’s owner, and his late wife, Sumaya, after whom it was named.
The museum has a collection of more than 66,000 works of art by such great artists as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Leonardo Da Vinci. Most of the exhibits belong to the European culture of the XV-XX centuries. There is also the world’s largest collection of colonial-era coins.