Businessman Antonio del Valle Ruiz, founder of one of the new museums that opened during the pandemic in Mexico, is also one of the richest men in the country.
According to the
ranking
of the
Forbes list
As of 2021, he and his family are the seventh wealthiest, with an estimated wealth of $3.1 billion. "I am completely retired from business and now I only dedicate myself to supporting culture and art in Mexico," says Don Antonio, as his acquaintances call him, in an interview he gives in the library of the Kaluz Museum. Its museum is in a beautiful colonial enclosure of volcanic stone, recently renovated and built in the seventeenth century in the historic center of the city. It is known as the Hotel de Cortés, although Hernán Cortés did not live there. But now another powerful man from Mexico enters, centuries later, the businessman Del Valle Ruiz.
"Well, you retired from the business before, but now you are doing your own business, little ones," replies one of his daughters, Blanca del Valle Perochena, today president of the museum. Antonio del Valle Ruiz – a tall man with white hair who is 83 years old and has the intact charisma of a businessman – looks at her and laughs. “Well yes, look, when a person gets used to working and doing things, they never stop doing them. Instead of buying companies, now I am buying paintings”. The Kaluz Museum has some 1,700 works of art, says del Valle, and that enormous collection was acquired by a single man: him.
Those who know about private collections in Mexico say that the most important thing about this one, really, is that it is perhaps the best there is of painters exiled from Spain during the Civil War and their children. There are more than 50 artists, among them the famous Catalan painter Remedios Varo, Antonio Rodríguez Luna from Cordoba, and José Bardasano from Madrid –detailing the Popocatépetl volcano in an oil painting– or the Galician Arturo Souto –painting a landscape of agaves. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mexico received around 25,000 Spaniards exiled by the Civil War.
The most moving work is by a Mexican heir to the Spanish, the abstract artist Vicente Rojo, who made a beautiful mural on an exterior facade of the museum for the inauguration, and which now passers-by on the busy Avenida Reforma can see daily.
It was his last great public sculpture before he died in March 2021. "I believe that an author should always disappear from a public work," said the artist in a video that is exhibited in the museum.
Therefore, he did not sign the mural.
Vicente Rojo was the nephew of General Rojo, the last Chief of Staff of the Spanish Republic.
“The Spanish government did not realize the amount of culture, and education, and science, that it wasted,” says del Valle now of his collection.
-What was the first painting you bought?
-The first two paintings that I bought, of importance for the collection, were one by Dr. Atl [the Mexican painter Gerardo Murillo] and another by the painter from Puebla [José Agustín] Arrieta.
It's almost like a vice, which my children sometimes complain about, because they say I spend a lot on art.
I have been buying almost without realizing it, after 20, 25 or 30 years.
Well, we already have more than 1,700 works between paintings and sculptures.
Collecting 1,700 works and making a museum is not really a small business.
But compared to the businesses that this entrepreneur has done, it can be seen as his
hobby.
. Antonio del Valle, in very brief words, is the patriarch of a consortium that has focused on petrochemicals (Mexichem, today Orbia), financial (Bx+ bank) and construction materials (Elementia, with Carlos Slim) businesses. His heirs – he had five children – now control most of the business. He started with little –working a family textile store, studied accounting– and ended up with a lot: in addition to Mexico, he has made investments in the United States and was an important investor in the late Spanish Banco Popular. "All the dividends I received in Spain went to Spanish charities: on the one hand the Prado Museum, on the other hand the Princess of Asturias Foundation", he tells about his relationship between money and art in Spain. In 2017, he adds,He helped the art collection of the Hispanic Society of New York –of whose board of directors he is a member– travel to the Prado Museum for an exhibition. "Then we brought it to Mexico, together with BBVA and the Palace of Fine Arts," he says.
Antonio del Valle Ruiz walks the corridors of the Kaluz Museum. Nayeli Cruz
Antonio del Valle shows EL PAÍS the inaugural exhibition of the Kaluz,
México y los Mexicanos
, where those first paintings he bought from Dr. Atl and Arrieta are, but also from the famous muralists –Siqueiros, Orozco, Rivera– or renowned Mexican painters: María Izquierdo or the sisters Josefa and Juliana San Román.
In a special corner are self-portraits of Juan Soriano, Juan O'Gorman and Dr. Atl, all three in the same room as another 1940 portrait by Diego Rivera of a woman named Bárbara.
"So far we haven't been able to find out who he is," says del Valle, looking at the painting.
The businessman stops at one point to show his latest acquisition, by the Italian painter Eugenio Landesio, a kind of documentary effort from the 19th century in which the artist painted the day his float fell off the cliff in Villa de Guadalupe. "He did not die because God was great, so he made this painting in some way as a memory for the Virgin of Guadalupe, of the miracle," says del Valle.
Further on is a painting of her, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or a huge version of the patron saint of Mexico in a gold frame that Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg asked to do in the 19th century.
"Tell him who that painting belongs to," asks his daughter.
"This painting is of my wife," he says.
“He was very upset when we took him out of the house, but we are going to return it to him.”
In a book about his collection, del Valle wrote that he initially thought it was going to be small, and for his home.
“But why did I bring the museum collection?
Because I want all of this to stay together.
The day my wife and I are gone, I don't want my children to keep some paintings and sell all the others.
No, this has to be conceived as heritage”, adds the collector.
A work by Spanish artist Arturo Souto at the Kaluz Museum, founded by del Valle Ruiz in Mexico City.
Nayeli Cruz
-Your family is of Spanish origin and you have done great business with Spain.
Does your interest in exiled artists come from there?
-My family is of Asturian origin on my father's side, and of mountain origin on my mother's side. My paternal grandfather was from Cangas de Onís, in Asturias, and my maternal grandfather, although he was born in Cuba, was originally from before 1898. In other words, he was from Spain. His family was from Santander, from Cantabria. So, our roots are very deep there. My father and my mother were born in Mexico, although already of European descent, and they instilled in us love for our small homeland, we could call it, as Spain is called here. That is the reason. And the other, very important, is that since most of my friends were children of Spanish immigrants from the Republic, they taught me the wonders they had from their parents' paintings. And so, I dedicated myself to buying them.
Antonio del Valle says, with the pride of a businessman, that he not only helped to collect these paintings but also to increase their value. “In Mexico, since they did not know the Spanish, nor in Spain did they know the beautiful immigration that came, because the paintings were very cheap. Sometimes [the artists or their children] had to sell them at very low prices to finish living”, he says. “They were worth much less than what they really have today as works of art. It happened that when people realized that I was buying works by Spanish painters… well, they began to rise in the market”.
The museum, which opened its doors in October 2020, is not yet self-sufficient: it is financed for now with money from the Kaluz Foundation and by the del Valle family.
Some money comes in from ticket sales, but not much.
A more lucrative form of financing has been the events that have been held in its facilities and that show how the museum is not only a cultural attraction but also for political power.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador met in December at the Kaluz with the most important businessmen in the country, conglomerates in the Mexican Business Council, whose president is one of Don Antonio's sons named Antonio Del Valle Perochena.
-Is the museum a place to connect the president with businessmen?
-Look, that story is different.
One way to make this museum self-sufficient is by holding events here.
And yes, the president had the first event here and he liked it.
It was very convenient for us because we charge for it.
Although he does not pay it, the employers pay it.
So the Mexican Business Council, in fact, has set up its headquarters for visits to the president and other government officials here in the museum.
Mrs. [head of city government] Claudia Sheinbaum has come, the Secretary of the Interior has come, the President has come.
But all invited by the Mexican Business Council.
Use that money to help maintain the museum and the collection.
View of the Kaluz Museum, founded by businessman Antonio del Valle Ruiz in Mexico City.
Nayeli Cruz
-But then there is an interest in being a point of communication between the two?
-
No, no, no.
The museum is totally out of politics.
The museum is dedicated to promoting culture and art in Mexico.
Nothing more.
So, that the meetings of the Business Council are held here is totally circumstantial.
The president liked it, and that is why they are all made here.
The museum has a beautiful terrace that overlooks the Alameda – the oldest public park in Mexico – and overlooks the orange roof of the Palace of Fine Arts and the skyscraper of the Torre Latinoamericana.
You can't see it through the trees, but on a street perpendicular to the park is one of the historical heritage purchases that makes collectors most proud: a canteen.
Not just any cantina, one from the end of the 19th century that belonged to his grandfather and one of the oldest in the historic center.
“That is a romantic purchase,” says del Valle. “I thought it was closed, but one day a friend of mine, precisely the son of [Spanish] Republicans, told me: 'Hey, why don't we go to your grandfather's canteen?' I told him 'we can't, it's closed'. He says, 'No no, it's open.' Well, we went, and it is identical to what it was in 1890, when my grandfather bought it. I ran into a lady there at the register and I told her, 'Hey, don't you sell this bar?' -No, sir, we do not sell it. -'Hey, it's because my grandfather founded it.' - 'No, we don't sell it.' She had a problem between families and partners, but ten years after that visit I was able to buy her. There was always a person who was behind the lady to see what was happening. We learned that he had a trial, we saw how the trial was going, until it was over, and there we were able to buy it for him.”
Someone who says he is "completely retired from business" but waits 10 years to buy an old saloon, still buys art at auction, and generates income for his museum from meetings between politicians and businessmen, may not take the word withdrawal literally.
But Antonio del Valle Ruiz undoubtedly takes Mexico's cultural heritage very seriously.
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