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The treasures of Mexican art that go on sale with the withdrawal of Citigroup

2022-01-15T16:23:57.215Z


The buyer will have to commit to preserving around 2,000 pictorial works, historic buildings, and a huge archive with the country's economic history dating back more than a century.


A huge financial operation like the one announced this week by the Citigroup bank – closing its commercial banking operations and selling most of the National Bank of Mexico, Banamex – will have enormous consequences in the financial system.

But, in addition, it will also have them in the world of art.

For several decades, through the Fundación Fomento Cultural, Citibanamex has owned one of the most important collections of Mexican art in the country, and several historic buildings that constitute cultural heritage. All of this, iconic architectural venues and an extensive art collection, will also be on sale with the departure of Citigroup. In a press conference this Thursday, the bank explained that it will not put the works and the places up for sale separately. In other words, the business group that decides to buy the bank's branches, its family and business credit portfolio, its retirement fund manager... must also commit to buying and preserving the important cultural capital of Citibanamex.

“It is an integral and indivisible part of what is for sale,” Alberto Gómez Alcalá, corporate director of Institutional Development, Economic Studies and Communication at Citibanamex, insisted at a press conference.

When asked, repeatedly, how much money he valued all the bank's cultural heritage, Gómez Alcalá reiterated that “the number in pesos and cents that we can give does not matter.

We say that it is invaluable, that it is a hallmark of the [Citibanamex] brand, and we are sure that it will continue to be so”.

Elma O'Donohue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art evaluates the state of artistic pieces in the CitiBanamex collection.FOMENTO CULTURAL BANAMEX

In the valuable art collection there are works by Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, or by the muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

There are around 2,000 pictorial works from the 18th to the 21st century, including oil paintings, watercolors and drawings, among others.

"An important aspect of the collection is its nationalist spirit," explains to EL PAÍS the art historian Angélica Velázquez Guadarrama, currently director of the Institute of Aesthetic Research, and who has worked on exhibitions and catalogs of the collection.

She has also been an advisor to the Foundation for its acquisitions in the painting collection.

"More than 90% of the painting collection are Mexican artists, or foreign artists who painted Mexican themes," adds Velázquez Guadarrama. “It is the most important private painting collection in the country, because it has been characterized by always buying work with a Mexican theme: the landscape, customs, etc. They have the works that you don't find in the Munal [National Art Museum] or in the Chapultepec Castle. If you want a complete panorama of Mexican painting from the colonial era, in Mexico, you have to go to see this collection. Velázquez Guadarrama mentions, for example, the works in the collection of Eulalia Lucio, a 19th-century Mexican artist that "you cannot find in any public collection." Or the Sanromán sisters (Josefa and Juliana), forerunners of Mexican painting in the 19th century,which are also in the collection.

Other works from the 20th century include

Diego Rivera

's May Day Parade in Moscow (1956), Khalo

's The Fruits of the Earth

(1938);

o

Woman with Metate

by Siqueiros (1931).

Among the foreigners who have drawn Mexico are, for example, the English Daniel Thomas Egerton and the German Johann Moritz Rugendas.

Book "Flor Garduño" from the Citibanamex archive. BANAMEX CULTURAL FOUNDATION

The Fundación Fomento Cultural has not only collected but also published dozens of catalogs and research on Mexican art, and has exhibited its works in temporary exhibitions at the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid or the Metropolitan in New York.

In Mexico, in addition, he exhibits a large part of his collection free of charge in the iconic Palace of the Counts of San Mateo de Valparaíso, located in the historic center of the capital.

"No one relates other banks, such as Banco Santander or Bancomer, with artistic heritage," says Velázquez Guadarrama.

"All banks have art collections, but making a catalog, making it known, opening a space so that everyone can see it, are different policies" that Citibanamex does have.

This cultural heritage is also associated with its beautiful facilities, historical places of baroque architecture in Mexico City and other parts of the country.

The main headquarters of the Foundation is the Palacio de Iturbide, in the historic center of the capital, former residence of the independence icon Agustín de Iturbide.

In addition to this, the Foundation owns the Casa Montejo Museum in the city of Mérida (Yucatán);

the Palace of the Count of the Valley of Suchil in Durango;

and the Casa del Mayorazgo de la Canal in San Miguel de Allende, in Guanajuato.

Exhibition "The Art of Clothing and Fashion in Mexico, 1940-2015", which shows the textile wealth of the country.

Moisés Pablo (DARKROOM)

“Another very important thing that Fomento Cultural Banamex has done is to give the diffusion of popular art in Mexico an art category,” says Kristina Velfu, an art consultant who currently works in an auction house and who has advised the Museum of Popular Art. for the photographic record of your collection. “Mexico is the world capital of popular art, and Banamex has a huge collection of great masters of popular art, which was managed in other places as crafts for many years. He was always underestimated. This collection, on the other hand, shows its artistic and even spiritual value in Mexico.” In 1996, Banamex started a renowned Popular Art Support Program where there are works by Nahua, Otomí, Tzotzil, Mayan and Mixtec artists, among others.

In addition to this, the bank has a giant documentary archive that dates back to the Bank's foundation in 1884. It is the "most important financial archive in Mexico" to understand the changes in the country's economic sector for more than a century, said Gómez. Alcalá, from Citibanamex, at the press conference.

The historical, artistic and architectural collection, in fact, has been accumulating for more than a century, and therefore this is not the first time that it has changed owners.

Twenty years ago, when Citigroup bought Banamex and thus also its art collection, several Mexican artists publicly demanded that cultural heritage not end up in the United States, but rather that it stay in the country.

"There was even false news that they were going to put a

Burger Boy

in one of the palaces," recalls Velázquez Guadarrama.

"They were absurd rumors, and none of that did not happen."

Installation of the "Cristóbal de Villalpando" exhibition at the Iturbide Palace, in 2017.

The request was heard. The works stayed in Mexico, the collection was expanded, but now several experts in the art market are wondering what its price will be and how the INAH –National Institute of Anthropology and History– will seek to protect the bank's architectural and artistic heritage . Many of his works (such as those by Rivera or María Izquierdo) are legally protected and cannot leave the country. But many others do not.

"In the history of the bank there have been several owners, and many times, when there is a change in the owners, concerns and questions have arisen," said Gómez Alcalá, from Citibanamex, at the press conference.

“The truth is that what we have seen is a constant: that commitment to culture by the National Bank of Mexico has been maintained.

And it has been maintained because it is part of its essence, it is part of its DNA, it is part of its very definition, it cannot be distinguished.

It is part of a whole that we cannot divide.

Based on that history, we believe that the same thing will happen”.

Now only one key element is missing: knowing who will be the buyer who will take, not only a good part of the Bank of Mexico, but also the enormous responsibility of protecting its artistic heritage in Mexico.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-01-15

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