BELLAS ARTES

This volume celebrates the 10th anniversary of Museo Jumex, Mexico City’s most important contemporary art museum, and its unique collection. Located in the vibrant Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City, Museo Jumex opened its doors to the public in 2013 as a one-of-a-kind museum devoted to the production and discussion of contemporary art. Founded by Eugenio López Alonso, a pioneer in the realm of contemporary art collecting in Mexico, and designed by Sir David Chipperfield, 2023 winner of the Pritzker Architecture award, Museo Jumex has achieved international recognition for its dual mission of bringing works of renowned international artists to Mexico for the first time and elevating the work of today’s Mexican and Latin American artists.

En vida, la fama de Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) apenas sobrepasó las fronteras de su ciudad natal, Delft, y el reducido círculo de sus mecenas. Despues de su muerte, su nombre cayó largo tiempo en el olvido y fuera de Holanda sus pinturas llegaron a atribuirse erróneamente a otros artistas. No fue hasta mediados del siglo XIX cuando Vermeer llamó la atención del mundo del arte internacional que, de pronto, supo admirar su precisión narrativa, la meticulosidad de los detalles de sus texturas y los majestuosos planos lumínicos. Habían descubierto a un genio.

In the mid-1950s, Yves Klein (1928–1962) declared that “a new world calls for a new man.” With his idiosyncratic style and huge charisma, this bold artist would go on to pursue a brief but bountiful career, producing more than 1,000 paintings over seven years in an oeuvre now considered a mainstay of postwar modernism.Klein made his name above all with his large monochrome canvases in his own patented hue of blue. International Klein Blue (IKB), composed of pure pigment and binding medium, is at once rich and luminous, evocative and decorative, and was conceived by Klein as a means of evoking the immateriality and infinitude of the world. The works of this “Blue Revolution” seem to draw us into another dimension, as if hypnotized by a perfect summer sky. Klein was also renowned for his deployment of “living brushes,” in which naked women, daubed in International Klein Blue, would make imprints of their bodies on large sheets of paper.