Mexico City collector's home is a work of art

Mexico City is awash in murals and museums and crowds that can suffocate. But a Metro ride from its teeming streets and skyscrapers is a little-known museum with a trove of discoveries for art lovers in a setting so peaceful it startles.

This is the legacy of Dolores Olmedo Patino, a glamorous collector of contemporary Mexican art best known as one of muralist Diego Rivera's patrons and last lovers.

Olmedo was intriguing in her own right. A self-made businesswoman, she assembled a collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, modern folk art and paintings by Frida Kahlo — the largest group in Mexico — that takes in 400 years of Mexican history. It's all displayed in a restored 16th-century hacienda set beside an expanse of plush lawns with wailing, strutting peacocks, geese, ducks and a pack of Mexican hairless dogs called Xoloitzcuintles wandering the grounds — all Olmedo's pets before her death in 2002.

Inside, you wander through drawing rooms packed with Mayan incense burners, papier-mâché skeletons, depictions of Acapulco sunsets and a spectacular Olmec jade mask, along with a cross section of the artistic life of Rivera and Kahlo, Mexico's most famous painters.

This sanctuary opened as a museum in 1994, and it's sequestered from the city's tourist circuit just outside the Periferico highway bypass. But the trip south of the city is worth the effort. A Metro ride, a quick transfer to a light-rail line and a two-block walk past a car wash and giant green Pemex gas station, and you're there.

You can combine your visit with a cruise nearby on a hand-poled raft through the floating gardens of Xochimilco ("the place where the flowers grow"), a favorite weekend spot for locals and visitors. Hire a guide for a glide over the water in a brightly painted flatboat as a floating market offers drinks, food, crafts and even mariachi bands.

Olmedo, who was 93 when she died, expressed a generation's search for its Mexican identity after the country's 1910 revolution. Indigenous art had begun to flower as Mexico cast European influences aside. Olmedo was born in 1908 to an art teacher and businessman, married an English magazine publisher, had four children and hobnobbed with Mexico's elite, from presidents to intellectuals. Along the way, she founded what became one of Latin America's largest construction companies.

She loved to be photographed and painted with the famous, and she liberally displayed these works throughout her home, the first stop for visitors touring the compound of colonial-era buildings called La Noria that Olmedo converted into her museum. She bought the property in 1962 and restored it as a place to live and display her glories.

At the shrine to Olmedo in her living quarters, a quick visit is all you need. The real treasures await in 12 elegant drawing rooms with ceiling vaults, hand-hewn wood beams and walls of stuccoed ivory. Funeral urns from the Mixtec and Zapotec cultures of Oaxaca, Emperor Maximilian's silver dining set, tomb offerings and engraved Palenque conch shells are among the 600 archaeological pieces on display.

Sprinkled throughout are 145 works by Rivera, who met Olmedo with her mother in 1919 when he was painting murals at the Ministry of Education. She was 10; he was in his 30s. A lifelong relationship started, interrupted for decades by the objections of Olmedo's first husband, who forced her to return a nude portrait of her that Rivera had painted. It now hangs in the museum, along with four of Rivera's self-portraits and numerous lithographs. There is also a series of 24 paintings of sunsets that Rivera created from the roof of Olmedo's summer home in Acapulco, where he retreated before his death from cancer in 1957.

Rivera appointed Olmedo trustee of his estate. On display in the museum are 42 works by his longtime partner before Kahlo, Angelina Beloff, many of them small, intricate drawings and engravings. The collection also includes 25 Kahlos, a tribute to the painter who was twice married to Rivera. Kahlo appears as the leading character in almost all of her work — self-portraits of a life of pain that came from a debilitating trolley accident as a teenager.

The museum's biggest surprise is an expansive room of folk art that Olmedo searched out — creativity by artisans working in Mexico's remote corners from the 1950s to today. What was an austere convent at La Noria centuries ago has been overtaken by bursts of hallucinogenic color, papier-mache dolls, ceramic dishes and bowls, tapestries, creations in tin and wood, and skeleton puppets used to celebrate the Day of the Dead, Mexico's annual November homage to relatives who have died. The quality of these masterpieces is enough to inspire an immediate trip to small villages to forage for more.

As you leave the Salon de Arte Popular, break for a coffee and a galeta (a light Mexican cookie) in the delightful tiled cafe. It will be served to you at white wrought-iron tables outside. From your tall, colonial-era wooden chair, you can take in the geraniums and purple bougainvillea along the low stone wall that winds toward the small but plentifully stocked gift shop. Step into the courtyard of stone serpents that look as if they're sunning themselves across the tile floor. Breathe deeply and take in the serenity before you prepare to negotiate your way back to the city.

If you go

Mexico City museums

Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino

Av. Mixico 5843, Col. La Noria, Xochimilco, phone 011-52-55-5555-1016 or www.museodoloresolmedo.org. The museum is about six miles south of downtown Mexico City. Take Metro Line 2 to the Taxqueqa station, then the light-rail line to La Noria station. The museum is two blocks south. Admission is about $3.20 (free on Tuesdays).

To reach the nearby floating gardens of Xochimilco, change at Taxqueqa to Tren Ligero at the end of the light-rail line.

Other Mexico City area museums:

• Museo Frida Kahlo, Calle Londres 247, Coyoacan, www.museofridakahlocasaazul.org/ or 011-52-55-5554-5999. Set in the house on a quiet residential street where the enigmatic Kahlo was born, this museum strongly evokes her spirit. The so-called Blue House includes paintings by Kahlo, crafts and works by other artists from her private collection, and well-preserved rooms where she and husband Diego Rivera lived off and on. Admission about $3.

• Museo Casa del Poeta Ramon Lopez Velarde, Alvaro Obregsn 73, Col. Roma, www.cuauhtemoc.df.gob.mx/atracciones/lugares/museos.html or 011-52-55-5533-5456. The former home of Velarde, this building was restored after the poet's death in 1921 to fully capture his spirit. Many features, down to the bedroom closet, are maintained just as Velarde left them. Admission 50 cents.

• Museo Jose Luis Cuevas, Calle Academia 13, Zocalo, www.museojoseluiscuevas.com.mx/ or 011-52-55-5522-0156. This museum, housed in a restored 16th-century convent, showcases the works of Cuevas — best known as a master draftsman and printmaker — and other noted painters, including Pablo Picasso. Admission $1 (free on Sundays).

• Museo Leon Trotsky, Viena 45, Coyoacán, 011-52-55-5554-0687. This building, where the exiled Soviet political leader lived and was assassinated in 1940, has an appropriately eerie air about it. Kept much as it was during Trotsky's life, it includes a collection of black-and-white photographs of him with artists Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and others. Admission $1.