Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo

This guide to Museo Tamayo in Mexico City traces how painter Rufino Tamayo, orphaned as a boy and sent to work a fruit stall in the La Merced market, trained his eye on ochre and watermelon-red before it ever touched a canvas. It follows him decades later, married and internationally famous, giving away first a collection of ancient Mexican art, then hundreds of modern works by names like Picasso and Rothko, on one condition about the building meant to hold them. He called in two of Mexico's boldest architects and asked for something that did not look like a museum at all.