As we settle into the plush seating of his living room, Eugenio López—the irrepressible 46-year-old bachelor scion of the Jumex beverage conglomerate—reaches for two things: a cigarette and an Art Deco–style vintage table lighter, a polished onyx orb with glinting metal accents. It’s one of several scattered throughout his marble-lined penthouse in the posh Polanco district of Mexico City, commingled on glass-topped tables with Richard Pettibone’s tiny takeoffs on works by Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. Are the lighters an indulgence approaching the level of his art holdings?
“No, I don’t have that many,” he says, waving his hands. “I don’t even smoke much. Maybe 30?” It’s less a casual dismissal of a non-habit than a reflection of the size of his art collection, arguably the finest in Mexico and numbering some 2,700 pieces. Here in Polanco, where he spends two-thirds of his time, he surrounds himself with prime works by Louise Bourgeois, Andreas Gursky, Donald Judd, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, and Cy Twombly. His stays here have become more protracted over the past few years as he prepares to open a new museum in Mexico City, under the Jumex banner, in a David Chipperfield–designed building this month. But for all the fame attached to the family business, López is relaxed and effusive when talking about art and artists, with a schoolboy’s curiosity and delight in discovery. He fairly swoons when describing his first time at an auction, rolling up a sleeve to show the goose bumps the memory provokes.
His is the zeal of the convert. “Art was something I had never developed. My parents are not collectors; they’re businesspeople,” he says. But once bitten by the art bug, he was a goner. He is a self-professed autodidact of art and especially loves books on the subject; his home and office are dotted with such gems as a copy of the original catalogue for Pontus Hultén’s 1968 retrospective of Andy Warhol at the Moderna Museet in Sweden. The library attached to the Fundación/Colección Jumex—a kunsthalle on the grounds of the company’s industrial park outside Mexico City—holds some 7,900 volumes.
López’s first purchases established his collecting template for the next decade. He was a consistent early supporter of Mexican and Latin American artists, and under the tutelage of advisers he began amassing notable works by international postwar and contemporary figures, often with a Conceptual bent. In 2001, having acquired some 650 works, he established the Fundación/Colección Jumex with the intent of sharing the bounty with the public.
Somewhat adrift at age 22 after studying business administration (López is the director of Grupo Jumex), he “got interested in art around 1990. A friend had just opened a gallery and had two Roberto Cortazar paintings. He showed me the first piece—it was a hand, very dark but nicely done, a torso, something surreal—and I said, ‘This one, this is the one I want.’ It was $7,000.” He went home and told his father, who scoffed at the price. “But I wanted it more than anything, and I finally got it,” he says, smiling at the memory. “I went back a month later and the second painting was still there. So I bought that one, too.” In 1993 López began spending time in Los Angeles to supervise the renovation of a home in Beverly Hills, where he now resides when stateside, among works by Paul McCarthy and Warhol. Art adviser Esthella Provas “used to send me things,” he remembers. “I’d ask about an artist, and she’d give me information even if she wasn’t working with him.” The following year “was a turning point for me,” he says. “I was driving around with Esthella and asked her, why not open a gallery here to sell Latin American art?” As fate had it, the next week the Northridge earthquake struck the city, giving them their opening. “Suddenly there was so much real estate for rent,” López explains. “We got a space next to the Ivy restaurant for $10,000 and brought the art from Mexico—Cortazar, Francisco Castro Leñero, Irma Palacios.” Today it is a Chanel store, but López’s and Provas’s Chac Mool Gallery, named for the iconic reclining sculptural figures that guard pre-Columbian temples, operated until 2005.
Around that time, López got his first lesson in Conceptualism. “I saw a Robert Ryman in the Sotheby’s catalogue, estimated at $200,000 to $300,000. I knew there must be a reason behind this all-white painting,” he says with a laugh. With Provas’s advice, he began acquiring pieces by Robert Motherwell, a large oil stick drawing by Richard Serra, a Roman series painting by Twombly—he now has five pieces from various periods by the artist—and a Judd from the “Progression” series. “Art changed my life,” he says.
“When I first met Eugenio, his collection was primarily focused on Mexican artists and representational artworks,” says adviser Patricia Marshall, who began working with López in 1995. They started with Judd’s Amber Stack, 1987; Dan Flavin’s neon Untitled (Monument for V. Tatlin), 1964; and a floor piece by Carl Andre, Lead Aluminum Alloy Square, 1969. These led into more contemporary works, including Damien Hirst’s Memories Lost, Fragments of Paradise, 2003, a medicine cabinet containing 7,000 aspirin; Robert Gober’s Flying Sink, 1985; and Koons’s Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1986, which López bought for $350,000 from L&M Arts in New York around 2001. This has pride of place in the penthouse, whose spiral staircase is up-lighted in a matching aquamarine hue.
Marshall also introduced López to Angeleno artists John Baldessari, Sam Durant, Richard Jackson, John McCracken, Jason Rhoades, and Jim Shaw. Under her counsel, the collector bought one of McCarthy’s first Santa installations, Tokyo Santa, Santa’s Trees, 1999, for about $150,000 from Blum & Poe; López gifted the piece to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles after joining its board in 2005. He is also a trustee of the New Museum in New York and is on the Tate International Council.
López’s instinct is to approach, not retreat, when he encounters something he does not immediately grasp. Mike Kelley and McCarthy, for instance, were difficult for him initially. “I learned to talk and think about it first,” he says. Victor Zamudio-Taylor, an independent curator and adviser to the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo recalls a conversation with López comparing the artists’ oeuvres as they touched on such themes as “how the contemporary grotesque becomes classic, repulsion seductive, and personal identity and lived experience overtly cultural.” López eventually acquired Kelley’s Bladder, 1983, for $40,000 from Blum & Poe. “You become confident,” he says.
López cites as models the late Victor and Sally Ganz— self-taught, eagle-eyed buyers who snapped up Mel Bochner, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, alongside an encyclopedic range of Picassos. He also mentions his friends Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Miami-based collectors who hold a strong array of Cubans and Latin Americans. But it was a visit to London’s Saatchi Gallery and its trove of YBA pieces that was the pivotal moment when he realized he could train his eye on the works of his own time—and, crucially, his own place. During the 1990s, a generation of conceptually minded artists had taken root in Mexico City, including Gabriel Orozco, Gabriel Kuri, and Pablo Vargas Lugo as well as expats such as Francis Alÿs, Thomas Glassford, and Melanie Smith, who had been drawn to its social cacophony and exhilarating extremes. Soon joined by Miguel Calderón, Minerva Cuevas, Daniel Guzmán, and Damián Ortega, these artists, explains Zamudio-Taylor, “saw urban visual culture, everyday life, and the ruptures of the social narrative as a laboratory.”
López was an early client of the Mexico City gallery that supported this work, Kurimanzutto, opened by José Kuri and Mónica Manzutto in 1999. “Eugenio has one of the best eyes in the art world,” says Kuri. “Even if he has a big group of advisers behind him, he himself has an amazing understanding of art. His approach is really visual; he immediately understands many of the layers of the work, even if it’s a complex installation” such as Abraham Cruzvillegas’s shambolic sculptures addressing poverty, tradition, and political theory, which López has collected in depth. “Eugenio loves Mexico, he understands our problems and our strengths,” José Kuri notes, “so he knows how to approach [Mexican art].”
The more he engaged with local art, the more López became convinced the global message of his countrymen needed to be placed alongside their international peers and forebears. As he read about how corporations were burnishing reputations and investment portfolios with art, his ambition for a museum grew. He entreated his father for a year and was finally granted a 15,000-squarefoot space on the grounds of the Jumex plant in Ecatepec, north of the capital. “My goal was for Mexico to have a collection it could be proud of,” he says.
His associates praise López for his receptiveness to work that reaches beyond his own tastes and politics, especially on a philanthropic level: His family’s foundation has disbursed more than $12 million in grants to date, and López has personally helped bankroll important exhibitions of Mexican artists abroad. “Eugenio is willing to support works that are outrageous and provocative,” notes Zamudio-Taylor. For instance, in 1998, he lent Santiago Sierra a Jumex trailer truck for his first big performance in Mexico, which stalled traffic on a major artery near Mexico City. “Sierra had the driver jackknife the vehicle to create a Serra-like volumetric plane, a monumental yet ephemeral sculpture that divided order and chaos,” the adviser recalls.
“That’s how you create something important,” López demurs. “Not having what everyone else has.” To keep up, he is constantly traveling, scouting, and talking to curators, and he spreads his purchases among dozens of top dealers, including Blum & Poe, Marc Selwyn, Regen Projects, and 1301PE in Los Angeles; Paula Cooper and Christophe Van de Weghe in New York; as well as Gagosian, Marian Goodman, Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner. His most recent acquisitions include Wilfredo Prieto’s Pond, 2008, a group of oil barrels filled with water to host a colony of frogs, via Nogueras Blanchard, in Barcelona and Madrid, and Chair, 2012, a series of 13 digital prints by Christodoulos Panayiotou, purchased from Rodeo, in Istanbul.
Along the way there have been a few snafus, though López doesn’t call them mistakes. He shows me a Louise Lawler photograph, Are Pictures Always Melancholy, 1994–97, of an art-choked wall in Leo Castelli’s apartment and zooms in on a Jasper Johns watercolor, 4 Leo, 1977, a gift from the artist to the dealer on the occasion of the gallery’s 20th anniversary. But did it look a bit familiar? He realized that he already owned a print of the original Johns piece, part of a portfolio published by Castelli. “I think I ended up selling the Johns,” López admits, one of only about a dozen works he has parted with over the years.
Then there was the time López hoped to buy El soplon (The Prompter), 1995, an early self-portrait in four parts by his friend Alÿs, which was tagged $150,000 to $200,000 at Sotheby’s New York in November 2005. “Because this one was so important, I figured it might go to $250,000. In your mind you always say, no more than $300,000. Or if everyone goes to $300,000, you stop at $310,000. But I didn’t think it would go that high.” He phoned in to the sale from the city’s Mandarin Oriental hotel and, speaking not with one of his usual specialists but with someone from the house’s bank of representatives, jumped in on the Alÿs, the first lot. Bidding opened with “maybe ten” people in the chase, “until $300,000, when it was down to five,” he recalls. The price ticked up, past $400,000, past $450,000. It came down to him and one other bidder, and López noticed that the other party was taking longer and longer to respond. “Finally, I won it for $550,000 at the hammer. I was so happy,” López relates. “Then I found out the underbidder was Francis!” He chuckles. “I told him that if I ever sell it, he gets first option.”
This article is published in the November 2013 issue of Art+Auction.
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