The slight, shy woman sitting in front of me has turned 20th-century art history on its head. Such accolades should not be given lightly, but the Venezuela-born collector Patricia Phelps de Cisneros is a patron on a mission: to bring modern and contemporary art from Latin America to new audiences, giving it a place in the 20th-century art canon that has, until now, been dominated by major European and US movements and artists. Noviembre, 2014

1. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros: an art patron on a mission
By: Gareth Harris
The collector talks about her life-long devotion to South American art and artefacts
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros at the Royal Academy of Arts in London
The slight, shy woman sitting in front of me has turned 20th-century art history on
its head. Such accolades should not be given lightly, but the Venezuela-born
collector Patricia Phelps de Cisneros is a patron on a mission: to bring modern and
contemporary art from Latin America to new audiences, giving it a place in the
20th-century art canon that has, until now, been dominated by major European and
US movements and artists.
The exhibition Radical Geometry: Modern Art of South America from the Patricia
Phelps de Cisneros Collection , held earlier this year at the Royal Academy of Arts
in London, was a key weapon in this South American art offensive, aiming to show
that abstract art and sculpture produced in Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay and
Argentina from the 1930s to the 1970s is as sophisticated and significant as any
avant-garde work made in North America and across the Atlantic.

2. “You could not see the show [Radical Geometry] without breaking all the previous
folkloric stereotypes about Latin America; there is not a single banana included,”
quipped Cisneros. The exhibition’s co-curator, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, says that
the “excitement and energy of the New World are made palpable in the works”.
He was not exaggerating. Argentine artist Juan Melé’s “Irregular Frame No. 2”
(1946) burst out of its unconventional, polymorphous confines (rectangular frames
were considered too bourgeois). The silver threads of Jesús Rafael Soto’s “Nylon
Cube” installation (1990) sliced through the air. It was tempting to reach out and
touch Lygia Clark’s futurist-inspired, folding aluminium sculpture “Machine –
Medium” (1962).
This sparky creative ethos comes across in Cisneros. “My mindset was certainly
marked by the world that I grew up in, Venezuela in the 1950s, when Caracas was
one of the great cities along with Brasília. These were the modernist capitals of the
world. We would see works by Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Fernand Léger, and
local artists like Jesús Rafael Soto and Alejandro Otero on the way to school.”
‘Machine – Medium’ (1962) by Lygia Clark
These days, her vast holdings encompass five distinct collections, including
colonial art created in Venezuela during the Hispanic and Republican periods. The
Orinoco collection, mainly 20th-century ethnographic material, was collected over
30 years during expeditions in the Venezuelan Amazonia, when Cisneros and her
husband Gustavo obtained objects directly from indigenous communities, such as
masks from the De’aruwa.
She reportedly owns at least 2,000 pieces in total but finds it hard to give a
number. “With the Orinoco collection, for example, there are hundreds of arrows

3. and fish hooks that may not seem comparable to a painting by Hélio Oiticica, but to
us they are all equally important as they represent moments in the artistic and
spiritual development of a culture.”
The “us” is a nod to Gustavo, chairman of the Cisneros Group, a media, e-
commerce and property conglomerate founded in 1929 in Caracas. He is worth
$4bn, according to Forbes; daughter Adriana is vice-chairman of the group.
The couple bought their first work on honeymoon in 1970. “I learnt a great deal
from my husband. He was the first to teach me that we need to look at all the
things that we have in common rather than our differences ... much of Gustavo’s
business life has been across borders, and as a history buff he really understands
the complex historical narratives that weave across Latin America.”
The pair founded the non-profit Fundación Cisneros and its offshoot, the New
York- and Caracas-based Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), in the
1970s. Its breadth of activities is impressive. The CPPC awards grants, publishes
monographs, arranges artist interviews, pop-up shows and scholarly seminars, and
supports artist-run spaces such as Soma in Mexico, by inviting local artists to
discuss their portfolios with visiting curators.
Meanwhile, the materials used by Latin American postwar artists are the focus of a
joint study initiated with the Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research
Institute in Los Angeles (the research will inform an exhibition at the Getty Centre
in 2017 entitled The Material of Form: Industrialism and the Latin American Avant-
Garde).
Not surprisingly, this ambitious range of activities means that Cisneros is never
short of devotees: dealers and curators dole out superlatives about her
endeavours. New York’s MoMA is indebted to her for the creation of the Cisneros
Travel Fund, which allows curators to pursue research in Latin America. “Paola
Antonelli [senior curator of architecture and design] discovered the Campana
Brothers [designers in Brazil] on one of these trips in the early days,” Cisneros tells
me.
But the issue often raised with the 67-year-old is that she could follow the usual
path of patronage, and open her own private museum which would rival most state
institutions. Venezuela especially would benefit from a new, high-profile private
museum. She is steely on the matter. “When people ask us about a museum, we
have to ask where would be the right place for it? Venezuela? São Paulo? New
York? London? If you have 200 works travelling around the world, it makes a big

4. difference, and each work travels to a new audience.” Objects from the Orinoco
collection have, she says, been seen by 7m people in the past 16 years.
‘Irregular Frame No. 2’ (1946) by Juan Melé
Capital resources are invested instead in the foundation’s new website, which
“transmits original thinking”, Cisneros says. This online resource may be more
cost-effective than a museum, and is a good example of how to digitise and
document a collection. A map shows, for instance, where works can be seen at
different locations across the world (move the mouse over Madrid and a box
flashing “33 loans” pops up for the Museo Reina Sofia).
She gives insights into her collecting strategy, mentioning “pre-emerging” artists in
her contemporary collection. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they are young, it
means that we go out of our way to do the research on artists who might not be
circulating in galleries and fairs, either through circumstance or choice.”
Performance art, now an art world favourite, is also on the agenda; over the
summer, Argentine David Lamelas’s 1970 “Time” piece from the Cisneros
collection was re-enacted on New York’s High Line.
Every three years, the collections have to be re-evaluated for insurance purposes
but, like most mega-collectors, Cisneros is averse to discussing market value. “My
jaw drops but otherwise we don’t think about things like that. We have an annual
working budget but there is a spending cap,” she says. Nonetheless, the record
price at auction for a Lygia Clark work alone is $2.2m for “Contra Relevo (Objeto N.
7)” (1959), at Phillips New York last year.

5. The enduring and complex question of what defines and makes a collector
underpins her thinking.
“These days it seems anyone who buys art is a collector, regardless of his or her
motives. I think collecting involves enormous responsibilities and we should judge
collectors by how seriously they take these obligations,” Cisneros says. In shifting
the art historical axis from north to south, future connoisseurs will no doubt be
thankful for her foresight.
coleccioncisneros.org
Photographs: Anna Huix
©Financial Times