Museo de Arte Moderno

The Museum of Modern Art sits in Chapultepec Park and houses the most important collection of 20th-century Mexican art — including Frida Kahlo's 'The Two Fridas,' one of the most recognisable paintings in Latin American art, and significant works by Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, Tamayo, and the generation of artists who made Mexico one of the most important centres of 20th-century art.

The museum building, designed by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares in 1964, is a circular structure with floor-to-ceiling windows that let the park's trees into the gallery spaces — a design decision that makes the museum feel more like an art-filled greenhouse than a white cube. The permanent collection traces Mexican modernism from the post-revolutionary muralists through the Ruptura movement (artists who broke with the political nationalism of muralism in the 1950s and 60s) to contemporary practice.

'The Two Fridas' — showing two versions of Kahlo holding hands, one in European dress with an exposed and broken heart, the other in traditional Tehuana dress with an intact heart — is the painting most visitors come to see, and encountering it in person after seeing it reproduced thousands of times is a reminder of how much art loses in reproduction. The painting is larger and more intensely coloured than photographs suggest, and the vulnerability of Kahlo's self-presentation is more powerful at actual scale. The sculpture garden outside, set among the park's ancient trees, includes works by major Mexican and international sculptors.