once upon a time in mexico

ONCE UPON
A TI M E
I N M EXI C O
Over the past two decades, Daniel
Liebsohn’s passions have evolved from
pocket watches to portraiture, but his
primary focus has remained the same: the
cultural remnants of New Spain.
By Edward M. Gómez
Photographs by Miguel Flores-Vianna
obsessions
Among the pictures hanging in Daniel Liebsohn’s town house are 18th-century portraits of
niños muertos, or niños dormidos (“dead children,” or “sleeping children”). Opposite:
Liebsohn in his courtyard with TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK.
OBSESSIONS
98
when the mexico city native daniel liebsohn was still a teenager, he began acquiring vintage silver pocket watches with a sense
of focus some museum curators take years to develop. Now, quips
the 38-year-old antiques dealer and collector, “I’m eclectic, maybe
too diversified, in my collecting. I’m definitely never static.”
Concentrating mostly on the viceregal period of modern
Mexico’s predecessor, New Spain (1535–1821), Liebsohn has
acquired a museum-quality collection that fills his bonbon box of
a residence in Roma Norte, the city’s latest hip district of galleries,
boutiques and restaurants, creating a sumptuous environment
similar to that of his nearby gallery-showroom. Tall French doors
open onto rooms packed with pieces of sculptural furniture and
ornately framed paintings and drawings hung salon-style on
almost every square inch of wall.
Liebsohn, who is also an accomplished exhibition organizer,
interior designer and museum consultant, identifies three main
categories of art and furnishings from the viceregal era—and, of
course, he collects them all. “There is religious art, of course, whose
purposes were liturgical and educative, to convey the teachings
of the Roman Catholic church,” he says.
“There was also ‘civil art’: paintings—especially portraits—of people, Mexican scenes,
and objects in the home that offer a picture
of society and everyday life. And there is
so-called official art, such as portraits of
government figures and furnishings for public buildings.”
In a corner of his high-ceilinged main salon, known as the
Garden Room, hangs one of the most important canvases of
Mexico’s long colonial past, a double portrait of two young, aristocratic sisters, Juana and María Josefa de Lafore Gay, painted by
a now-unknown artist of the 1700s. It is believed that the young
Frida Kahlo saw the work in a museum show, and it inspired her
iconic double self-portrait, The Two Fridas, which she painted in
1939, at the time of her divorce from Diego Rivera.
Liebsohn first encountered the picture when he was about
15 years old, in an exhibition of Mexican furniture at the Palacio
de Iturbide, a venue for cultural events in downtown Mexico City.
“Of all my collecting obsessions, this piece represents one of the
greatest. I was determined to acquire it, I was patient, and some 15
years later, it was mine,” he says of the canvas, which he obtained
from descendants of the Lafore Gay sisters.
“I don’t believe authorship alone, or even primarily, establishes the value of a work,” says Liebsohn. “There are some terrible
works by well-known artists and some masterpieces by complete
unknowns.” Liebsohn calls attention to
four undated and anonymous paintings of
Eighteenth-century
paintings fill the walls
of the “Garden Room,”
including a 1795 portrait of a mother and
her two daughters by
Juan Sáenz, left, and a
circa 1770–80 depiction of the Lafore Gay
sisters, right, which
supposedly inspired
Frida Kahlo’s The Two
Fridas, 1939.
OBSESSIONS
106
Below: Liebsohn’s
taste in decorative
objects includes 17thcentury Japanese
porcelain, a 19thcentury French
chandelier and an Art
Deco Mexican sofa
and armchair. Below
right: 18th-century
Mexican paintings and
a cabinet made in
Germany, circa 1710.
Far right: A 16thcentury portrait of
Elizabeth I hangs in his
library.
hearts, with Jesus Christ’s head popping up out of each, illustrating
various ways of eradicating sin from one’s soul. He also points out
an anonymous portrait of Queen Elizabeth I that was created in the
monarch’s lifetime and is believed to have belonged to her, because
it shows her in riding clothes, without her crown. He is especially
drawn to 18th-century paintings of niños muertos, sometimes
called niños dormidos (“dead children,” or “sleeping children”),
whose deaths were seen by devout Catholics not as tragic losses
but rather as events that prompted “the births of angels.”
What many of the pictures in Liebsohn’s collection share is
a “psychological intensity,” he says. As examples, he cites a portrait by the 18th-century Mexican artist Andrés López of a novice
Carmelite nun wearing a traditional crown of flowers, and also a
1795 canvas by Juan Sáenz of an aristocratic mother and her daughters dressed up in their finery to go plant flowers. This canvas is
noteworthy because, rather unusually, it depicts an urban scene
within a domestic portrait; through a window, it offers a view of
what appears to be Mexico City’s Alameda Park.
Although paintings are Liebsohn’s primary interest, he says,
“I’m open. It all depends on how something grabs me.” Over the
years, a wide array of treasures certainly have, including a pair
of small painted-wood sculptures of Jesus and Saint John portrayed as chubby infants, from the viceregal era in what is now
Guatemala; antique Baccarat jars that were etched with decorative
designs in Mexico; and a carved-wood candleholder, taller than
the average man, that Liebsohn turned into a lamp base and topped
with a dark-red shade, of equally exaggerated proportions, that
he designed himself.
His gallery features an even wider array of objects, including
a pair of life-size 19th-century terra-cotta bulldogs from Britain;
leather-bound volumes of Je sais tout, a French magazine from the
1920s; a Louis XV daybed-divan big enough to hold a football
team; and a pair of Christian Dior high heels from the mid-1900s
covered with sequins and embroidery. The daybed and the shoes
once belonged to María Félix, the much-loved actress-diva of the
golden age of Mexican cinema, who died in 2002. Toward the end
of her life, Liebsohn knew her well.
The beginnings of Liebsohn’s eclectic inventory can
be traced to his first obsession: pocket watches. He recalls how
he patiently saved up his allowance and birthday-gift money to
amass the collection, which included examples crafted in Europe,
Mexico and the U.S. in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
Some had finely wrought decorative motifs. Others gently chimed
the hours. At 18, Liebsohn, whose Argentinian mother had studied
art in Buenos Aires and was a nonprofessional painter, and whose
Mexican father ran a textiles business, sold his watch collection
and used the earnings to open his first antiques store in the Plaza
del Ángel, a building, which housed antiquarians’ shops, in the
Mexican capital’s Zona Rosa district. He sold “furniture, paintings
and decorative-art items, although not too many, as the space was
small,” he says. “Its second floor was dedicated to antique clothing
and textiles, some of my passions.”
When Liebsohn opened his first shop—in time, he would have
four in the same place—he did so
with a flourish: He presented a
fashion show that looked back
at a century of Mexican clothing and costume, all taken from
another of the well-researched
collections he had assembled
before he had turned 20 years
old. Those holdings were soon
acquired by Mexico City’s
Soumaya Museum, founded
by the world’s second-richest
person, the local businessman
Carlos Slim Helú.
OBSESSIONS
108
At the time, Liebsohn was an undergraduate in communications at the Universidad Nuevo Mundo, on the outskirts of
Mexico City, but he gave up his studies to devote himself full-time
to collecting and dealing. As he saw it then—and still regards it
today—selling his finds is less a means for striking it rich than a
way to raise funds with which to seek out additional unusual,
undervalued objects.
Liebsohn does not divulge where he finds his material but,
he says, “anything of any value almost always passes through
the hands of dealers in Mexico City.” That does not stop him,
however, from sometimes venturing out to provincial towns to
poke around and see what he might find. A good example of such
a discovery is a mural-size oil-on-canvas tableau dated 1725 by the
painter Joseph Miranda that came from a former Jesuit hacienda
in the state of Puebla, south of Mexico City. On display in a redwalled room in Liebsohn’s gallery-showroom, the picture, which
he acquired in the former hacienda’s estate sale, is packed with
images of sacred figures and the Holy Trinity. (The irony that a
Jew who grew up without a typical Mexican Catholic’s religious
education should know as much as he
does about the iconography of the art and
artifacts of the Mother Church is not lost
on him.)
Last year, Liebsohn consolidated
three of the four retail spaces he had
operated in the Plaza del Ángel (keeping only his textiles store,
Las Tijeras, or “The Scissors”) into an impressive two-floor
gallery-showroom in a historic house in the flourishing Roma
Norte district, near his own home. Items for sale range from a
Cézannesque self-portrait by the Mexican modernist Ángel
Zárraga (1886–1946) to a compact, timelessly chic sofa designed
by the Mexican modernist architect Mario Pani (1911–1993), to a
pair of Italian-made wood-framed upholstered chairs from the
early 1800s, adorned with outrageous, oversized carvings of cute,
cavorting squirrels; the chairs also once belonged to María Félix.
After two decades of collecting and dealing, Liebsohn thinks the
market has finally caught up with him. “Mexico is gearing up to
mark the 200th anniversary of the start, in 1810, of the Mexican
War of Independence from Spain,” he says, “so now collectors are
seeking material from that period.”
He’s interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. Setting
down a little glass of tequila that he has been slowly sipping, he
apologizes for taking the call. After a few seconds of florid pleasantries, he looks up and excuses himself again. “I’ll just be a moment,”
he says graciously—and with notable
excitement. “It’s about a painting.”
Clockwise from left:
the “Children’s
Room”; Liebsohn
wears TKTKTKTKTK
TKTKTKTKTKTKTKT; a
19th-century Echeverría family portrait and
a pair of 19th-century
armchairs; on either
side of the window are
19th-century paintings by José María
Estrada.
ONCE UPON A
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E
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Over the past two decades, Daniel Liebsohn’s passions have
evolved from pocketwatches to portraiture, but his focus has
ONCE UPON
A TI M E
I N M EXI C O
Over the past two decades, Daniel Liebsohn’s
passions have evolved from pocketwatches to
portraiture, but his focus has remained
the same: the cultural remnants of New Spain.
By Edward M. Gómez
Photographs by Miguel Flores-Vianna