Lima Art Museum

MALI's claim on Peruvian art history rests on breadth rather than a single blockbuster holding: pre-Columbian ceramics, metalwork and one of the country's most complete surveys of ancient and colonial textile weaving, sit in the same building as Lima- and Cuzco-school colonial painting, republican portraiture, a large costumbrista drawing collection, and a photography collection running from the 1840s to the present. The weak point by the museum's own account is contemporary art: more than a thousand post-1940 works exist in the collection, but a dedicated wing to show them has not been built, so what is on view at any time is a fraction of the holding.

The building MALI occupies was not built to be a museum. The Palacio de la Exposicion went up in 1868-1872 on the site of Lima's demolished Guadalupe Gate, commissioned for an international exhibition held to mark Peru's modernisation under President Jose Balta. The Italian architect Antonio Leonardi, then resident in Lima, designed its Italianate facade and worked with the journalist Manuel Atanasio Fuentes on the surrounding Parque de la Exposicion; the cast-iron structural frame behind that facade came from Gustave Eiffel's Paris atelier, built between 1870 and 1871, making the palace one of the first iron-framed buildings in Latin America.

After the 1872 exhibition the building had a long working life that had nothing to do with art. It served as the headquarters of the Fine Arts Society from 1872 to 1879, as a hospital for the wounded during the War of the Pacific with Chile, and from 1935 as offices of Lima's city government. The park around it grew a second layer of history in 1921, when Moorish and Byzantine pavilions were added to mark the centenary of Peruvian independence.

The museum itself began as a civic project. In 1954 a group of businessmen, academics and cultural figures - among them the historian Jorge Basadre and Manuel Solari Swayne, whose name the museum's library now carries - formed the Patronato de las Artes under the presidency of Carlos Neuhaus Ugarteche, with the explicit aim of giving Lima a museum of Peruvian art. Restoration of the war-damaged, long-repurposed Palacio de la Exposicion began in March 1956, led by the Peruvian architects Hector Velarde and Jose Garcia Bryce with financing from both the Peruvian and French governments; the building's first exhibition after that restoration, in 1956-57, was in fact a showcase of French industry and culture offered in thanks for French support.

The museum opened to the public on 10 March 1961, inaugurated by President Manuel Prado y Ugarteche, who donated the art collection of his late brother Javier Prado as a founding gift. The building was declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation in 1974 and reserved by supreme resolution for cultural use only in 1979; a thirty-year lease signed with the municipality in 1998 runs to 2028. A run of directors since then has included the art historian Natalia Majluf, who led the museum for a combined stretch from 2000 to 2018 with a short break, and the Catalan curator Bartomeu Mari, previously director of Barcelona's MACBA, who took charge in July 2019 and resigned in April 2020 as the museum absorbed the shock of the COVID-19 shutdown.

MALI's own description of its holdings runs to more than 17,000 works, most of them Peruvian, spanning close to 3,000 years. The permanent galleries occupy about 4,500 square metres and present a representative slice of some 1,200 pieces in a sequence that moves, room by room, from pre-Columbian ceramics, textiles and metalwork, through a dedicated textiles room built around coastal Paracas, Nazca, Chimu and Chancay weaving and highland Wari, Chuquibamba and Inca weaving - its oldest piece a scrap of basketwork from the Guitarrero Cave dated to about 8000 BC - into a colonial room of Lima- and Cuzco-school painting, a silverware room tracing Peruvian silversmithing from the Spanish conquest onward, a nineteenth-century republican room of history and portrait painting, a costumbrista room of social-type drawings, a twentieth-century room of academic and indigenista painting, a photography room running from the 1840s daguerreotype era to the present, and a contemporary room covering work from 1940 onward.

The arcaded ground-floor courtyard around which the palace is built is not a gallery in the curatorial sense, but it is where most visitors first experience the building: it hosts family workshops, temporary-exhibition banners and public programs under the same iron-framed glass roof that Eiffel's atelier built for an industrial fair a century and a half ago.

MALI's own promotional material names four works as the collection's icons, and each carries more than decorative value. El Contorsionista de Puemape is a roughly 3,000-year-old Cupisnique ceramic bottle showing a young man bent double, his feet drawn over his head; specialists who have studied the piece have raised Marfan syndrome as an explanation for the extreme flexibility shown, and the tattoos, serpents and San Pedro cactus imagery on his body point toward a shamanic reading rather than a purely anatomical one. It was acquired by the museum only in 2022. The Trinidad Trifacial, an anonymous eighteenth-century Cuzco-school painting of the Christian Trinity as a single figure with three fused faces, keeps alive a medieval convention that had already fallen out of use in Europe by the time it was painted in the Andes. The retablo by the Ayacucho master Joaquin Lopez Antay represents a different kind of recognition: Lopez Antay's 1975 National Culture Prize, awarded for what had been classed as popular rather than fine art, was itself an argument about who gets called an artist in Peru.

The fourth icon has the most eventful biography. Luis Montero's Los Funerales de Atahualpa, a history painting more than four metres tall showing the funeral of the last Inca emperor, was painted in Montero's Florence studio and shown at the 1867 Paris exposition before touring Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo and Buenos Aires; by the time it reached Lima in 1868 an estimated 30,000 people had seen it. Montero gave the canvas to Peru's Congress, and it was in Lima when Chilean forces occupying the city during the War of the Pacific took it as war booty and shipped it to Chile's National Museum. It came back to Peru only through the intervention of the writer Ricardo Palma, then spent time at the National Library before settling in the Palacio de la Exposicion itself.

The museum's current shape is largely the product of renovation rather than new construction. A restoration laboratory opened in 1966, an auditorium and library in 1986, and a run of individual room openings followed over the next two decades: the silverware room in 2003, the photography room in 2006, and a new precolumbian textile room in 2008 built with support from the German embassy and Peruvian textile firm Creditex. A first phase of a larger, comprehensive renovation reopened in 2010 with the infrastructure now visible in the galleries.

What that renovation did not solve is space for contemporary art. MALI's own collection of contemporary work runs past a thousand pieces, but most of it stays in storage for lack of a dedicated wing that has been discussed for years without being built - a gap the museum's temporary-exhibition program, and shows built around donated or borrowed contemporary work, has had to work around rather than fill.

MALI holds a strong aggregate rating from ordinary visitors, and the pattern in what they write is consistent: praise for being able to walk the whole chronological span of Peruvian art history in a single, physically striking building, for bilingual labelling, for guided tours, and for the courtyard cafe; complaints cluster around the permanent galleries feeling unchanged between repeat visits, and around signage near the entrance being unclear when construction work is under way nearby. Both threads point at the same underlying fact: MALI's core strength is depth of historical range rather than turnover, and the museum's own acknowledgement that most of its contemporary collection sits in storage is the institutional version of the same complaint.

Visitors consistently describe MALI as the place to get the whole span of Peruvian art in one visit, praising how clearly the chronological hang moves from pre-Columbian pieces through colonial and republican painting to modern and contemporary work, inside a building most reviewers single out on its own merits. The most common complaint is that the permanent galleries feel static between visits and that finding the entrance amid nearby construction and signage can be confusing.