Career
Pérez Simón has assembled a collection of over 3000 paintings, including works by Dalí, Goya, El Greco, Rubens, Van Gogh and Monet. In 2010, Paris Match described the collection as the largest in private hands in the world. Pérez Simón was just 5 years of age when his family emigrated to Mexico.
They were not wealthy.
They travelled by sea in third class accommodation for 28 days before eventually arriving in Mexico City after spending a month in Cuba. Pérez Simón met Carlos Slim when they were both young mentor
In May 2014, the firm had a stock market capitalisation of over United States$12 billion. Pérez Simón"s interest in art began as a teenager.
Today, Pérez Simón"s collection includes works from the fourteenth century onwards but he does not enjoy contemporary art, feeling that it is too intellectual and lacks emotion.
Pérez Simón claims never to refuse a request for a loan of one of his pictures. From November 2014 to March 2015, fifty paintings owned by Pérez Simón will be on display at London"s Leighton House Museum in the exhibition: The Pérez Simón collection. The permanent collection of the museum has been placed in storage to allow the works to be hung throughout the house.
The selected works are those of Frederic Leighton and other important British Victorian painters, many of whom Leighton would have known, such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Albert Moore, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, John William Waterhouse, Edward Poynter, John Melhuish Strudwick and John William Godward.
The paintings have not been labelled, in order that they fit in with the decor of the house. As part of the exhibition, Lawrence Alma-Tadema"s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) will be shown in London for the first time since Alma-Tadema"s memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1913.
In his review of the exhibition, Waldemar Januszczak of The Sunday Times, described the works included as "demented escapism" and Pérez Simón as "Mexico"s richest lover of droopy damsels in distress and muscular Greek nymphettes". He observed that Pérez Simón "made his money with the new, but it is antiquity that presses his ringtone".
Works from the Pérez Simón collection
Pérez Simón is married to Josefina.
