Museum · Palermo
MALBA
Eduardo Costantini's museum of Latin American art: Frida Kahlo, Tarsila do Amaral's Abaporu, Xul Solar, Berni.
Look for: Tarsila do Amaral's Abaporu, and Berni's Manifestación.
Closed Tuesdays
Go further, look closer.
Cities · Latin America · 34°36′S 58°22′W
Buenos Aires
A city that looks to Europe and invented its own modernism anyway, with the best collection of Latin American art anywhere and painters who drew their own planets.
Best monthsOctober–November and March–April
Art calendararteBA (spring) · Gallery Nights
This guide4 essentials · 7 places off-piste
Essentials
Museum · Recoleta
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
The national collection, free, with a strong 19th-century Argentine section.
Look for: Prilidiano Pueyrredón's portraits and scenes of the pampas.
Free · closed Mondays
Foundation · La Boca
Fundación PROA
International contemporary shows in an Italianate building by the old port of La Boca.
Look for: The rooftop café.
Closed Mondays
Museum · Puerto Madero
Colección Fortabat
The industrialist Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat's collection, Argentine art from the 19th century to Berni, in a glass building on the old docks.
Look for: Turner's Juliet and Her Nurse, a long way from Venice.
Closed Mondays
Off the list
Off-Piste in Buenos Aires
Rooms, ruins and curiosities: the city's other museum.
Bookshop · Recoleta
El Ateneo Grand Splendid
A bookshop inside a 1919 theatre, with the café on the stage.
Coffee on the stage.
Cemetery · Recoleta
Recoleta Cemetery
A city of 4,700 marble mausoleums along named streets, for the families who ran Argentina, Eva Perón among them.
The tomb of Rufina Cambaceres.
Architecture · Avenida de Mayo
Palacio Barolo
Mario Palanti's office tower of 1923 built around Dante's Divine Comedy: hell on the ground floor, purgatory in the middle, heaven at the top, with a lighthouse.
Take the night tour.
Artist house · Palermo
Museo Xul Solar
The visionary painter's house, with his watercolours, his invented languages and his reformed tarot, chess and astrology.
His panchess board.
Architecture · Recoleta
Biblioteca Nacional
Clorindo Testa's Brutalist library, designed in 1962 and finished only in 1992: a concrete block raised on four legs above a park. Borges was the library's director.
The reading room at the top.
Interior · Florida Street
Galerías Pacífico
A shopping arcade whose central dome was painted in 1946 by Berni, Castagnino, Spilimbergo, Urruchúa and Colmeiro.
Look up from the middle of the crossing.
Architecture · Retiro
Edificio Kavanagh
A stepped Art Deco tower of 1936, the tallest concrete building in the world when it was built.
Look from Plaza San Martín.
Nearby
La Plata
Le Corbusier's Casa Curutchet, an hour away.
If you have one day
MALBA at opening → Bellas Artes → El Ateneo → Recoleta Cemetery → evening at Palacio Barolo.