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Collecting Art Is Easy. Running a Museum, Not So Much.

Every single-collector museum ultimately faces the same uncomfortable truth: a fixed collection, however extraordinary, can make a place feel like a one-and-done destination.

Dolores Olmedo was a prominent art collector and close friend of Diego Rivera who, over the course of her lifetime, acquired more than 140 of his works and 25 paintings by Frida Kahlo, many directly from the artists themselves. When it came time to consider her own cultural legacy, rather than donating her holdings to a museum, she opened Mexico City’s Dolores Olmedo Museum in La Noria, a 16th-century hacienda in Xochimilco, making clear that she wished the collection to remain there “for the Mexican people.” Olmedo died in 2002, having seen her museum, which holds the world’s largest collection of works by both Rivera and Kahlo, become a beloved cultural hub.

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In opening the Dolores Olmedo Museum, she  joined the exclusive club of private museum founders that includes Albert Barnes, Henry Clay Frick, Eli Broad, Peter Brant, Norton Simon, Christian Levett, Henry Walters, Raymond Nasher, David and Carmen Kreeger, Sterling and Francine Clark and Emily and Mitch Rales.

Many other high-net-worth art collectors have also taken this path, though not all of them successfully. Chicago businessman and President Reagan’s ambassador-at-large for cultural affairs Daniel Terra (1911-1996) founded a private museum—actually two museums, one in Chicago and the other outside of Paris—to showcase his 750-work collection of Hudson River Valley and American Impressionist painting. Both closed, the result of a failure to achieve........

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