The story
In May 1980, at an auction in New York, an Argentine buyer paid 6.4 million dollars for Juliet and her Nurse by J. M. W. Turner, the English painter of light and weather. It was a record price for a painting at auction at the time. The buyer was Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, known to Argentines as Amalita, who ran Loma Negra, the country's largest cement company. The picture now hangs in the museum she built for her collection on the docks of Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires.
Turner painted it in 1836 and moved Shakespeare's lovers from Verona to Venice. Juliet and her nurse are small figures on a rooftop, looking down on Saint Mark's Square under fireworks. Critics mocked it, one complaining that the pair were perched like sparrows on a house-top, and the seventeen-year-old John Ruskin, later the leading Victorian critic, drafted a reply in Turner's defence.
The museum opened in October 2008, in a building by the Uruguayan-born architect Rafael Viñoly. Its glass and steel galleries sit under a roof of movable aluminium louvres that open and close with the position of the sun, a feature Fortabat asked for herself. Inside are Andy Warhol's portrait of her, works by Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, and a room given entirely to Antonio Berni, the Argentine painter of the slum boy Juanito Laguna.
