BUENOS AIRES—Eduardo Constantini, the millionaire Argentine real estate developer, has assembled one of the largest, most valuable and most diverse collections of modern and contemporary Latin American art in the world.

The vast majority of these works are housed in his personal museum—the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA)—one of the most significant arts institutions in the Argentine capital.

Constantini sat down with ArtInfo for a rare interview.

Talk about your collecting strategy. Did you have a long-range plan from the beginning to become known as one of the most important collectors of Latin American art?

I originally started collecting only Argentine art, and then I came to understand that by making [broader] selections of Latin American pieces, I would have more visibility. So this became my long-term plan: Trying to give more visibility to Argentine and Latin American art, both within the region and abroad—because Latin American art was really [ignored] for a long period of time. In the 1940s it had more visibility than it does now, although I would say that in the last 10 years that visibility has been improving.

How would you describe some of the key characteristics of Latin American art?

Within the groups of people who are promoting it, some think of Latin American art as having independent and strong characteristics, but some others think the other way around, and they are fighting for the full integration of Latin American art. I don’t think the artists here are that different. One has to fight for the integration of Latin American art. When you talk about regions, in some sense, you are diverting and taking away from the main aspect of art. If you go to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, you have Latin American [dedicated sales] and that is a problem in some ways. It would be better if you had Latin American art [included] with [general] modern and contemporary art—so that you are not differentiating by country. It’s like classifying athletes—tennis players, for example—by country [rather than ability]. You have to think globally.

Yet you still do find specific characteristics in Latin American art like, for example, Social Realism or Mexican Muralism. These works represent the needs of a society, the conditions of the lower classes, the social unrest and suffering. There’s often a strong leftist ideology in Latin American art.

You can also see the exuberance of nature and colors. It’s a sunny region, and you can feel it through the colors of the painting. If you go to the permanent collection in my museum and enter the main room, you are greeted by a splash of colors: Pedro Figari’s (Uruguay) Candombe; or the black people dancing or the jungles in the works of Wifredo Lam (Cuba). Lam was a Cubist, with his own creativity, and he was a genius. If you look at the iconography of his paintings you see the Cuban jungle, the Afro-Latin American cultural mix, the lower classes asking for food and work.

But overall, as with mainstream art, you have many different movements in Latin American art that are expressed by hundreds of different artists. It’s kind of like [asking what are the characteristics of American art from the 1950s and ’60s]. You had movements as different as Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art and Minimalism. And in Latin America, you have Lygia Clark from Brazil with just a black canvas in the 1950s, and at the same time, you have Antonio Berni from Argentina who confronted poverty and rich society in his works of Social Realism.

Which Latin American country do you think has produced the best art over the past century?

Mexico has the most important Latin American artists in the modern era. Probably Brazil is second. Then it’s hard to differentiate between the others, but maybe Argentina and then Cuba next.

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo are the most important overall, the top two, if you have to classify. The Surrealist Roberto Matta from Chile was very important too, but he is less well known today and certainly less in fashion now than Frida.