But some experts said that Mr. López had not assumed the responsibility that came with opening a museum in the Mexican capital. The foundation, which does not have a board, is financed by Grupo Jumex. While the foundation would not give details about who canceled the exhibition, decisions are sometimes influenced by Eugenio López Rodea, the Grupo Jumex founder and father of the collector, according to people who know the younger Mr. López. The elder Mr. López is considered a man with more conservative tastes than his son.

Cuauhtémoc Medina, a Mexican curator and art critic, said he could not recall an occasion in recent decades when a Mexican museum canceled a show because of fear of controversy, adding, “There’s a lack of seriousness in an institution that — just because it has private funding — forgets that it has a responsibility to the public.”

The Jumex, of course, is not the first museum drawing fire for a controversial show. In 1999, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor of New York, threatened to cut city financing to the Brooklyn Museum if it did not shut down an exhibition that included Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary,” which incorporated the use of elephant dung. (A federal judge found the mayor’s action violated the First Amendment.)

The storm over the Brooklyn show echoed cases from the 1980s, including the decision by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington to cancel a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, fearing it would lose public financing. The Smithsonian Institution in 2010 removed a video installation by David Wojnarowicz from a National Portrait Gallery exhibition. It had drawn conservative and religious protests over taxpayer financing of art that the work’s opponents considered sacrilegious.

Mr. Cuauhtémoc cited cases of censorship in Mexico, like that of Robert Chiarito, an American painter, some of whose works were temporarily removed from a Mexico City exhibition in 2000 after a group of local women protested that they were pornographic. In 1988, under pressure from Roman Catholic groups, Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art shuttered an exhibition by the painter Rolando de la Rosa that included a collage that put the face of Marilyn Monroe on the body of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

In his statement, Mr. Charpenel denied that the decision to cancel Mr. Nitsch’s exhibition was mainly the result of pressure from a petition initiated on change.org by Carlos Silva Ronzón, an animal-rights activist, which gathered some 5,000 signatures.