Many soccer aficionados in town for the World Cup took time out for a change-of-pace culture fix: a visit to an emblematic collection of 20th century Mexican art, featuring signature works of Frida Kahlo, the taboo-breaking painter turned global feminist icon.
“Fabulous,” concluded Álvaro Muñoz, 41 a university professor from Colombia, after viewing the paintings of Kahlo and others. But Muñoz was shocked to learn that many Mexicans fear that the private collection’s future in Mexico may be in doubt.
“The paintings are the patrimony of all Mexicans,” he said.
Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait “The Broken Column” appears in the Dolores Olmedo Museum, one of two museums in Mexico City showcasing works by Kahlo. (Marco Ugarte / Associated Press)
The works are scheduled to go on display in Europe, and the trove’s impending departure has ignited one of Mexico’s most heated cultural controversies in recent memory.
Hundreds of intellectuals and others have signed letters and online petitions expressing fears of a disastrous denouement: the collection’s prolonged — and possible permanent — absence from Mexico.
“These works deserve to be preserved forever for the people of Mexico,” said Francisco Berzunza, an art historian.
The 68 works — including 10 oil paintings by Kahlo — went on display at the Museum of Modern Art in February, the first public showing in Mexico in almost two decades. The exhibit, reflecting an especially vibrant period in Mexican history, has drawn record crowds, exceeding 300,000.
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The show is scheduled to end Sunday and hit the road for a European tour, beginning with a star turn in the September opening of the glitzy new Faro Santander museum in Spain, Mexico’s onetime colonial overlord.
The exhibit showcases other Mexican masters, including Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, but the big draw has been Kahlo, whose oeuvre has become a touchstone of feminist and Latin American iconography.
In life she may have played second fiddle to the flamboyant Rivera, but time has reversed the artistic hierarchy. Last year, one of Kahlo’s self-portraits sold at auction in New York for $55 million — a record for a woman and a Latin American artist.
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Berzunza is the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed this month against the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, which reviews export licenses for items protected under cultural heritage statutes. Dozens of the collection’s works — including all the paintings by Kahlo and Rivera — bear the legal imprimatur of “artistic monument,” which restricts sales and export.
The lawsuit alleges that authorities ignored statutory safeguards meant to ensure the collection’s return to Mexico, and seeks an injunction barring the works from leaving the country.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has dismissed as fake news any notion that Mexico is in jeopardy of losing the collection.
“The collection will visit various countries of the world for two years and will come back, as it says in the law,” Sheinbaum told reporters in April, blaming political adversaries for the contretemps. “It has to return.”
These works deserve to be preserved forever for the people of Mexico.
Francisco Berzunza, art historian
The foundation overseeing the traveling exhibition has also said the collection “would return to Mexico at the end of the period of temporary export.”
Activists say they applaud foreign exhibitions of heritage treasures — as long as laws guaranteeing their return are followed.
“I’m the last one to complain about a collection traveling; it presents [Mexico’s] best face” to the world, said Adriana Malvido, a cultural columnist. “But everything must be done under a state of legality and order and transparency. That has not been the case here.”
In the 1930s and 1940s, postrevolutionary Mexico emerged as both an incubator of modern art and haven for European refugees, political exiles and other expats. Many developed a deep affection for the country and its artistic innovations, while seizing on business opportunities.
Among the emigre newcomers were Jacques Gelman and Natasha Zahalka.
Gelman, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, fled the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and moved to Berlin, where he launched a career in the fast-developing movie industry, according to a Metropolitan Museum of Art research paper. He later relocated to Paris and became a film producer and distributor, before decamping to Mexico in 1938, just before the outbreak of World War II.
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In Mexico, Gelman met Zahalka, a native of Bohemia (part of the current-day Czech Republic ) who was reared in a Catholic convent and attended schools in Vienna and Switzerland. In 1941, the cosmopolitan soulmates wed in Mexico City.
Gelman reached mogul status as a producer during the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema. His cash cow: Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, the improvisational comic genius sometimes called the “Mexican Charlie Chaplin.”
The Gelmans fraternized with Mexico’s bohemian avant-garde and hosted soirees at opulent residences in Mexico and New York. The couple commissioned Kahlo and Rivera to paint portraits of Natasha. The Gelmans also acquired paintings by José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo, among other masters.
According to reports, five Kahlo paintings hung in Natasha’s bedroom.
Kahlo’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl” combines images of herself, her husband and an Aztec god. (Heritage Images via Getty Images)
Since Kahlo became a posthumous sensation, her works have attracted deep-pocket collectors, among them Madonna. The pop star’s inventory reportedly includes five Kahlo paintings.
By contrast, experts say, the Mexican government owns only seven of Kahlo’s approximately 152 known works. Mexico long lacked the funds, or interest, to pony up the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to purchase the Gelman cache, a former chief of the country’s fine-arts agency told the Milenio news outlet this year.
Natasha Gelman died in Mexico in 1998, having outlived her husband by 12 years. She left the couple’s assemblage of modern European works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while bequeathing management of her Mexican collection to a U.S. curator, with instructions that it be displayed to the public.
However, various legal imbroglios about ownership — including a claim by descendants of Cantinflas — led to the collection dropping from public sight in Mexico after 2007.
In January, Banco Santander, Spain’s largest financial institution, moved to pull back the shroud of mystery that had enveloped the marquee collection.
Mexico’s billionaire Zambrano family, heirs to a fortune in cement and other holdings, acquired the collection in 2023, Santander announced. While the art remained the property of the Zambranos, the Santander Foundation was henceforth in charge of preservation, care and temporary exhibition.
The works were rebranded as the Gelman Santander Collection.
Neither Santander bank nor the Zambrano family has revealed the purchase price. But the lawsuit states that the paintings stood as collateral for a $150-million loan toward the purchase. A bank spokesman declined to comment.
Among the paintings now on display are several widely viewed as Kahlo masterpieces.
“Self-Portrait With Monkeys” features the raven-haired artist unfazed by the presence of four spider monkeys — two touching her while the others peer from tropical foliage.
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In “Self-Portrait With Necklace,” a string of blue jadestones rests on Kahlo’s bare neck, above the fringes of a lace blouse. Her face displays the trademark unibrow and faint mustache — a gender-bending look that, scholars say, reflects Kahlo’s defiant repudiation of the classic female aesthetic.
And in “Diego on My Mind,” Kahlo dons an elaborate Indigenous headdress while her forehead features a miniature portrait of Rivera — a visual acknowledgment, analysts say, of her obsessive attachment to a partner who repeatedly betrayed her.
Kahlo’s subdued portrait of Natasha Gelman — sophisticated and reserved, with blond curls and a fur stole — stands in sharp contrast to Rivera’s seductive take: a sultry Gelman in a clingy white dress reclining on a blue divan against a lush backdrop of calla lilies.
As the exhibit’s days count down, the inspired visions from Kahlo, Rivera and their contemporaries continue to transfix visitors.
“I understand that it’s important that other people in the world see these masterworks,” said Jeny Vargas, 29, who was visiting from Chicago. “But Mexicans should get to know them first.”
Sánchez Vidal is a special correspondent.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
