Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera: Masterpieces from The Gelman Collection

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacán on the southern outskirts of Mexico City. Through illness and injury, she was left bed-bound and isolated at 18. As a result, she began to paint. With mixed German, Spanish and Native American heritage, there is a prevailing theme of identity in her work. Her self-portraits are defiant and unapologetic, asserting her right to exist and refusal to be a victim.

With continued ill-health following a major accident in her youth and several miscarriages, Kahlo was pre-occupied with mortality and trapped in a battle between her body and mind. As a result, her work is bold, blunt and emotive, cementing her identity as a distinctive and independent artist.

Kahlo and Diego Rivera met in 1927, when she took some of her paintings to show him as he worked on a commission at the Ministry of Education. They married in 1929, her parents calling it a marriage between ‘an elephant and a dove’.

Rivera was born in Guanajuato but brought up in Mexico City. Celebrated as the founding father of the Mexican Muralist Movement, he was a talented painter with a striking personality and a fondness for debate. Innately political, he was a unionist who helped found the Mexican Communist Party, appealing to Kahlo’s own passsionate, political spirit. In 1907 he went to Europe on a painting scholarship to Madrid, then settled in Paris where he was influenced by Picasso, Bracque and the Futurists.

Returning to Mexico City after World War One, his celebrated murals incorporated elements of Cubism and Constructivism with a touch of Italian and Spanish classicism, and the colours of Mexican popular art.

Rivera’s masterpieces are undoubtedly the murals he painted in grand public buildings. It is therefore difficult to give his achievements proper credit in temporary exhibitions outside Mexico. Nevertheless, his easel paintings reveal his talent. Much younger than her husband, Kahlo excelled under the support, stimulation and tutelage of Rivera, who was the foremost Mexican painter of his generation.

Jacques Gelman (1909–1986) was Russian by birth and worked as a photographer and film distributor in Europe, taking refuge in Mexico City before the Second World War. He met Natasha Gelman (1911–1998), a fellow Eastern European émigré, in Mexico City in 1939 and the pair married in 1941. As a Jewish couple, they could not return to war-torn Europe and later became Mexican citizens.

Collecting was their passion, beginning around 1943. Like their friends Kahlo and Rivera, they were unable to bear children, so their collection was their surrogate family. Mexico had adopted the Gelmans and given them refuge. It became their aim to support contemporary Mexican artists.

They bequeathed their collection of international art to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In this gift were major works by artists such as Léger, Miró, Matisse and Picasso. However, they wanted their collection of Mexican art to stay in Mexico; to be publicly accessible for the Mexican people; and to promote Mexican culture.

The Gelman Collection now numbers over 300 works and is regarded as the world’s most significant private holding of 20th century Mexican art. It is now managed by the Vergel Foundation in Mexico City and New York, founded in 1998 upon Natasha’s death to care for the collection. By touring the collection to a wider audience the foundation acquired funds to add works to the collection and support Mexican artists, as had been the Gelmans’ wishes.