Scholars Dispute Authenticity of Frida Kahlo Find
Posted on August 20, 2009
Frida Kahlo scholars are denoucing as fake an entire collection of Kahlo memorabilia found by an antiques dealer in Mexico.
Princeton Architectural Press, which will soon publish a book of Kahlo's oil paintings, diary entries and personal letters, says it has stumbled across "an astonishing lost archive of one of the 20th century's most revered artists … full of ardent desires, seething fury, and outrageous humour."The items are owned by Carlos Noyola, who with his partner Leticia Fernández, runs an antiques store in San Miguel de Allende, central Mexico. He insists the items are real. But Kahlo scholars think the whole thing is a hoax and refuse to get on a plane to Mexico to see Carlos' collection of odds and ends allegedly owned by Kahlo.But news of the discovery has prompted a group of Kahlo scholars to denounce the items – which belong to an antique-dealing Mexican couple who bought them from a lawyer who got them from a woodcarver who claimed to have got them from Kahlo – as fakes.
They also urged Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts and the National Institute of Fine Arts to protect the work of one of its favourite daughters and "to put a stop to this type of fraud and clarify the situation".
Others have been less temperate in their response. "It's a silly book," said Mary-Anne Martin, a New York-based Latin American art dealer who has sold many of Kahlos works. "But it has been put together very carefully and very cleverly. It is full of biographical material that would appeal to people into Kahlo and her relationship with Rivera, her feminism and her communism. Those bits have been created to that end."