Diego Rivera Art

No Charges Are Brought in Kahlo Case

In a setback for the guardians of Frida Kahlo’s work, the Mexican attorney general’s office has declined to bring charges against two art dealers who say they have an enormous collection of paintings, keepsakes and letters that belonged to the artist. The Mexican trust that owns the copyright to Kahlo’s work says that the works are fakes and last year asked prosecutors to investigate.

The attorney general’s decision was issued last summer but not publicized by the dealers, Carlos Noyola and his wife, Leticia Fernández, until this week. “They have proven our innocence in this,” Ms. Fernández said.

But prosecutors made no ruling on whether the works were forgeries. Art forgery is not a crime under Mexican law.

Hilda Trujillo, the director of the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, said that the only authority with legal standing to rule on the works’ authenticity is the state-run National Institute of Fine Arts, which backed away from submitting any opinion in the case. “We did everything we could,” she said. “We have no more legal instruments until the authorities decide to help us.”

Ms. Trujillo, along with art experts and several descendants of Kahlo’s husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, held a news conference on Thursday to denounce the works as fakes after the Noyolas said this week that they hoped to display the collection, which is now tucked away in a back room in their gallery in the town of San Miguel de Allende.

“They have no real provenance,” said James Oles, an art historian at Wellesley College who has argued that the works are forgeries. If they were real, he added, they would “triple the number of known works by Frida Kahlo.”

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Frida, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Diego, Mexican painter, Mexican ...

Over the sofa in the living room.”

But that’s just it. She wasn’t painting for me…or you…or for anyone else. In her relatively short life, Frida suffered a great deal both emotionally and physically. For reasons we’ll get into shortly, Frida spent long hours alone. and she began painting as a way to make sense of her life and to work through her pain.

There is already so much out there about Frida that I’ll keep this relatively brief. If  it whets your interest and you want to learn more, check out some of the resources I’ve listed at the end, including the fabulous movie, Frida,

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacan, Mexico, the daughter of a Jewish immigrant with Hungarian-German ancestry, and a mother of Spanish-Indian descent from the Mexican state of Oaxaca. As a child, Frida developed polio, a disease that left her with a slight limp.