Frida Kahlo
Shortly after the Museo Frida Kahlo’s announcement of a second location, its former director made startling accusations of mismanagement against the organization. These allegations, if proven true, could have far-reaching implications for the museum and its collections.
The Museo Frida Kahlo and the Museo Anahuacalli are both managed by the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Frida Kahlo Casa Azul Museums Trust, established in 1955 by Diego Rivera following Kahlo’s death. That trust is now overseen by the Bank of Mexico (Banxico). However, the Museo Kahlo’s former director, Hilda Trujillo Soto, has now gone public with claims that many items have gone missing from the museum inventory, possibly through nefarious means. Although Trujillo Soto served as director of the Museo Kahlo (also known as the Casa Azul) until 2020, she publicly raised her concerns about this mismanagement in April of this year. She claims that the trustees have neglected to appropriately act upon her expressed concerns that works from the museum have been misplaced. She says she had made this clear both in writing and in person and that she wished for Banxico to conduct an audit of the museums’ financial records and their inventories. “They all acted as if they did not understand me or did not listen; they ignored and let such events go by. They never took my complaints into account and, to this day, there is no action taken for what appear to be crimes against the property of the Nation.”
The Casa Azul previously conducted an internal audit in 2011, commissioned by Carlos Phillips Olmeda, the general director of both the Kahlo and Rivera museums. Its conclusions were kept secret, even from Trujillo Soto. She was, however, able to gain access to three of the roughly two hundred total pages. Those three pages show several works that are no longer part of the museum collection, including the Kahlo painting Frida in Flames. She wrote that she urged Carlos Phillips to notify the relevant cultural authorities, namely the Secretariat of Culture and the National Institute of Fine Arts & Literature (INBAL). Phillips instead sent his findings to one of the Rivera Kahlo Museums Trust’s lawyers. Through her own investigation, Trujillo Soto found that many of the missing works were now part of private collections in the United States. She strongly implies that someone illegally sold these works without the trust’s knowledge. She stated that Banxico “has failed to fulfill the mandate it accepted to safeguard the museum collections that house part of the national heritage, which is crucial to understanding the history, identity, and memory of our country”.
The works of both Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are protected by Mexican federal law. These protections make it illegal for any work by either artist to be sold to a buyer outside of Mexico, that is, unless the relevant parties obtain a special export permit issued by the INBAL. Trujillo Soto has found that many were taken out of Mexico from the 1970s to the 1990s. A good deal of these artworks, now in the United States, passed through the New York gallery Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art, a prominent dealer of Latin American art. One of the most notable works to pass through Martin Fine Art is the 1952 Kahlo painting People’s Congress for Peace, which sold for $2.66 million w/p at the June 2020 Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale. Trujillo Soto also found that, in addition to these artworks, several pages from Frida Kahlo’s diary are missing. The original was photographed in 1993 to create a replica, while the original was stored away in a safe. When she opened the safe to view the original, she saw that six double-sided pages of the manuscript written in March 1953 were gone.
Trujillo Soto concluded that many of the problems that the Casa Azul faces in terms of missing inventory stem from Carlos Phillips’s mother, the museum’s former director, Dolores Olmedo. Olmedo was a prominent Mexican art collector who enjoyed a close friendship with Diego Rivera. Several agree that Olmeda was romantically interested in some of the same men that Frida Kahlo was romantically involved with, including Alejandro Gómez Arias and Diego Rivera. This, at least according to Trujillo Soto, resulted in a rather fraught relationship between the two women. According to Trujillo Soto, when Olmedo served as director of the Casa Azul, she managed the museum in a way that could be seen as somewhat neglectful. Whole rooms of artwork, artifacts, and personal effects went completely untouched during her tenure, sometimes completely unopened since Kahlo’s death. This has led some to believe that perhaps many of the missing items were originally kept in these rooms, hence the great length of time it took for anyone to notice their absence. The museum staff “let her act as she pleased and did not prevent abuses.” Trujillo Soto does, however, recognize that Olmedo is one of the reasons the museum remains open today, fighting for public money when such funding became scarce. While she poured great amounts of her time and energy into expanding and maintaining the Museo Anahuacalli, the same cannot be said about the Casa Azul.
The Rivera Kahlo Museums Trust has responded to Trujillo Soto’s accusations by saying that she “never filed a formal complaint during their professional association with the trust.” They later launched an allegation of their own, saying that Trujillo Soto was dismissed as director of the Casa Azul “for having benefited third parties with the assets under her care.” Trujillo Soto responded by clarifying that these third parties were “qualified specialists” she brought on to assist with museum duties. An opinion piece featured in Excélsior, a prominent Mexico City newspaper, has called on the country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, to intervene in the matter.