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Frida Kahlo book features ‘fake’ collection
A new book on Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has been denounced by experts for including paintings and letters they say are forgeries
Art experts have denounced a collection of work by artist Frida Kahlo as fake. The collection includes paintings, diaries, letters, notes and trinkets supposely by, or owned by, the Mexican surrealist. Now its contents are to form the subject of a soon-to-be-published book by Princeton Architectural Press, prompting scholars to speak out.
Among the collectors and experts who say the cache of work is bogus is Mary-Anne Martin, a New York-based Kahlo specialist dealer. She told the Art Newspaper: "The drawings are badly done, the writing infantile, the content crude; the anatomy drawings look like something from a butcher shop instruction book. There's nothing I would like more than to discover a group of unknown works by Frida Kahlo, but there is no way on earth that any of these works could pass muster at Sotheby's, Christie's."
The collection belongs to a pair of antique dealers from Mexico, who are supposed to have acquired it from a lawyer who bought it from a woodcarver who was given the items by Kahlo herself. Now Kahlo scholars have asked the Mexican authorities to put a stop to what they claim is fakery.
Frida Kahlo, played by Selma Hayek in a 2002 film of her life, has become a feminist icon since her death in 1954. Her forceful paintings were inspired by Mexican folk art, and during her colourful life she took Leon Trotsky, Josephine Baker and the artist Diego Rivera as lovers. ·
