The fundamental nucleus of the works comes from the US collection of Jacques and Natasha Gelman, he a successful director and refined collector, she who, after his death, continues, with brilliant competence, to enrich the collection.
The spouses, whose collection counted on the best of contemporary European art, from Balthus, to Chagall, Giacometti, Matisse, Picasso, to the young Bacon, had a particularly intense relationship with the two Mexican artists, by whom they also had their portraits.
Thus, the various fundamental works of Frida Kahlo entered their collection, including her most famous self-portraits, and of Diego Rivera, present in the exhibition.
The exhibition
It is a choral exhibition, the one that is proposed at the San Gaetano. Alongside the great painting – there are 23 works by Frida Kahlo and 9 by Diego Rivera – photography is also on offer.
Karl Wilhem Kahlo, a German Jew who emigrated to Mexico, was a skilled architectural photographer. Frida, very young, accompanied him on his campaigns around Mexico and this collaboration greatly influenced his art.
Finally, a very colorful section is reserved for Mexican costumes, whose colors reverberate in her works and in his works, from murals to oils on canvas.
It is the iconic, strong, lively Mexico that emerges in this exhibition, that land and those people who in the central part of the 1900s attracted intellectuals, artists, militants and adventurers from the Old Continent.
And no one like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera has been able to translate that world of passion, beauty, strength and suffering into art.
