{"id":489823,"date":"2026-06-09T00:45:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T00:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/489823\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T00:45:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T00:45:08","slug":"bounty-of-frida-kahlo-art-emerges-in-mexicos-restored-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/489823\/","title":{"rendered":"Bounty of Frida Kahlo Art Emerges in Mexico\u2019s Restored Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

For six years, the heavy wooden doors of the Dolores Olmedo Museum<\/a> in Mexico City remained closed to the public, its storied art collection hidden from view.<\/p>\n

The museum, housed in a 16th-century hacienda, is home to 26 artworks by Frida Kahlo \u2014 said by experts to be the largest collection in the world \u2014 and nearly 140 pieces by Diego Rivera, including paintings, drawings and a fresco.<\/p>\n

Set in lush gardens patrolled by peacocks and Mexican hairless dogs, the museum closed in 2020 during the coronavirus outbreak. It remained shuttered, with little explanation, long after the pandemic abated. Then on May 30, it reopened \u2014 in time, the management said, for the World Cup, which Mexico will co-host starting June 11.<\/p>\n

The hacienda was once the home of the museum\u2019s founder, a powerful, self-made businesswoman who modeled for Diego Rivera as a teenager and became his lifelong friend and patron. Olmedo established the museum in 1994 as a monument to Rivera, who died in 1957. She put the hacienda, the art and even her animals in a trust for Mexicans to enjoy.<\/p>\n

As visitors wandered the galleries and gardens on opening day, Guadalupe Phillips Marg\u00e1in and her sister, Dolores Phillips Marg\u00e1in, Olmedo\u2019s granddaughters and members of the committee that manages the trust, said that they had used the hiatus to rethink and renovate the museum.<\/p>\n

The Phillips sisters said they wanted to emphasize their grandmother\u2019s story and her relationship with Rivera. They said they also aimed to better showcase her collection, which includes three dozen artworks by Angelina Beloff (1879-1969), the Russian artist who was Diego Rivera\u2019s first wife, and hundreds of pre-Hispanic artifacts and pieces of Mexican folk art.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe tried to put her front and center,\u201d Guadalupe Phillips said of her grandmother, speaking over the honk of peacocks on a shady patio. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have any of this without her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Workers restored artworks and added museum-quality glass to frames, repaired walls, stripped out old carpets and unbricked huge windows. The museum made more space for Rivera\u2019s artworks and hung them chronologically (Olmedo had arranged his work as she fancied, the sisters said). They also set aside a room for letters and documents that attest to the affection Olmedo and Rivera shared, which Olmedo described as intense but platonic.<\/p>\n

In one, written a year before his death, Rivera suggests Olmedo buy about a dozen of his artworks from other collectors. He signs off \u201cwith all my love\u201d and a sketch of a frog \u2014 a running joke about his froglike appearance.<\/p>\n

The Museums Special Section<\/p>\n

The museum also made more space for Kahlo\u2019s art, which had previously been relegated to a long, low room that was once Olmedo\u2019s walk-in closet. Olmedo bought the pieces in her collection at Rivera\u2019s request after Kahlo died in 1954. She reportedly paid the equivalent of about $1600; in today\u2019s market<\/a>, the selection, which includes works such as \u201cSelf-Portrait With Monkey\u201d (1945) in which Kahlo, her pet monkey and her dog fix their eyes on the viewer, along with \u201cA Few Small Nips\u201d (1935) and \u201cHenry Ford Hospital\u201d (1932), both painted in oil on metal, would be worth millions of dollars.<\/p>\n

Luis Rius, a former director of the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo House Studio in Mexico City, said the collection is a kind of posthumous reconciliation between Olmedo and Kahlo. In life, he said, \u201ctheir quarrels were really harsh,\u201d adding that, with Rivera, \u201cThey made a very difficult triangle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dolores Phillips dismissed the notion of any enmity, noting the women\u2019s similarities: Cultured, nonconformist and born a year apart, they both married men who were significantly older. In an interview in 1993, however, Olmedo was direct. \u201cI was never a friend of Frida Kahlo,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The new museum\u2019s six-year closure riled intellectuals and residents of Xochimilco, the borough on the outskirts of Mexico City where the museum is based. So did a plan, announced by the museum in 2022, to move part of the collection to an amusement park in the center of Mexico City. The plan\u2019s critics said it would violate the terms of the trust, which stipulates that the collection remain intact and at the hacienda. The moving plan was shelved earlier this year, said Guadalupe Phillips.<\/p>\n

On opening day, a jubilant group of residents in traditional dress danced in the street as visitors filed into the museum.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are very happy,\u201d said Juan Gonz\u00e1lez Romero, part of a group of Xochimilco residents, who had campaigned against the museum\u2019s closure and the amusement park plan.<\/p>\n

Gonz\u00e1lez, who toured the museum, said it had been well-restored. Still, he said, the improvements did not justify the six-year closure.<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cThey deprived us of the museum for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

A tour of the hacienda begins in the generous annex where Olmedo lived after she turned the rest of the property into a museum. The rooms speak to a life of glamour, influence and collecting: walls covered with photos and portraits of Olmedo, including several nudes; a living room filled with carved ivory tusks, Chinese figurines and reclining Buddhas and hung with fanciful chandeliers composed of blue glass.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf she hadn\u2019t been a collector, she would have been a hoarder,\u201d Guadalupe Phillips said.<\/p>\n

The galleries remain a shrine to Rivera, with 98 pieces that span his career, from an early drawing that he made of his mother, Maria Barrientos, in 1896, when he was 10 years old, to a series of sunsets painted at Olmedo\u2019s seaside house in Acapulco, shortly before his death in 1957. There are landscapes reminiscent of C\u00e9zanne and squat Russian children with sparkling blue eyes, whom Rivera painted after receiving cancer treatment in the Soviet Union in 1955, according to Rius.<\/p>\n

Jorge Rios, a visitor who works in the fashion industry, said he was struck by some Cubist paintings by Rivera, who is mostly known for political murals and for paintings celebrating Indigenous people and members of the working class. Pieces like the 1915 oil painting, \u201cEl Rastro\u201d and \u201cYoung Man With a Fountain Pen\u201d (1917) showed that Rivera was an accomplished painter whose repertoire was wider than \u201cIndigenous figures and calla lilies,\u201d Rios said.<\/p>\n

Guadalupe Phillips said that the museum wanted to promote Diego Rivera and lend his work to foreign shows more often. The museum frequently lends its Kahlos; their hopes for Rivera are more modest, Phillips said, adding, \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to compete with Frida.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, at the museum, which Olmedo dubbed \u201cthe maestro\u2019s house,\u201d Kahlo has gone from being a slightly-resented guest to a star attraction.<\/p>\n

The museum has hung all 26 Kahlos in two rooms. One, said Dolores Phillips, shows intimate portraits of those close to her and the other, the psychological pain she suffered because of her injuries, ailments and romantic betrayals. At the far end of the second room is \u201cThe Broken Column,\u201d a 1944 self-portrait in which a shattered pillar replaces her spine.<\/p>\n

Dolores Phillips said the piece, hung alone on a black wall, was her pi\u00e8ce de resistance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was her Mona Lisa,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Despite these artistic treasures, enticing visitors to Xochimilco is a challenge, said Phillips. Visitors already throng Kahlo\u2019s foreign exhibitions and flock to three other pilgrimage sites in Mexico City, including the joint studio with Rivera, the blue Frida Kahlo Museum<\/a> and the red Kahlo Museum Home<\/a>, which opened last fall, and where Kahlo\u2019s parents lived starting in 1930.<\/p>\n

But fewer make the trek across the city\u2019s hectic sprawl to see her art at the Olmedo Museum, Phillips said. The museum hoped to tie in with other local attractions, such as Xochimilco\u2019s well-known pre-Hispanic canals, she said. Their goal is to boost the number of annual visitors from around 120,000 per year prepandemic to 300,000.<\/p>\n

The Phillips sisters said options are needed to keep the museum financially viable. The original fund set up by their grandmother had diminished, they said, though they declined to share details. As part of their quest to sell more tickets, the sisters said that the committee was still mulling some kind of \u201cextension\u201d of the museum closer to the center of Mexico City.<\/p>\n

Luis Cacho, former head of legal affairs for the Ministry of Culture, said anything but a temporary exhibition would break the terms of the trust. Speaking by telephone, he said there was no strict definition of temporary, but that an exhibition that lasted decades \u201cobviously wasn\u2019t the intention of Dolores Olmedo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other plans for the museum included commissioning works by contemporary artists, Guadalupe Phillips said. In a nod to the World Cup, they had added a temporary exhibit by the Mexican photographer Santiago Arau focused on the Aztec-era game pelota and a series of tableaus in papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 of soccer and fans. An exhibition of Mexican female artists, including works by Beloff, is planned for early 2027.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to generate revenue,\u201d said Guadalupe Phillips. \u201cTo generate interest, to keep it alive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For six years, the heavy wooden doors of the Dolores Olmedo Museum in Mexico City remained closed to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2273,307,304,305,306,181544,308,208271,210380,93,210377,61,60,35208,210378,210381,4540,210379,97298,160770],"class_list":["post-489823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-collectors-and-collections","tag-design","tag-diego","tag-dolores","tag-entertainment","tag-frida","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kahlo","tag-mexico-city-mexico","tag-museum-mexico-city","tag-museums","tag-olmedo","tag-restoration-and-renovation","tag-rivera"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}