The Gelman Collection, assembled by Jacques and Natasha Gelman, is one of the most significant collections of twentieth-century Mexican art. Works from the collection are currently on view at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, amid renewed controversy over the collection’s ownership, financing, and future. In the following open letter, Mario García Torres addresses Natasha Gelman, who died in 1998. He joins hundreds of Mexican artists, cultural workers, and writers, known as Defendamos la Colección Gelman, calling on the Mexican government and Banco Santander to keep the Gelman Collection in Mexico.
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Dear Natasha,
I thought you might like to know that some of the paintings from your Mexican collection have finally returned to Paseo de la Reforma, the avenue where you lived with them for years. They are not back in your house, that place belongs to another time, but they now hang a few blocks away, at the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM). I went to see them the other day.
I have to say, they are still astonishing. What surprised me most was not that they had lost none of their force, but that they still seemed to belong together. After everything that has happened to them, they continue to behave like a collection, they carry with them their own time, and geography—as if the paintings themselves remembered something that everyone else has forgotten.
It has been almost twenty years since people in Mexico last saw them. At times they seemed to had disappeared, nobody knew exactly where they were. Perhaps that sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. Artworks of this type rarely vanish. They continue to exist somewhere. Yet their absence creates an unusual feeling. We miss them. We worry about them. At some point people begin to invent stories in order to explain where they have gone.
Maybe that sounds odd. After all, they were never our property; they were yours. But that is part of the discussion they have prompted just now. You see, many of us grew up with them. You might remember our first encounter at Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo (CCAC). After that, they became part of our memory of Mexican art, somehow they became part of how we explain our history and identity to ourselves, they accompanied us. When they disappeared, it felt less like a collection had changed hands than like someone had quietly left.
That, I suppose, is why I am writing, or at least that is the feeling that prompted me to write. I thought I should tell you what has happened to them since you left. Or perhaps I should say, what has happened to them since they no longer belonged to anyone who knew them in the way you, and Jacques, did. I think you might be surprised.
I have for a long time wondered what brought the collection together in the first place. I want to believe it was many other things than speculation. These days collectors spend a fortune trying to construct collections of comparable importance. They hire advisors, consultants, researchers. Yet what you and Jacques assembled seems to have emerged from something much simpler: I would call it affection.
Not affection in the sentimental sense, but in the sense of wanting to live with something, of creating a feeling of belonging, way before knowing what they might become. You acquired paintings because the artists, and their work, mattered to you. Because they, both, accompanied your lives. Because they reflected the world, and the time, around you. It was not assembled as an investment strategy or a cultural asset. It was assembled because certain works demanded to remain close. When that happens, artworks tell a story, a true story.
Art collections are a way of organizing daily life around objects that acquire meaning through presence. When you died in 1998, that presence entered a different phase. The CCAC closed shortly afterward, and the collection began a strange second life. It continued to be powerful, admired, exhibited, and reproduced, but it also became something else.
Suddenly, people started asking different questions. Not what the paintings meant for people, but who owned them. Not how they related to one another, but how much they were worth. Not where they came from, but where will they hang. The collection, in fact, had begun to produce new kinds of relationships and meanings. Not because of the artists’ intentions, or the artistic qualities of the works, but because of a certain aura that time, and a new context, had given them.
You already knew that artists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros had become central figures in the history of Mexican modernism. What neither of us could have imagined was the extraordinary transformation of the perception of Frida Kahlo’s work. During the decades that followed, she would become something far beyond an admired painter. She would become one of the most recognizable artists in the world.
The paintings themselves did not change. The world around them did.
The fact that you owned eleven Fridas—an extraordinary number considering her small body of work—gradually transformed the way that the collection was understood. What had once been a group of paintings became a cultural landmark. A historical resource, which then turned into a financial asset. And a source of speculation. A group of works so powerful they could change the economy and perception of a city.
As the collection acquired value, it was also stripped of its original meaning. The works became the Gelman Collection, and then they became masterpieces; after that, national treasures. And then they turned into assets, then collateral. Maybe they became a future in themselves. I will try to explain.
I am not alone; thousands of people have come to see them at MAM, marveled at the paintings, yet I wonder how many are actually looking at art. To be honest, I think they are looking at—this will sound blunt—money.
The collection’s meaning slowly transformed over the last four decades; meanwhile, it continued to travel. It appeared in museums across the world. It returned to Mexico. It disappeared, again and again.
At one point it was installed in a private museum in Cuernavaca, which could have fulfilled, I understand, your desire for keeping the works together, in a museum in Mexico. The exhibition space was built on the grounds formerly occupied by the Casino de la Selva. I am sure you would remember it. The hotel had been demolished, along with the murals it housed. The works in your collection arrived there, with other designs than the goal of being exhibited. They arrived carrying a complicated operation: they were a collection born from one history helping to legitimize the erasure of another. But I won’t get caught up on this when there are more urgent matters.
Soon afterward, the collection vanished from public view again. For years nobody seemed entirely certain where it was. The mystery surrounding the collection only increased its aura. Stories multiplied. Lawsuits proliferated. So did speculation. Yet the most significant transformation was taking place elsewhere.
The collection was learning a new language. At first it learned the language of home. Then the language of museums. Then the language of law. Eventually, it learned the language of finance. This is perhaps the strangest part of the story. Not because there is anything unusual about art having value. What changed was the role that value played. The collection no longer merely represented wealth. It acquired the capacity to generate it. That capacity creates potential futures in our world. Let’s call it greed.
First, a foundation was established to manage the collection. Exhibitions generated income. Loans generated revenue. Through the years, the paintings continued to circulate, but in recent years they started to circulate through increasingly complex financial and institutional arrangements. I never imagined I would write the following sentence to you. At some point, the collection became valuable enough to borrow hundreds of millions against it. Yes, the works at the core of your collection were in fact sold.
Further, the recent purchase—which included your portraits—was financed through Sotheby’s. I find that detail remarkable, not because it is scandalous, but because it reveals how much the art world itself has changed. The auction house no longer functions only as a marketplace. It also became a bank. This allowed the collection to become the property not of an art lover but a businessman. When some works could not be sold as anticipated, the debt itself entered another phase. It was refinanced through Banco Santander. The creditor changed. The financial structure changed. It doesn’t end there. With these changes, the geography of the paintings changed as well.
That is the reason they are very soon to be shipped to Spain. I have begun to suspect that paintings no longer travel only because museums want to exhibit them. Sometimes they travel because contracts require them to. And because they promise to change a city, and its future. Or at least that is what I believe is now happening.
As an artist myself, what interests me is that the paintings have long left the sphere of intention and affection; they now participate in systems that did not exist when you hung them on your walls. They generate meanings, different meanings, but also obligations and relationships far removed from the circumstances that first brought them together.
And yet, despite all of this, something stubborn remains. Standing in the galleries of the Museo de Arte Moderno, I could see Frida Kahlo still looking back with the same powerful unsettling certainty. Her works remain incredibly intriguing and telling at the same time.
For a moment, standing there on Paseo de la Reforma, I could see them, as I imagine you once did, not far from there. Suddenly the collection ceased to be an asset, a dispute, a guarantee. It became art again, it felt at home.
All this made me forget that the works had not returned at all. They were there only momentarily.
Perhaps that is why I decided to write to you. I felt the need to tell what is happening to the one person who lived with them and understood what they truly carry with them. The person who understood where they belonged. You understood what story these objects told, and to whom.
The exhibition here further revealed the uncertain future your collection has today. I am afraid to say, it is not clear that they will manage to keep the works together, and even less so in Mexico, as you wished.
You were right. They are needed here, as artworks, as objects that tell a story of affection and belonging. I hope I will have better news for you in my next letter.
Yours,
Mario García Torres
I would like to thank Jose Esparza Chong Cuy, as this text came out of a conversation with him. I would also like to thank the collective Defendamos la Colección Gelman for spreading public awareness of the details that foreground this text. The exhibition “Relatos Modernos” at the Museo de Arte Moderno is open till July 19.
