| | |  Vallarta Living | Art Talk | November 2008 
In Mexico, an Ownership Fight Sends an Art Collection Into Hiding
 Elisabeth Malkin - New York Times
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| | The Gelman collection of art includes, from left, Frida Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait With Monkeys”; Diego Rivera’s “Calla Lily Vendor”; and Gunther Gerzso’s “Person in Red and Blue.” | | |
Mexico City — Somewhere a great collection of 20th-century Mexican art has been hidden.
The works, by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and their contemporaries have been removed from a museum in Cuernavaca, about an hour south of here, until further notice as a legal battle unfolds over the collection’s rightful ownership.
The paintings belonged to Jacques Gelman, a Russian-born producer of Mexican films who died in 1986, and his wife, Natasha, who jointly began amassing art after they were married in 1941. The couple were best known for creating a sweeping collection of 20th-century European art that Mrs. Gelman left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York upon her death in 1998.
They purchased the Mexican art mostly from friends as they took part in the vibrant art scene of midcentury Mexico City.
Mr. Gelman, who became rich producing the films of the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, moved in glittering spheres in Mexico City and New York, socializing with artists, actors and art curators. As patrons in Mexico, the Gelmans commissioned many portraits: Rivera, Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo and David Alfaro Siqueiros all painted Mrs. Gelman.
At the time of her death the collection consisted of 95 pieces, including two well-known 1943 works by Kahlo, “Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on My Mind)” and “Self-Portrait With Monkeys,” and Rivera’s 1941 “Calla Lily Vendor.” The largest number of works are by the couple’s close friend Gunther Gerzso, an abstract painter whose reputation has grown over the last decade.
In 1993 Mrs. Gelman wrote a Mexican will that bequeathed the Mexican collection to Robert R. Littman, an American curator who was a close adviser and friend in the last years of her life. He established the Vergel Foundation to oversee the collection, which traveled to museums around the world.
Mr. Littman used the fees from those shows to triple the size of the collection, filling gaps that he said Mrs. Gelman had identified and adding pieces by younger contemporary artists. In 2004 he found a temporary home for the collection in a museum set up by the retailer Costco and its Mexican partner in Cuernavaca, where Mrs. Gelman had a house and spent most of her final years.
But two years ago a cousin of Mrs. Gelman who has been fighting for a greater share of her estate brought his legal battle to Mexico City.
The cousin, Jerry Jung, hired a team of lawyers who have used a quirk in Mexican law to mount a challenge to Mr. Littman’s control over the collection.
One of the lawyers, Francisco Fuentes Olvera, bought the succession rights to Mrs. Gelman’s Mexican estate for $20,000 from her half brother, Mario Sebastian, in 2007 just before he died.
The transaction would give the lawyer the right to any part of the estate that was not clearly left to somebody else.
Since then, the Jung legal team has attacked Mr. Littman’s handling of the Mexican estate — he is its executor and main beneficiary — in the Mexico City family court. Mr. Fuentes has won rulings that temporarily named him executor of the will and recognized the succession rights he had purchased from Mr. Sebastian. The judge, Celia Santos, also ordered the collection to be turned over to Mr. Fuentes.
The legal battle was described this month in an article in The Art Newspaper.
As his appeals wound through the courts, Mr. Littman removed the works from the Cuernavaca museum last spring and hid them. He also canceled a tour of museums in Europe and North America that would have begun this week at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
“With all this that’s happened, we have to keep it safe,” John Koegel, Mr. Littman’s New York lawyer, said of the collection. “You never know when Judge Santos will pop out another order.”
Mr. Littman’s lawyers have submitted a formal complaint against Judge Santos, arguing that her decisions have ignored the law regarding inheritance. Mr. Littman recently won several stays in Mexican federal courts of Judge Santos’s decisions. Mr. Jung’s lawyers are appealing those stays.
Lawyers for both sides say that a final decision on the fate of the collection could be years away.
The two sides have begun a separate round of litigation over Mr. Littman’s control of the collection. And the Mexico City prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation of Mr. Littman’s handling of the estate.
Given the vagaries and technicalities of Mexican law, there is now a possibility — how remote depends on which lawyer is talking — that the collection could end up in the hands of Mr. Fuentes Olvera, Mr. Jung’s lawyer.
“We are not interested in the paintings for what they are worth,” said Enrique Fuentes León, a well-known defense lawyer and Mr. Fuentes Olvera’s father who is the senior adviser to Mr. Jung’s legal team.
“This is a patrimony of the Mexican people,” he added.
Mr. Littman, in an e-mail message, wrote that Natasha Gelman “would be disheartened and furious at this turn of events which, given the instruction in her will, she clearly never meant to happen.”
Mr. Littman has left Mexico and has not appeared before the family court.
According to her will, Mrs. Gelman wanted Mr. Littman to ensure that the collection be shown — in a private museum, because she distrusted the Mexican government — and that it stay together.
“There is no museum or private collection which can match these holdings and it would be impossible to assemble such a collection today,” Mr. Littman wrote by e-mail.
Yet for now it seems that the collection will probably stay hidden from view. |
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