Frida’s Legacy Mired in Turmoil : Art: A museum celebrating Kahlo’s work has reopened amid charges that the facility’s director has mismanaged the collection entrusted to her.

The Frida Kahlo Museum, the “Blue House,” where one of Mexico’s most popular artists was born, suffered, painted and died, reopened last month after a two-year hiatus for structural repairs.

The slow remodeling sparked criticism of the museum’s already controversial director, Dolores Olmedo, an octogenarian art collector whose appreciation of the celebrated painter is tepid at best. It also drew some snide graffiti on the museum’s outer wall in January that may have finally pried Frida Kahlo’s doors open again, although work still was not finished.

One painted scribble, making fun of the fact that Olmedo had the museum’s windows sealed and covered, asked: “Por que Lola tapiola y luego no abriola?” --”Why did Lola cover it and then not open it?”

Critics of Olmedo note that the government took only six months to overhaul the colonial San Idelfonso school here last year to install the “Splendors of Thirty Centuries” exhibition of Mexican art. They charge that Olmedo dragged her heels on the renovation because she does not care about the museum or its artist, whom Mexicans affectionately call “Frida.”

“For two years, she never explained why it was closed,” said Sylvia Navarrete, an art historian and art critic for the newspaper La Jornada. “Why did she take so long? Simply because it did not interest her. She abandoned the museum because it was not important to her.”

Others see more hostile motives behind the delay, asserting that Olmedo was always jealous of Kahlo. Olmedo, a close friend and patron to Kahlo’s husband, muralist Diego Rivera, until his death in 1957, dismisses such charges with a wave of her heavily jeweled hand. The crumbling walls and ceilings had to be replaced, she says; floors were fixed, the entire museum was painted, new lights and security were installed. And all that labor takes time.

“It’s an old house. It was falling down,” Olmedo says. She takes credit for having promoted Kahlo internationally, but also makes it clear she is not the artist’s biggest fan. She says other Mexican women painters such as Maria Izquierdo and Olga Costa are more important artists.

“It’s one thing to say (Kahlo) has value as a painter. It’s another to say she was the equal of Diego,” Olmedo said. To La Jornada, she added: “Frida never was and never will be the equal of Diego.” This despite Rivera’s admission in his biography that Kahlo was a better painter than he.

Only 19 of Kahlo’s own paintings hang in the museum and none is considered to be among her most important works. (Several of those are in Olmedo’s private collection of 25 Kahlos and 137 Riveras, at least part of which her critics assert belongs in the Blue House.)

The charming 19th-Century house, painted cobalt blue and brick red, is a rectangular string of rooms that look out onto a central garden patio. Kahlo’s German-Jewish father bought the house before she was born and she continued to live there after her marriage to Rivera at the age of 19, until she died in 1954 at 47.

In 1955, Rivera learned he had cancer and set out for the Soviet Union for cobalt treatments that were not available in Mexico. Before leaving, he established a trust to manage his personal art collection, papers and library, Kahlo’s house and a museum for his collection of pre-Columbian art. He made Olmedo president-for-life of the trust’s technical committee and director of the museums. (Rivera’s studio in San Angel is also a museum, but is not part of the trust.)

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The Kahlo museum was first inaugurated in 1958 and its exhibitions have not been significantly altered in the remodeling, according to Olmedo. They include Kahlo’s written and painted journal, spotlighted and encased in glass; penned notes between her and Rivera; a half dozen of the indigenous Tehuantepec dresses that she wore, and the couple’s collection of retablos , or religious paintings, that inspired her work.

The bright blue-and-yellow tiled kitchen is decorated with Mexican ceramic cookware and Kahlo’s studio is set up with her antique wooden easel and paints. Her bedroom has been left nearly intact. Its principal fixture is the poster bed with a mirror canopy where Kahlo lay so often suffering from the after-effects of a crippling childhood bus accident or recuperating from dozens of follow-up operations. Flat on her back, she looked into the overhead mirror to paint several of her self-portraits.

Now, one of the plaster corsets that Kahlo had to wear to support her weak spine sits on the bed. The corset, the shape of Kahlo’s petite torso, is painted gaily, even though it was a torture chamber for the artist.

Olmedo lives in a building adjacent to her former residence--a 16th-Century convent on 10 acres in the Xochimilco neighborhood, which she has established as a museum for her own collection. That elegant, arched museum, shrouded in bougainvillea and winding around a garden filled with orange trees and wandering peacocks, will be open in December.

Ten large rooms of the museum will display Rivera’s work, along with about 500 stunning pre-Columbian art pieces that Olmedo says she collected over her lifetime. One small, back room has been reserved for Olmedo’s 25 Kahlo paintings, which are now on tour in Germany.

Olmedo presents a dramatic portrait herself. In thick false eyelashes beneath sharply drawn eyebrows and jet black hair pulled tightly back from her face, she wore a red silk pantsuit, red suede shoes and an enormous coral necklace to an interview in her home. In her Oriental living room, she keeps a photograph of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari prominently displayed, along with other pictures of her powerful friends.

Asked why she had collected the Kahlos when she was not especially fond of the work, Olmedo answered: “I bought the collection to please Diego. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bought them. He wanted her collection to stay together. He didn’t have the money and I did. He said, ‘Help me with this.’ ”

Olmedo said that she first met Rivera when she was a girl accompanying her mother, a school teacher, to the Education Ministry to collect a paycheck. Rivera was there to be paid for the murals he was painting in the ministry and asked Olmedo’s mother if he could paint the girl. He eventually did 27 drawings of Lola, as Olmedo is called, including several nudes.

“Of course, I never told my mother I posed nude. She would have killed me,” Olmedo said.

The two remained friends until Rivera died, Olmedo said, but she was never close to Rivera’s soul mate.

“I was never a friend of Frida Kahlo’s. We said hello to each other, that was it,” she said.

Why was that?

“Frida Kahlo liked women and I liked men,” Olmedo answered coolly, referring to Kahlo’s bisexuality.

Olmedo volunteered that she and Rivera were never lovers. Rivera had a reputation as a philanderer who bedded even Kahlo’s favorite sister.

“They say I am the widow of Diego Rivera. They say I was Diego Rivera’s lover. We were very close friends, but I never had a lover relationship with Diego Rivera. We were friends until the last day of his life,” she said.

At a party to send Rivera off to the Soviet Union, Olmedo unveiled the Kahlo works that she had bought at his behest. A reproduction of a photograph from that time hanging in her new museum is signed by Rivera with the inscription: “For my marvelous friend Lolita Olmedo of infinite sensibility, generous and refined, in memory of the biggest emotion of my life, which I owe to her. With all my love. I adore you.”

Olmedo acknowledges that Kahlo was “a brave woman” who won broad respect. “Everyone admired her. Maybe because she suffered so much and overcame her suffering,” Olmedo said.

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She calls the Fridamania that has grown in the United States “a craziness,” but is less critical than many in the Mexican art world who believe that Kahlo’s personal life has been stripped of its political and cultural content and elevated in importance above her painting. Mexican critics are bemused and, in some cases, irritated by the commercialization of Kahlo in the United States and her conversion into a minority icon.

“Americans think of all minorities as the same,” said critic Cuauhtemoc Medina. “She was Latin, handicapped, a woman, her husband cheated on her, she was an artist, a Communist and bisexual. She was Susan Sontag’s dream.”

Medina added that the American obsession with Kahlo is a fixation on an image from the past and does not allow foreigners to understand Mexico today.

“The image of this nation is no longer a man sitting in a sombrero under a cactus, but a bleeding heart and eternally suffering woman,” he said.

Medina is among the critics who have long charged Olmedo with mishandling the Kahlo museum and Rivera trust. They say that since Rivera’s death, his and Kahlo’s archives, library and museums have become a personal fiefdom managed according to Olmedo’s whim.

Critics also say Olmedo has not ensured the preservation of many items in the Kahlo museum--several letters are faded and nearly illegible, several paintings need restoration, the museum still has no catalogue and Kahlo’s diary has not been published.

Olmedo responds that the works are in fine condition and she expects the government to publish facsimile copies of the Kahlo diary in a couple months.

But Proceso magazine art critic Raquel Tibol, who has written a book on Kahlo, says access to the couple’s vast personal archives has been restricted since Kahlo showed them to Rivera biographer Bertrand Wolf before she died.

Others concur in the criticism and urge government culture officials to intervene.

“Rivera wrote that the opening of his personal archive, deposited in the Blue House in Coyoacan, now a museum, should occur in a period of no more than 20 years,” columnist Francisco Reyes Palma recently wrote in La Jornada.

“Thirty-five years have passed and these archives continue to be closed,” he protested. “Diego and Frida are part of the country’s patrimony and have been declared national artists, which implies absolute co-responsibility on the part of cultural authorities. In fact, it is up to all of us to watch over this patrimony.”