Who Actually Owns Frida Kahlo?

More than 50,000 people had bought tickets to see Frida Kahlo by the time her exhibition opened at Tate Modern on 25 June. Frida: The Making of an Icon is the highest pre-selling show in Tate’s history. 

In the middle of a sweltering London heatwave, opening-day temperatures hit 35 degrees – hotter on that Thursday than high-altitude Mexico City, which enjoyed a mild 23 – as if the heat had been exported with the rest of her. Kahlo’s face is among the most widely circulated images on Earth: her joined eyebrows, floral crown, and calm, steady gaze are printed to infinity on cushions, puzzles, mugs and tote bags, transformed by the merchandising machine into a globally recognised emblem of resilience, self-invention – and Mexico itself.

The paintings that made the icon do not share its freedom of movement. Under a 1984 presidential decree, everything Kahlo created – easel paintings, graphic works, prints – is a monumento artístico de la nación. Her works may never be permanently exported. They can travel only temporarily, exceptionally, and with guaranteed return. Hers is among the strictest of Mexico’s heritage decrees. Those covering Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros expressly allow their works abroad permanently, provided they go to a museum of high standing. Those for Kahlo goes further, obliging the Mexican state to seek, “using all means at its disposal”, the return of any of her works held privately abroad.

That decree is now at the heart of a dispute unfolding five and a half thousand miles from Fridamania-on-Bankside, over whether 30 works – ten of them Kahlos – will leave the country. They are among 68 works currently being shown in the Museo de Arte Moderno's exhibition Modern Narratives: Emblematic Works from the Gelman Santander Collection, which closes on 19 July. If they do go, they are destined to hang in the Santander Foundation’s new art centre, Faro Santander, in northern Spain.

The law that keeps Frida at home

The 30 works at issue were collected from the 1940s onwards by Jacques Gelman, a Russian-born film producer who made his fortune in Mexico, and his wife Natasha. How the Kahlos entered the collection is, for the campaign fighting to stop them leaving Mexico, a story worth telling – and María Minera, art critic and spokesperson for Defendamos la Colección Gelman (Let’s Defend the Gelman Collection), tells it with relish. The Gelmans collected only the men, Rivera and Orozco, until the day Natasha saw Diego on My Mind, Kahlo’s 1943 self-portrait with a miniature Rivera painted on her forehead. She asked Jacques to buy it. He was dismissive – “Why? She’s just the wife of Diego Rivera” – and, besides, “last week you were crazy about Braque!” 

“Now I’m crazy about her,” Natasha replied. She bought the painting and went on to buy nine more – “not one, ten”. It is, Minera says, “a triumph of feminism and of history” that the wife of Diego Rivera is now probably the best-known woman artist in the world. In a country whose public collections hold only a handful of Kahlos, the ten Natasha bought are, in effect, irreplaceable.

There is a circularity to it. When Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1990 – a landmark of cultural diplomacy as the NAFTA era dawned – the image on the posters, says Tobias Ostrander, co-curator of Frida: The Making of an Icon, was that same self-portrait that had captured Natasha Gelman five decades earlier. Mexico sent Diego on My Mind out into the world as its own calling card, which in turn was part of the machinery that made Kahlo one of the most coveted names at auction. The same painting is now a treasure many in Mexico feel is too valuable to risk leaving the country.

When Natasha died in 1998 – her husband had passed away 12 years before – she left the collection in the care of New York curator Robert Littman, who set up the Vergel Foundation to manage it. The bequest came with strict conditions, including that the works be kept together and shown publicly in a private museum or cultural centre, and it is Gelman’s wishes, above all, that Defendamos la Colección Gelman – a group of Mexican art and culture professionals – believes are being ignored. The group has now started legal proceedings against the government to prevent the works being taken out of the country.

Portrait of Natasha Gelman by Diego Rivera, courtesy INBAL

A legal battle begins

Does the 1984 decree actually stop Kahlo’s works from leaving? Not on the evidence from London. The Tate show is itself proof the system can work, Ostrander says. It displays 32 Kahlo works, the majority lent from Mexican collections under exactly the temporary permits the heritage regime allows. “The national patrimony has not directly affected our exhibition,” he says; Mexican owners lend “without any problems or complications”. Kahlo works are harder to borrow than they were for Tate’s 2005 survey, but the obstacle, he says, is the market, not the law: some owners “don’t want to live without their Fridas”. For others “they’re too valuable” to let go – or “they’re interested in potentially selling them.”

That’s where María Minera comes in. She is more than a spokesperson: she is the named plaintiff in the first of four planned suits by the coalition. Her amparo – a constitutional-protection action – asks a federal court in Mexico City to halt the export of the 30 heritage works. Her case is built on the government’s own paperwork. In response to freedom-of-information requests this spring – entered as evidence in the filing seen by The Art Journal – the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL), the body charged with protecting the works, confirmed that no export permit had been applied for, that the bond the law requires as a precondition for the works to travel had not been sought, and that the arrangement’s five-year timeline had no legal basis beyond a private agreement. INBAL also acknowledged that it had never seen Natasha Gelman’s entire will. Asked a few days ago – just weeks before the works’ scheduled departure – whether a permit had yet been granted, and whether the bond had been arranged, a spokesperson for the Santander Foundation would say only that “all steps regarding the temporary export of the collection are being carried out in coordination with INBAL and in full compliance with Mexican legislation”.

The INBAL spokesperson, in written answers to The Art Journal, gave more detail. The export permit and customs procedures “are currently being processed” – still unissued, by the institute’s own account. The requirement for a bond, it says, “will not apply”: INBAL itself will be responsible for exporting the artworks, and “guarantees the return of the works in 2028” – the end of the two-year customs clock that starts when they leave – and says the agreement’s five-year term merely mirrors the current administration’s period of oversight and “in no way represents the duration of the temporary export permit”. 

On the Gelman will, INBAL explained its earlier admission: wills are private, and INBAL never held a full copy of Natasha’s, but Littman provided “the relevant portions” in 2009 to establish his status as lawful legatee – the basis, INBAL says, on which the collection was sold in 2023.

Under the customs law, works loaned for exhibitions may stay out of the country for a year, extendable once by an equal period, with anything longer requiring special authorisation; the “national monuments” regulation itself sets no fixed term, leaving it to INBAL’s discretion. The campaign’s argument is that the loan is a permanent export in temporary clothing, and therefore unlawful. 

The court Minera has been assigned to is itself part of the story. Under a contested 2024 constitutional reform passed by the governing Morena party – a defendant in her suit – Mexico now elects its federal judges by popular vote, the only country in the world to choose its entire judiciary at the ballot box. Roughly half the federal bench was replaced at the first judicial elections in June 2025. Human Rights Watch and others warned the change would produce courts more loyal to the government, and legal analysts say it has narrowed judges’ willingness to restrain state acts – precisely the remedy Minera seeks. Her case, in other words, asks a bench remade by the government to stop the government.

Relatos modernos. Diego Rivera_Paisaje con cactus_1931_Colección Gelman Santander. Foto Gerardo Suter. Courtesy INBAL.

Collateral damage

And then there is the money. According to reporting in the Spanish newspaper El País, the works are also collateral. The collection’s owners since 2023 are the Zambrano family, a Monterrey industrial dynasty long associated with the cement giant Cemex, reported to have paid around $200 million to the Vergel Foundation, borrowing first from Sotheby’s Financial Services and later refinancing through a $150 million Santander loan, although it remains unclear who ultimately has the benefit of the sale proceeds. Were the borrower to default while the works were abroad, the campaigners fear control could pass to a foreign bank beyond the reach of Mexican law. It is this structure the coalition, in an open letter, called “a speculative financial operation”. 

The historian Francisco Berzunza – a co-founder of the campaign and soon-to-be plaintiff himself – goes further, arguing that the cultural agreement was built to serve the financing rather than the reverse. Asked directly whether the deal with INBAL was, in effect, a mechanism to secure the financial loan, with cultural promotion as its justification, Berzunza is clear: “I believe that it had this intention.” It is a claim of intent he cannot document. Asked the same question, a spokesperson for the Santander Foundation confirmed that the bank “has entered into a financial agreement with the Zambrano family in connection with its broader cultural collaboration” – but would not say whether the collection, or the company that owns it, serves as security, and did not address whether a default could pass control to the bank, saying only that ownership remains with the family and the Foundation’s role is “solely the conservation, research and exhibition of the Collection”. On one point, then, the campaign and the bank agree: the money and the culture are joined. They disagree on which serves which. The Zambrano family did not respond to questions sent through Santander's representatives. 

Asked what Kahlo – a communist and, in his words, “in many ways an anti-capitalist” – would have made of her work standing as collateral for a bank loan, Ostrander is careful. She criticised Wall Street and appeared in Vogue; there was, he says, “an agency in the use value that she saw of her own image”. “I think she’d be surprised at the commercialisation. But I think she would be very proud… that she’s loved in this way.”

The government’s position is that it is following the law. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has said publicly that the works will return, casting much of the opposition as politically motivated. Santander’s spokesperson says the collection “will return to Mexico in the summer of 2028, where it will once again be exhibited”.

Whose heritage?

For the campaign, none of the protagonists’ explanations is adequate. They insist INBAL’s duty is to protect the works as national monuments and to “seek the public good and the public interest over the interest of one financial corporation or individual”. 

But the campaign’s position is far from straightforward. The works are private property, and the will at the heart of the coalition’s moral case – a copy of which The Art Journal has seen – does not require the collection to stay in Mexico. Its fifth clause, skirted over by the campaign, expressly permits the collection to leave the country for exhibition abroad, subject to authorisation. The works form, in Natasha Gelman’s own words, part of "the artistic patrimony of the Mexican Nation". When Minera sent The Art Journal what she described as "the important part" of the will, the excerpt she highlighted stopped one clause short of it. Even the campaign’s lawyer, Jesús Soledad Terrazas of Soledad & Carrasco Abogados, concedes the will is “not really relevant” to the injunction as “Mexican law, in these kinds of proceedings, does not protect that kind of intent”. 

Neither would keeping the Gelman Santander Collection in the country guarantee access for ordinary Mexicans, since the works would remain in private hands. The coalition’s hope is that by piling on public pressure and making what they believe were Natasha Gelman’s true wishes known, the works will be acquired by a public institution.

Some have suggested the government could simply buy the collection, but this is highly unlikely. El Paísreported that Littman, Natasha’s executor, offered to sell it to the Mexican government soon after her death for $200 million, but was turned down. And the paintings’ absence from Mexican walls long predates any involvement of the Santander Foundation. The collection has circulated abroad for decades, Ostrander notes; “Nobody was really seeing it in Mexico because it was travelling.”

The test case

Ostrander, who lives in Mexico and has worked previously for Mexican government-funded institutions, is not taking sides in the Gelman controversy, saying it’s a complex issue that raises a lot of questions. “I don’t see a real solution here. Mexico is not going to buy these works – and if it did, is that how Mexico should be spending its money, in a developing-world economy?”

He is glad, he says, that the case is “bringing visibility to the question of public and private collections”, a case only one artist could have produced. “I think Frida is pushing all of this right now, because she’s so adored, because she has become the icon she is… This isn’t happening with any other artist.” Owners of Fridas, he says, are increasingly testing the state’s restrictions in the hope of one day selling: “It’s a test case. It’s really testing the idea of national patrimony right now.” “There’s just this incredible national pride in Frida,” he adds. “It’s very interesting to see how passionate people are about her now – and we’ll see how the government in Mexico responds to that ultimately, and how the private sector, meaning Santander, responds to the public pressure.”

His hope is that the attention raised by the Gelman Santander Collection brings viewers back to the skill and sophistication of Frida Kahlo’s work – to the paintings themselves – small, most of them domestic in scale, holding, he says, “worlds in there”. “We often lose the work in the narrative, in the money, in the popular culture,” he says. “I just hope that all of this leads us back to remember what an extraordinary artist she was.”

In London, a record crowd has paid for the icon – the face on the mugs and the tote bags. In Mexico City, people queue at their own museum of modern art for the paintings themselves, above all Diego on My Mindand Self-Portrait with Monkeys, which come down on 19 July, bound for Spain by September unless a judge halts them first. “We can go to war for those works,” says Minera as the clock ticks towards their departure.