Kahlo fakery -- but they wanna believe

Odd article in the NY Times about a hoard of stuff supposedly once belonging to Frida Kahlo. Just from reading the article, it's obvious that the "discovery" is an audacious but incompetent exercise is fakery -- yet the writeup is pitched as if there is a real debate about the material's authenticity.

Fakery is a constant in the arts trade; when a fake makes the news, it's usually when it's either good enough to take in an expert or two, or has been picked up by professional publicists. In this case, the real story seems to be how Princeton Architectural Press got sucked in -- and it doesn't make them look at all good:

The book, “Finding Frida Kahlo,” scheduled for publication on Nov. 1 but already available on Amazon and elsewhere, contains lavish illustrations of many items in the collection. . .

In an essay the book’s author, Barbara Levine, a former director of exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, raises the possibility that the collection is not genuine but concludes, “This archive in five cases offers us an intact album of Frida Kahlo’s world, and how she imagined her place in it.”

Art history as magical realism?

Ms. Levine, who moved here [San Miguel de Allende] a couple of years ago, said a friend told her about the collection as she was preparing a book about how people assemble their personal archives. Neither an expert on Kahlo nor a Spanish speaker, Ms. Levine, the author of two earlier books for Princeton Architectural Press, said she was initially hesitant. But Ms. Levine put her doubt aside and wrote about a collection that she said “hovers between fact and fiction.”

Forget the hovering -- if it ain't fact, it's fiction.

“As a landscape it’s incredibly beautiful,” she said. “I kept coming back to the same thought: If this is completely inauthentic, if Kahlo or somebody close to her had no hand in this, then who would make such a compelling fictitious archive?”

Clearly, born yesterday.

Jennifer Thompson, editorial director of Princeton Architectural Press, said she had not consulted outside experts before signing up the book because she had confidence in the steps Mr. Noyola [the dealer who owns the collection] had taken to authenticate the works. . .

When it was suggested by this reporter that any number of books in print could have offered a starting point for investigating the collection’s authenticity, she conceded, “We could have figured out who to call, and we didn’t.”

Posted by David on September 29, 2009 9:48 AM