Frida Kahlo turf war

Over at the LA Times, art critic Christopher Knight has fired a salvo in favor of academic sanity in the war over an archive that may have been Frida Kahlo's.

A collection of some 1,200 items, which contains everything from small paintings to recipes, is hotly contested. Knight sums up the controversy in a blog post:

More than a dozen prominent people have claimed the archive is a fake, even though none of them has seen it.

Frida Kahlo 007a Like I said, bizarre. The archive's owners, Leticia Fernandez and Carlos Noyola, haven't even made a definitive claim that the 1,200-piece archive did in fact belong to Kahlo -- although their initial research certainly leads them in that direction. That's why they acquired it in 2004.

Several notable artists who lived and worked with Kahlo and her husband, famed muralist Diego Rivera, have examined it. Arturo Bustos, Arturo Estrada and Rina Lazo are convinced of its authenticity, and they have attested as much.

The question for Knight, and the art world generally, is why a knee-jerk barricading of authenticity happens whenever new material comes to light. The choice isn't between immediately accepting or not accepting. The imperative is to investigate and do what artists and scholars should do: look.

Photos of the archive can be found here.