By Suzanne Sprague
DALLAS – Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 Reporter: Jacques and Natasha Gelman met by chance in the garden of a Mexico City hotel in 1938; but once they married three years later, they began a lifetime of deliberate and serious art collecting that was a mirror of both modern Mexico and the Gelman's own lives.
Eleanor Harvey, Curator of American Art, Dallas Museum of Art: I think they felt very strongly that the art was a part of their family.
Sprague: Eleanor Harvey is the Curator of American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art and the local curator of "Modern Masters of Mexico."
Harvey: And it's very clear that by extension the artists that they patronized became very close friends with so they became part of that extended family as well.
Sprague: Their friends included the muralist Diego Rivera, his wife and artist Frida Kahlo, cubist painter Gunther Gerzso, and several other prominent Mexican artists of the 20th century.
Harvey: That is the first painting the Gelmans purchased. They commissioned Diego Rivera to paint Natasha Gelman. He decided to paint her, effectively, as a calla lily.
Sprague: Natasha lounges in a white evening gown on a blue sofa, the folds of her dress mimicking the lines of dozens of calla lilies that surround her. Her legs are exposed up to her thigh and her hair is perfectly coiffed.
Harvey: Natasha used to protest she never looked that good, but it's quite clear that Rivera seemed rather smitten by her, and certainly she has the look of a Hollywood starlet which seems perfectly in keeping with the Gelmans' primary business of making movies.
Sprague: Jacques Gelman made his fortune producing films starring Cantinflas, the Mexican equivalent of Charlie Chaplin. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, Gelman settled in Mexico to escape the Nazis after living in Europe. He met Natasha, who came from Czechoslovakia, while she was vacationing in Mexico City. The Gelmans often commissioned paintings of themselves, but they also collected the drawings and paintings of Mexican artists who were balancing their country's cultural traditions with the modernist fever sweeping the international art scene, such as Frida Kahlo. Kahlo is perhaps best known for her dozens of self-portraits. Jacques Gelman bought seven of them.
Dr. Saloman Grimberg, art scholar and friend of the Gelmans: I remember he told a story of how he bought the one in which she has a braid on her head.
Sprague: Dr. Salomon Grimberg is a Dallas psychiatrist and art scholar who was a personal friend of the Gelmans.
Grimberg: And he one night was walking on 57th Street in New York with Mrs. Gelman. And he saw through the window of a gallery that this small painting was on an easel in the back of the gallery.
Sprague: The painting was Kahlo's "Self-portrait with Braid." She originally painted herself with short hair to represent her divorce from fellow artist Diego Rivera. When the couple reunited, Kahlo added an intricate braid that stands like a snake on top of her head. Jacques Gelman recognized the painting and returned to the New York gallery the morning after he first saw it.
Grimberg: He asked about the painting and he was told, "Oh, yes, this woman, we think she was a girlfriend of Diego Rivera." He said, "How much is it?" And they said, "Oh, about $300." So he bought it on the spot, and he was very proud. He knew exactly what he had gotten.
Sprague: The Gelmans hung most of Kahlo's paintings in Natasha Gelman's bedroom. But directly across from her bed, where she could see it every morning, was Gunther Gerzo's 1954 painting, "The Cat from London Street." Harvey: It's interesting because Gerzso never liked the picture. He was in the process of temporarily separating from his wife. They did not divorce, and they couldn't figure out [how] to get out of his funk and what to paint and Natasha said, "Why don't you paint your cat?" And for some reason, he did paint the cat. It is the view out of their apartment, the Gelman's apartment in Mexico, but he just never liked it a great deal.
Sprague: Gerzo was a set designer for Jacques Gelman and well known for his cubist landscapes and portraits. The Gelmans also collected paintings from a variety of surrealists, abstract expressionists and contemporary artists who defy categorization. Natasha Gelman purchased many of these more recent works after Jacques died in 1986. The insurance on owning the great Mexican masters at home became too expensive, so she loaned them to museums and galleries.
Robert Littman, President, Vergel Foundation and Gelman friend: So those paintings went out and these other paintings went in, and she was thrilled to look at something else. That Cisco Jimenez was in the dining room. And these Paula Santiagos were in her bedroom.
Sprague: Robert Littman was a friend of Jacques and Natasha Gelman and is now the president of the Vergel Foundation, which holds the Gelman collection. He's pointing to an 8 x 8 foot brightly colored collage by Cisco Jimenez, painted in this last decade. It's a cartoonish social commentary on the state of Mexican culture.
Littman: This is sort of an X-rated painting because it talks about Mexico and its people but in very colloquial terms, let's say. When you get mad at somebody, you would say some of these things, referring to various parts of the body. I don't think it's something that we could put over the airwaves. (Laughs)
Sprague: There are also small embroidered shirts from Paula Santiago in which the artist has stitched her own hair and blood. Controversial, but so were Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and the other Mexican masters during their early careers. The Gelman collection has continued to grow even though Natasha Gelman died in 1998. Robert Littman uses revenue from touring the exhibit to make new acquisitions. The collection has no permanent home, but it will continue on tour for the next three years, which friend Salomon Grimberg says is what the Gelmans would have liked. "Modern Masters of Mexico" opens Sunday and continues through January 28th at the Dallas Museum of Art. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.