How Dolores Olmedo won the adoration of Diego Rivera — and made Frida Kahlo famous

For six years, the only sign of life at the Dolores Olmedo Museum in southern Mexico City was the honk of its 100 peacocks. Set in a converted colonial hacienda that dates back to the 16th century, the museum closed in 2020 with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There were fears that it might stay shut for good — which would have been a huge cultural loss, given that the venue boasts the world’s largest private collection of works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. When it reopened, in May this year, locals thronged the streets outside, uniting in celebrations that involved music, folk dance and a host of Kahlo lookalikes.

The museum is named after its founder, Dolores Olmedo Patiño, a successful Mexican businesswoman and art collector who counted the two aforementioned painters as friends. Its establishment ensured the realisation of a prediction made to her by Rivera towards the end of his life. Aged almost 70 and suffering with cancer, the artist wrote to Olmedo in 1956, saying, ‘I know how generous you are, so it’s clear that [the artworks you own] will one day be housed in a museum.’

Olmedo continued to add to her collection over subsequent decades, before opening the museum in 1994. Along with the Kahlos and Riveras, it is renowned for its trove of pre-Columbian objects and items of Mexican folk art.

‘She was an extraordinary woman — and this place has been an extraordinary gift from her to the public,’ says the collector’s granddaughter, Dr Guadalupe Phillips Margain, a committee member of the trust that oversees the museum today. ‘During the years of closure, we thought hard about the future, and ended up making certain changes. But the essence of the museum that my grandmother opened remains the same.’

The changes included basic maintenance, such as repairing ironwork, roofing and walls; a slight increase in exhibition space; and, perhaps most notably, a shift in curatorial emphasis. Both Olmedo, who passed away in 2002, and Kahlo now receive greater attention.

Before discussing the museum any further, though, it’s worth looking back on its founder’s life and career — as well as on the fascinating relationship she had with Kahlo and Rivera.

Olmedo was born in Mexico City in 1908. Her father was a businessman who died when she was four, and her mother a schoolteacher. Young Dolores attended law school in her home city, before undertaking more informal studies in Paris in anthropology, music and art history.

In her twenties, she bought a handful of brick factories, starting a business that would eventually become ICA, one of Latin America’s largest construction companies. As a woman operating in what was then a highly patriarchal industry, this achievement was impressive indeed.

Shrewd property investments followed, and before long Olmedo started building an art collection. She also entered a social orbit where she met Mexico’s top politicians, industrialists and cultural figures, Kahlo and Rivera included. (The couple had married in 1929 — Olmedo was younger than them by one year and 22 years respectively.)

Like them, she was deeply patriotic, which was reflected not just in the choice of artworks she acquired, but in the elaborate Day of the Dead altars she commissioned each year, and the Mexican Xoloitzcuintle dogs she made pets of (notable for their lack of hair).

Rivera achieved fame by painting vast, state-sponsored murals on public buildings such as the National Palace and Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City. He was a keen champion of the Mexican Revolution (which had concluded in 1920), and through his murals sought to spread a message of hope to his compatriots, artistically connecting the country’s revolutionary present to the heroic Mesoamerican past of civilisations such as the Aztecs.

Rivera also produced easel paintings, watercolours and drawings across his career, including portraits of Olmedo. The pair frequently exchanged letters, the former describing the latter in one of them as a ‘marvellous friend’ and a person ‘of infinite sensibility, generous and refined’ — before signing off, ‘I adore you’.

Repeatedly asked in later life about her relationship with Rivera, Olmedo insisted that they had been ‘very close friends’ rather than lovers. Perhaps as a consequence of that closeness, her relationship with Kahlo was slightly cooler. At one point, Olmedo said, it consisted of ‘saying hello to each other, and that was it’.

The collector was aware of Kahlo’s talent as a painter, however, and valued the way she transmuted into art her various afflictions, such as childhood polio and a teenage traffic accident, both of which had led to permanent disabilities. In one well-known picture at the museum, My Nurse and I, the artist depicts herself as a baby sucking the breast of a wet nurse, who has the face of a stone idol — an allusion, in part, to her inability to bear a child.

‘Everyone admired Frida,’ Olmedo said in the 1980s. ‘She was a strong person, and remember, it was a very different situation then. Women were supposed to be… working in the kitchen or waiting for their husbands to come home.’

Olmedo herself was married to the British journalist Howard S. Phillips, with whom she had four children before their separation. Like Kahlo, however, she was anything but a tradwife.

Kahlo died in 1954, aged 47. As Rivera’s own health declined shortly afterwards, Olmedo invited him to make use of her beach house in Acapulco for recuperation. There he produced a stunning set of paintings of the sun setting into the Pacific — the intimations of mortality in them unmistakable. Twenty examples are on view at the museum, among the collection’s 148 Riveras and 26 Kahlos.

Rivera was known to suggest specific works of his for Olmedo to acquire — works from across his career, to ensure that her holdings were comprehensive. For example, the museum has a fine selection of the Cubist pictures he made while living in Paris as a young man.

In the 1960s, Olmedo bought a new home: a seven-acre hacienda called La Noria. ‘Nowadays, this area is considered an oasis within Mexico City, but back then it was countryside,’ says Phillips Margain. ‘I have fond childhood memories of visiting her at weekends, surrounded by her peacocks and dogs. She was such a vibrant personality. What I didn’t realise then, though, was that she was planning to turn La Noria into a museum.’

Essentially, from 1994 until her death, Olmedo kept modest living quarters for herself, but relinquished the rest of the hacienda to visitors wishing to see her art collection. With the recent reopening, those living quarters have been converted into an exhibition space where her story is told, complete with photographs and pictures of her, including a celebrated portrait by Rivera in which Olmedo wears a colourful Tehuana dress and holds a basket of tropical fruit.

‘She never wanted the museum to be about her, but we believe my grandmother deserves some prominence,’ says Phillips Margain. ‘Not solely in her role as founder, but in testament to her whole life. Without her, Frida Kahlo would not have the fame that she does today.’

To explain: during their lifetime, Rivera was more famous than his wife — so famous, in fact, that he was only the second artist, after Henri Matisse, to be made the subject of a monographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Kahlo’s star rose posthumously — thanks in no small part, says Phillips Margain, to the frequency with which Olmedo lent works by the artist to exhibitions worldwide. In a role entrusted to her by Rivera, the businesswoman also served as the first director of La Casa Azul, a popular museum dedicated to Kahlo, which opened at her former home in Mexico City in 1958.

At La Noria today, there is more space for Kahlo’s art than there was before, with two galleries devoted to her rather than one. Her uncompromising self-portrait The Broken Column hangs by itself on a black wall — the artist showing us the inside of her body, and revealing a shattered pillar instead of a spine.

Requests to borrow the Kahlos are constant. For the reopening, however, every one of them is on view at the museum, and the plan in the years ahead is for them to spend more time there than used to be the case.

Other changes at La Noria include the decision to commission contemporary artists on a regular basis. Marking this summer’s FIFA World Cup, of which Mexico is a co-host, there is a show by the photographer Santiago Arau, exploring the connection between football and Mesoamerican ball games.

The reopening has also seen the addition of a restaurant-café and a children’s activity area. Thankfully, however, La Noria’s lush green gardens — filled with fruit trees and bougainvillea — remain much as they were.

For finances, the museum relies on a fund set up by Olmedo, although this alone isn’t enough to keep it viable. During the recent closure, trust members discussed moving the collection to a new venue — in Chapultepec, in the centre of Mexico City — in the expectation of attracting more visitors there. Ultimately, those discussions came to nothing. However, there are plans to host pop-up exhibitions off site.

‘Our number-one priority is to protect my grandmother’s legacy,’ says Phillips Margain. With a legacy as rich as Olmedo’s, however, that task isn’t easy. ‘Do you have any idea how much it costs to feed 100 peacocks?’ she asks with a smile.

The Dolores Olmedo Museum is open year-round, Tuesday to Sunday

5843 Avenida México, La Noria, Xochimilco, 16030 Mexico City, Mexico

museodoloresolmedo.org.mx/en