See You Soon, Hopefully - The Gelman Collection's Journey to Europe

"Two categories of painting collectors exist: those who possess it, and those who are possessed by it. Jacques and Natasha Gelman belong to the second."

- Pierre Schneider (1925–2013)

Belgian-born art historian and close friend of the Gelmans

Art Connections in the Capital

The 1940s were a formative decade for Mexican art: the muralist movement was at its height, as younger artists like Kahlo were beginning to find their own, more personal voice.

Jacques Gelman, originally from Russia, traveled from Paris to Mexico on business in 1938. It is said that in the garden of his hotel, he met a blonde woman reading a French newspaper - the Czech-born Natasha Zahalka. The two married in Mexico in 1941 and began collecting art together, setting out to support contemporary Mexican artists.

In 1943, Jacques commissioned Diego Rivera to paint a portrait of his wife. The result - Natasha in an elegant dress, reclining on a blue sofa - became one of the first pieces in what would grow into the Gelman Collection. The commission sparked a friendship between the two couples, and that same year, Frida Kahlo, in her mid-thirties and still largely known simply as "Diego Rivera's wife", painted the Gelmans a second portrait of Natasha.

Around the same time, Kahlo also completed one of what remains her most significant self-portraits to this day: "Diego en mi pensamiento" ("Diego on My Mind"), showing her dressed in a Tehuana costume, the traditional festive dress of women from Oaxaca's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, with a small portrait of Rivera painted onto her forehead, interpreted as a symbol of her partner's constant presence in her mind. Natasha bought the painting and, in the years that followed, helped Kahlo to growing international exposure.

Over the following decade, Natasha would go on to become one of the collection's recurring motifs, sitting for portraits by Ángel Zárraga (1946), Rufino Tamayo (1948) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1950).

Jacques and Natasha, Source: Gelman Collection.

A New Owner, a New Purpose

Today, that conviction looks increasingly difficult to honor. This is due to a series of opaque transactions following Natasha Gelman's death in 1998 - twelve years after she was widowed by Jacques, who died in 1986. After the collection had largely disappeared from public view for decades, in 2023, Robert Littman - whom Natasha's will named as both executor and sole legatee of her Mexican art heritage, in itself a decision which has been questioned due to Natasha Gelman’s declining mental health towards the end of her life - sold parts of it to Mexican businessman Marcelo Zambrano, a deal critics say violated the couple's intention that the collection remain intact. To help finance the purchase, Zambrano took out a loan from Sotheby's Financial Services, using the artworks themselves as collateral.

In January 2026, Banco Santander took over the outstanding loan, becoming both the collection's creditor and its international manager. The collection was renamed. From September 8, 68 works from the collection that were recently displayed at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Mexico City - returning to the Mexican public for the first time in almost 20 years - will be shown at Faro Santander, the bank's new cultural center, before part of the works continue on tour through Switzerland and Norway.

To the Collectors, the Present, and Its Worries

For Mexico's cultural scene, that is a disastrous prospect. In an open letter titled "Dear Natasha", Mexico City-based artist Mario García Torres reflects on what the works have meant to the country: "They became part of our memory of Mexican art, somehow they became part of how we explain our history and identity to ourselves, they accompanied us. When they disappeared, it felt less like a collection had changed hands than like someone had quietly left."

And yet the works are in transit again. Whether they come back permanently is not clear yet. INBAL has stated that the collection will return to Mexico in 2028 to be shown at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MARCO) in Monterrey. But by the museum's own admission, no formal agreement on that return has been signed, and it remains unclear whether the entire collection will come back, or only the protected pieces, and for how long.

"To the painters, the future glory, to the collectors, the present, and its worries”. This is how Schneider once captured the Gelmans' stance towards collecting art. Six decades on, those worries belong to neither painter nor collector, but nominally are under the control of an international bank - one that manages, and has renamed after itself, a collection of Mexican cultural artifacts it does not own. Without the original guardians of the collection, who watched over it so carefully, Mexico has lent out a piece of its own memory, on terms it does not control, with no return date guaranteed.

Frida Kahlo's "Diego en mi pensamiento" (1943). Source: Gelman Collection.

United by a shared love for modern art and Mexico, collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman spent about fifty years building an art collection whose reach would come to shape the country's cultural identity. Long before Frida Kahlo became a global icon, the couple bought several of her works - now valued in the tens of millions of dollars each - for the equivalent of a few thousand dollars, and brought them together with pieces by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo and María Izquierdo, among others, to form one of the most important collections of Mexican modernism: the Gelman Collection.

This year, around three decades after Natasha passed away, the collection received a new name. On behalf of the Spanish bank Banco Santander, it was recently transferred to Europe as the "Gelman Santander Collection”. Whether this reflects the wishes of Jacques and Natasha Gelman is a question being seriously doubted in Mexico, having generated collective uproar in the country’s cultural community.

The Gelmans’ Philosophy

In an essay on the Gelmans, art historian Pierre Schneider, who met Jacques Gelman in New York in 1968 and became a close friend of the couple, recalls that Jacques constantly spoke about his collection. One question, in particular, seemed to preoccupy him almost obsessively: to which museum would the couple entrust it? From the beginning, the Gelmans had decided the collection would be donated - not sold, not scattered. "Jacques believed that a collector was never truly the owner of the works in their care, but merely their guardian", Schneider writes.

Among the Gelmans' worries was that their collection remain complete. "It had not only to stay perpetually in the same museum, but furthermore had to be exhibited as a whole, instead of being scattered among the rooms, abandoned to the changing humors of the keepers," Schneider continues. "This wish responded [...] mainly to the conviction that a collection is, in itself, a masterpiece whose author is the collector."

A Trip Without Return Date

In Mexico's cultural scene, these developments have sparked considerable resistance in recent months - particularly the terms of the agreement between the Zambrano family, the Fundación Banco Santander and Mexico's National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL). The agreement runs through September 2030, with an option to extend. The works, however, include 30 Monumentos Artísticos ("Artistic Monuments"), which cannot leave Mexico for more than two years. According to the activist collective "Defendamos la Colección Gelman" ("Let's Defend the Gelman Collection"), the agreement therefore violates national legislation protecting cultural heritage. Through several lawsuits against the Mexican cultural ministry and INBAL, they are demanding its annulment.

With the artworks now serving as collateral, the bank also holds a financial claim on them - and should the loan ever go unpaid, could end up in control of a significant share of Mexico's protected modern art. This is not a hypothetical scenario: When interest payments fell behind in 2024, roughly 30 works were put up for auction to help cover the debt - prompting INBAL to intervene and pull a protected piece by María Izquierdo from the sale. In fact, of the estimated 360 works which originally featured in the collection, almost half are currently unaccounted for.

Of those still in inventory, ten of the travelling pieces are Frida Kahlo's - more than are currently held in all of Mexico's public collections combined. In 1984, Mexico declared Frida Kahlo's entire artistic output a national artistic monument by presidential decree, banning its permanent export. That decree is now also under review: Mexico's Supreme Court recently agreed to examine its constitutionality, in a separate case brought by a Mexican bank seeking to export a different Kahlo self-portrait. Should the court strike the decree down, Frida's work more broadly - Gelman pieces included - could leave the country on a one-way ticket.

Natasha Gelman, portrayed by Diego Rivera (1943). Source: Gelman Collection.

Exposition "Relatos Modernos" in Mexico City. Source: Museo de Arte Moderno.

Frida Kahlo's "Autorretrato con mono" (1938). Source: Gelman Collection.

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