Author Description

Workbook to help children learn about portrait painting by observing and answering questions about portraits of Jacques and Natasha Gelman, the owners of the paintings in the exhibition. Cosponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Phoenix Art Museum, the bilingual exhibition catalog under review complements the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Twentieth-Century Modern Masters: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection. The two collections were mutually exclusive, for the Gelmans furnished their New York apartment with European art and their Mexican homes with Mexican art. Kahlo is represented by ten paintings, Rivera by nine; 34 artists created the additional 90 works. Most are illustrated full page in color, and exhibition curator Olivier Debroise includes short descriptions of the works as well as artist biographies. Art critic Sylvia Navarrete provides a chapter on the Gelmans' appreciation of modern figurative, surrealist, and abstract art and their relationships with many of the artists. The portraits of the now-deceased Gelmans commissioned from Kahlo, Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, Rafael Cidoncha, and Angel Zarraga are particularly haunting. Recommended for all modern art and Mexican art sections of public libraries.