A long lost Frida Kahlo archive described as “astonishing (and)…full of ardent desires, seething fury, and outrageous humor”  has been exposed as a fake by Kahlo scholars just three months before it becomes the theme of a new Kahlo book to be published by the Princeton Architectural Press.

The upcoming book — Finding Frida Kahlo — explores the history and importance of this collection of 1,200 Kahlo objects, including paintings, drawings, letters and personal trinkets.

The collection was amassed by Carlos Noyola and Leticia Fernández, a couple who own the antiques store La Buhardilla Antiquarios in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The two accumulated the dubious Kahlo pieces from 2004-2007 from a lawyer who had received them from a local wood-carver who says he got them from Kahlo herself.

Uh-huh!

The story turns odd with the introduction of Barbara Levine, Finding Frida Kahlo’s author and a former Director of the SF MOMA. Levine worked on the book with co-author and fellow acrhivist Stephen Jaycox in collaboration with the Noyolas.

Clearly mindful of the implications of the fraud claim, Levine is using an unusual — through impressively crafty — method to defend herself.

She does not actually insist the Kahlo pieces are real, nor does she confirm she employed the highest form of scholarly technique to confirm their authenticity.

Rather, she calls the book ““my personal encounter with the materials”, and says that the study is “about the personal belongings of an icon not from the point of view of telling her story or contributing to her place in art history, but instead from the perspective of our essential human need to accumulate talismans, keep scraps to remember, track time and leave legacy”.

WTF?

In other words, Levine has written a book to be published by a major academic imprint which is basically just a 256-page indulgence in her own faux-intellectual fantasy world.

Nice! — Where do we sign up!

Princeton says all of the allegations of fraud have examined and are dealt with within the book, which even received a friendly mention in The NY Times in June (suckers!).

Princeton also insists the pieces are legit; this despite charges by numerous Frida scholars worldwide that the entire trove is a sham.

One such voice is Mary-Anne Martin — a longtime Kahlo dealer and Latin American art specialist, who offers the following scathing critique of the whole affair:

“In my view the publishers have been the victims of a gigantic hoax,” she says.“The perpetrators have constructed all these letters, poems, drawings and recipes, using Frida’s biography and her published letters as a roadmap. The drawings are badly done, the writing infantile, the content crude; the anatomy drawings look like something from a butcher shop instruction book. The paintings are ‘pastiches’, composites based on published works. The provenance provided is unverifiable and meaningless. There’s nothing I would like more than to discover a group of unknown works by Frida Kahlo, but there is no way on earth that any of these works could pass muster at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, or my gallery. I am astounded it has gone as far as it has.”