Shared Painting Martha Joy Gottfried & Irene De BOhas 1960

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Portrait of Marta Wiley painted by Martha Joy Gottfried

Marta Wiley & Grandmother Martha Joy Gottfried

Martha Joy Gottfried
Martha Joy Gottfried, née Young, was a prominent American-born Mexican landscape painter. She was born on September 15, 1925, in Glendale, Arizona, and died on January 10, 2014, in Coyoacán, Mexico City. She is best known for her paintings of Mexico’s mountains, deserts, valleys, skies, and volcanoes.
Gottfried showed a natural interest in painting from childhood. She was the oldest of four children born to Samuel Joy and Helen Young. While attending Stephens College for women in Columbia, Missouri, she met Mario Héctor Gottfried, a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps. They married in January 1945 in Glendale, Arizona. Later that year, the couple moved to Mexico City, where they eventually settled in Coyoacán. They remained married for more than fifty-five years and raised four children: Mario Héctor, María Elena, Carlos Federico, and Martha Cecilia.
As a young mother in Mexico, Gottfried continued developing her artistic practice, often working in watercolor and drawing. She studied with Martha Sauer from 1953 to 1954 and Gordon D. Jones from 1955 to 1956. From 1958 to 1959, she attended the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, where sculptor Ignacio Asúnsolo was among her teachers. She later continued her training with Irene de Bohus, Toby Joysmith, and Juan O’Gorman, who shared his tempera techniques with her.
Gottfried held her first solo exhibition in 1974 at a gallery in the Mexican-American Institute of Cultural Relations in Mexico City. In the following years, she exhibited widely in Mexico, including at the Instituto Anglo-Americano de Cultura, the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, the Palacio de Minería, the Museo de la Estampa, the Mexico City and Cancún airports, the Palacio de la Escuela de Medicina, and the Club de Industriales in Polanco. Her work was also auctioned internationally.
Several of her paintings were acquired by distinguished institutions and notable figures. In 1976, during an honorary ceremony in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, she presented a painting of the Valley of Mexico to José López Portillo. In 1978, the Duke of Kent received one of her paintings during a ceremony organized by the British Chamber of Commerce in Mexico. Between 1969 and 1979, she was estimated to have created around 700 paintings.
Gottfried’s work was inspired by light, weather, atmosphere, and the natural beauty of places such as Arizona, the Himalayas, and especially Mexico. Her paintings often focused on mountain ranges, deserts, and the great volcanoes of central Mexico, including Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. She was especially drawn to the Valley of Mexico, Topilejo, Nevado de Toluca, Ajusco, Copper Canyon, Valle de Bravo, and other dramatic landscapes.
Her paintings explored distance, color, terrain, shadow, and the changing effects of light. She often returned to the same places in different seasons or from different perspectives. Because of this, the press described her as the “painter of all seasons.” At times, she was also interested in skyscapes and aerial views, creating landscapes seen from an airplane.
Gottfried commonly used a technique in which she began with a monochrome oil sketch on canvas while on location, then completed the details later in the studio. Her work was admired for its direct relationship to the natural world. Critics noted that her paintings offered clear, factual responses to nature while preserving the pleasure of recognition, atmosphere, and place.
Much of Gottfried’s life was also devoted to teaching in her own studio. She left behind hundreds of paintings, including large-scale works, and a legacy centered on the landscapes, volcanoes, skies, deserts, and changing light of Mexico.
Representative works include San Miguel de Allende, North of Cave Creek, Topilejo, Iztaccíhuatl Summer, Urban Sprawl, From Sierra Chincua, Popo & Izta, Ajusco, The Cliff, Road to Yautepec, Copper Canyon, Fly by Popo, Aerial of Anáhuac, Zitácuaro Valley, Valley of South Mexico II, The Superstitions, Arizona, Donato Guerra, Autumn Sonnet (Grand Topilejo), Popocatépetl & Iztaccíhuatl, Red Cliff, Valle de Bravo Lake, Pinacate, Nevado de Toluca, and Xitle.

The Duke of Kent receiving one of Martha's Joy paintings (1978).
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Irene de Bohus
Painter and artist
Irene de Bohus, sometimes written as Irene Bohus or Irene DeBohus, was an American-born painter active in Mexico during the twentieth century. She was born in New York in 1913 and became part of the artistic world surrounding Mexican modernism, including the circles connected to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Her work included painting, drawing, watercolor, charcoal, and pastel. The Metropolitan Museum of Art lists several works by Irene de Bohus, including The Palm Tree from 1940 and Two Women of Ibiza, also from around 1940. These works show her as an artist working across both oil painting and works on paper.
De Bohus was also connected to mural and fresco traditions. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco note that she developed a strong handling of charcoal and pastel, media often used in preparation for large fresco paintings. She was also listed among the artists connected to Diego Rivera’s mural work, identified as an American painter who was originally intended to serve as a primary assistant.
In Mexico, Irene de Bohus became part of a significant artistic lineage. She was one of the artists who taught Martha Joy Gottfried between 1959 and 1962, helping shape Gottfried’s development as a landscape painter. Through this connection, de Bohus’s influence extended into the next generation of painters working in Mexico.
Today, Irene de Bohus is remembered as a painter linked to both American and Mexican art history, with work held by major institutions and a life connected to the creative world of Mexico City, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the artists who continued that tradition.
  • Martha Joy Gottfried 
Martha Joy Gottfried
Martha Joy Gottfried
https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2019/contemporary-art-day-n10150/lot.159.htmlwww.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2019/contemporary-art-day-n10150/lot.159.html
Frida Kahlo
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈfɾiða ˈkalo]; 6 July 1907 – 13 July 1954[1]) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.[2] Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist.[3] She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.[4] Her 1940 self-portrait titled The Dream (The Bed) holds the record for the most expensive work by a female artist ever auctioned at $54.7 million.[5]

Born to a German father and a mestiza mother (of Purépecha[6] descent), Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán – now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school until being injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood interest in art with the idea of becoming an artist. Around the same time, she approached artist Diego Rivera, whom she had encountered several years prior when he was painting a mural in her school auditorium, to ask for his opinion whether she should pursue a career as a painter or find another means to support herself.[7][page needed] According to Rivera, the two began their "courtship in earnest" shortly after this encounter.[7][page needed]

Kahlo's interests in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927,[1] through which she once again met fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera, according to Zelazko. The couple married in 1929[1][8] and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s travelling together in Mexico and the United States. During this time, she developed her artistic style, drawing her main inspiration from Mexican folk culture, and painted mostly small self-portraits that mixed elements from pre-Columbian and Catholic beliefs. Her paintings raised the interest of surrealist artist André Breton, who arranged for Kahlo's first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938; the exhibition was a success and was followed by another in Paris in 1939. While the French exhibition was less successful, the Louvre purchased a painting from Kahlo, The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection.[1] Throughout the 1940s, Kahlo participated in exhibitions in Mexico and the United States and worked as an art teacher. She taught at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado ("La Esmeralda") and was a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana. Kahlo's always-fragile health began to decline in the same decade. While she had had solo exhibitions elsewhere, she had her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

Kahlo's work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, not only had she become a recognized figure in art history, but she was also regarded as an icon for Chicanos, the feminism movement, and the LGBTQ+ community. Kahlo's work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and Indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.

irene de bohus portrait of my mom nena wiley

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Family Portrait Irene De Bohus 1967'
Irene De Bohus 
The Three Women Who Shaped My Art
​Martha Joy Gottfried, Irene de Bohus, and Frida Kahlo
Autobiography of an Artist, 2026I

I grew up painting in Coyoacán, Mexico, inside a vibrant and intimate artistic world. Art was not separate from life. It was in the house, in the studio, in the portraits on the walls, in the stories, in the parties, in the conversations, and in the people who moved through my grandmother’s world.
My grandmother, Martha Joy Gottfried, was my first and most important teacher. She began teaching me how to paint when I was only two years old in her studio. She gave me the foundations of painting — contrast, shade, composition, the golden mean, and the Fibonacci sequence. Because of her, I studied the classics, including Leonardo da Vinci. Painting became my first language.
My grandmother’s house was filled with art. There were paintings and portraits everywhere. In her room hung a small Vermeer painting that I would stare at for hours. It felt like a little jewel. There was also a portrait of Irene de Bohus painted by Diego Rivera. These were not distant museum names to me. These people and their work were part of the atmosphere I grew up inside.
Martha Joy Gottfried, née Young, was a prominent American-born Mexican landscape painter. She was born on September 15, 1925, in Glendale, Arizona, and died on January 10, 2014, in Coyoacán, Mexico City. She is best known for her paintings of Mexico’s mountains, deserts, valleys, skies, and volcanoes.
Gottfried showed a natural interest in painting from childhood. She was the oldest of four children born to Samuel Joy and Helen Young. While attending Stephens College for women in Columbia, Missouri, she met Mario Héctor Gottfried, a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps. They married in January 1945 in Glendale, Arizona. Later that year, the couple moved to Mexico City, where they eventually settled in Coyoacán. They remained married for more than fifty-five years and raised four children: Mario Héctor, María Elena, Carlos Federico, and Martha Cecilia.
As a young mother in Mexico, my grandmother continued developing her artistic practice, often working in watercolor and drawing. She studied with Martha Sauer from 1953 to 1954 and Gordon D. Jones from 1955 to 1956. From 1958 to 1959, she attended the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, where sculptor Ignacio Asúnsolo was among her teachers. She later continued her training with Irene de Bohus, Toby Joysmith, and Juan O’Gorman, who shared his tempera techniques with her.
My grandmother held her first solo exhibition in 1974 at a gallery in the Mexican-American Institute of Cultural Relations in Mexico City. In the following years, she exhibited widely in Mexico, including at the Instituto Anglo-Americano de Cultura, the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, the Palacio de Minería, the Museo de la Estampa, the Mexico City and Cancún airports, the Palacio de la Escuela de Medicina, and the Club de Industriales in Polanco. Her work was also auctioned internationally.
Several of her paintings were acquired by distinguished institutions and notable figures. In 1976, during an honorary ceremony in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, she presented a painting of the Valley of Mexico to José López Portillo. In 1978, the Duke of Kent received one of her paintings during a ceremony organized by the British Chamber of Commerce in Mexico. Between 1969 and 1979, she was estimated to have created around 700 paintings.
My grandmother’s work was inspired by light, weather, atmosphere, and the natural beauty of places such as Arizona, the Himalayas, and especially Mexico. Her paintings often focused on mountain ranges, deserts, and the great volcanoes of central Mexico, including Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. She was especially drawn to the Valley of Mexico, Topilejo, Nevado de Toluca, Ajusco, Copper Canyon, Valle de Bravo, and other dramatic landscapes.
Her paintings explored distance, color, terrain, shadow, and the changing effects of light. She often returned to the same places in different seasons or from different perspectives. Because of this, the press described her as the “painter of all seasons.” At times, she was also interested in skyscapes and aerial views, creating landscapes seen from an airplane.
My grandmother commonly used a technique in which she began with a monochrome oil sketch on canvas while on location, then completed the details later in the studio. Her work was admired for its direct relationship to the natural world. Critics noted that her paintings offered clear, factual responses to nature while preserving the pleasure of recognition, atmosphere, and place.
Much of her life was also devoted to teaching in her own studio. She left behind hundreds of paintings, including large-scale works, and a legacy centered on the landscapes, volcanoes, skies, deserts, and changing light of Mexico.
Representative works include San Miguel de Allende, North of Cave Creek, Topilejo, Iztaccíhuatl Summer, Urban Sprawl, From Sierra Chincua, Popo & Izta, Ajusco, The Cliff, Road to Yautepec, Copper Canyon, Fly by Popo, Aerial of Anáhuac, Zitácuaro Valley, Valley of South Mexico II, The Superstitions, Arizona, Donato Guerra, Autumn Sonnet (Grand Topilejo), Popocatépetl & Iztaccíhuatl, Red Cliff, Valle de Bravo Lake, Pinacate, Nevado de Toluca, and Xitle.
One day in her studio, my grandmother told me she wished she could paint with real light itself, because white pigment never gave her the luminous quality she saw in nature. That stayed with me. Her deep pursuit of light became the core of my own painting.
Her teacher and close friend Irene de Bohus was also a major influence on me from a very young age. Irene de Bohus, sometimes written as Irene Bohus or Irene DeBohus, was an American-born painter active in Mexico during the twentieth century. She was born in New York in 1913 and became part of the artistic world surrounding Mexican modernism, including the circles connected to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Irene’s work included painting, drawing, watercolor, charcoal, and pastel. The Metropolitan Museum of Art lists several works by Irene de Bohus, including The Palm Tree from 1940 and Two Women of Ibiza, also from around 1940. These works show her as an artist working across both oil painting and works on paper.
Irene de Bohus was also connected to mural and fresco traditions. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco note that she developed a strong handling of charcoal and pastel, media often used in preparation for large fresco paintings. She was also listed among the artists connected to Diego Rivera’s mural work and was identified as an American painter who was originally intended to serve as a primary assistant.
In Mexico, Irene became part of a significant artistic lineage. She was one of the artists who taught my grandmother Martha Joy Gottfried between 1959 and 1962, helping shape her development as a landscape painter. Through this connection, Irene’s influence extended into the next generation of painters working in Mexico — including me.
Irene was not just a name in art history. She was part of my grandmother’s life and part of the living artistic world around me. Irene had been Frida Kahlo’s lover and was a strong, accomplished artist in her own right. She had worked as Diego Rivera’s studio assistant and moved confidently in that intense creative circle. Irene and my grandmother painted together for years, and Irene recognized my talent early. She helped guide and refine my technique while encouraging the artist she saw in me.
I remember the lively parties at my grandmother’s house where Irene would be present, along with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Frida, Diego, Irene, and that circle of friends had a direct influence on me. They were not abstract historical figures I discovered later. They were part of the living artistic atmosphere around my grandmother in Coyoacán, and I grew up inside that energy.
Frida Kahlo was part of that world.
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born on July 6, 1907, and died on July 13, 1954. She was a Mexican painter known for her portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by Mexican popular culture, she used a naïve folk-art style to explore identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often contained strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy.
Frida was also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain. As a child, she was disabled by polio, and at eighteen she was severely injured in a bus accident, which caused lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood interest in art and began to think seriously about becoming a painter.
Frida’s interests in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927. Through this world, she connected again with Diego Rivera, whom she married in 1929. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, they traveled through Mexico and the United States. During this period, Frida developed her artistic style, drawing from Mexican folk culture and painting small self-portraits that mixed pre-Columbian and Catholic symbols.
Her work gained the attention of surrealist artist André Breton, who helped arrange her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938. She later exhibited in Paris in 1939, where the Louvre purchased The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection. Throughout the 1940s, Frida participated in exhibitions in Mexico and the United States and worked as an art teacher. She taught at La Esmeralda and was a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana.
Frida’s health declined in the 1940s. She had her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of forty-seven. Her work became widely recognized after the late 1970s and, by the early 1990s, she was regarded as an icon in art history, Chicano culture, feminism, and the LGBTQ+ community. Her paintings are now celebrated internationally for their connection to Mexican national and Indigenous traditions and for their uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.
But to me, Frida was not only a famous painter. She was part of the circle that shaped the world I inherited.
My grandmother told me stories of seeing Frida walking through the Mercado de Coyoacán with beautiful flowers in her hair. She also told me that when Diego went on one of his trips, Frida would sometimes be left without food. Irene would go over and bring her a full chicken so she would not starve.
Those stories stayed with me. They made Frida real. Not just an icon. A woman. A painter. A survivor. Someone who lived with pain, hunger, love, intensity, and truth.
Seeing Frida, Diego, Irene, and my grandmother connected through that circle left a deep impression on me as a child. Being around that energy gave me a direct connection to Frida’s bold, unapologetic spirit and to her powerful way of painting her truth.
These three women each gave me something essential.
My grandmother, Martha Joy Gottfried, taught me love of landscape, patience, discipline, composition, classical structure, and the endless pursuit of light.
Irene de Bohus gave me technical guidance, professional encouragement, early recognition of my gift, and a direct connection to the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo circle.
Frida Kahlo showed me the power of painting with courage, identity, emotion, pain, beauty, and fearless authenticity.
This living legacy — from studio lessons with my grandmother and Irene, to the presence of Frida and Diego at those gatherings — is the foundation of everything I have created in painting, music, writing, publishing, and invention. It all began in Coyoacán.
I had a deep love of horses and painted them constantly growing up. By the time I painted Lepa Zena in college, I had already created thousands of horses.
There is a famous story about an artist commissioned to paint a horse. The client kept returning, asking if his horse was ready. Each time the artist said no and kept working. When the man finally grew impatient, the artist walked over to the wall, made one single stroke, and said, “There. There’s your horse.”
That is how I understand painting. One line can look simple, but it may contain years of study, repetition, memory, instinct, discipline, and inheritance.
My work did not come from nowhere. It came from my grandmother’s studio, from Irene’s guidance, from Frida’s courage, from Diego’s presence, from the parties and stories of Coyoacán, from the portraits on the walls, from the Vermeer I stared at for hours, from the golden mean and Fibonacci sequence, from horses, landscapes, women, light, and the living artistic circle that surrounded me.
That is the foundation of my art.