The third National Film Library, Curiel, will open in August.

Fabiola Palapa Quijas

La Jornada Newspaper, Sunday, June 22, 2025, p. 2

The head of the federal Ministry of Culture (SC), Claudia Curiel de Icaza, announced that the Cineteca Nacional Chapultepec will be inaugurated with all its infrastructure on August 15, as well as with a program that includes historical and contemporary films.

The opening will take place in the context of Mexican Cinema Day. We're working with Marina Stavenhagen (director general of the Cineteca Nacional) on a detailed program that focuses on our legendary cinema, but also on emerging and contemporary cinema. We're going to celebrate with all the theaters, bookstores, and restaurants, as well as the outdoor screen , Curiel de Icaza said.

Place for art

Last year, then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador symbolically inaugurated part of the 10 projects that make up the Chapultepec: Nature and Culture project, which integrates the four sections of the forest.

The federal Secretary of Culture also announced that the National Art Warehouse will open its doors in Chapultepec at the end of the year, a space that will house the country's most important collection.

“We are already testing the electrical installation and moving the works.

It will be a space where you can see many of the pieces and how they are being restored in real time , explained Claudia Curiel.

Regarding the El Arsenal Artistic Training and Production Center, the official indicated that it will also begin operations this year and will be a space dedicated to the community of Chapultepec's fourth section.

▲ Vermeer dedicated six of his works to reading, writing, or exchanging letters, including Lady and Maid, the last painting acquired in 1919 by industrial magnate and patron Henry Clay Frick, and Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid, which the museum borrowed from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. The exhibition is the first to be held since the museum reopened after five years of closure for renovations. Photo courtesy of the Frick Collection

AFP

La Jornada Newspaper, Sunday, June 22, 2025, p. 3

New York. An exhibition with just three works? That's what the Frick Collection in New York is proposing with Vermeer's Love Letters, a display of three canvases by the celebrated 17th-century Dutch painter, in which ladies and maids are complicit in apparent secret love affairs.

Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), a prominent exponent of the Dutch Golden Age and painter of Girl with a Pearl Earring, dedicated six of his works to reading, writing or the exchange of letters, at a time when epistolary communication was at its peak in art.

Three of them show women reading or writing letters alone.

But in the three paintings that will be on display in New York until the end of August, another character appears: the maid, who has become the mistress's intermediary , who, presumably, is having an affair or some kind of romantic relationship with the author of the letters, according to curator Robert Fucci.

At a time when women were increasingly empowered to choose their romantic partners, maids were undoubtedly witnesses to a certain emotion in that process , explains this specialist in 17th-century Dutch painting.

The Frick Collection exhibition includes Lady and Maid, the last painting acquired in 1919 by industrial magnate and art patron Henry Clay Frick, and two paintings that the museum borrowed from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid and The Love Letter.

For Fucci, viewers can easily identify with that sense of anticipation, that expectation of the moment portrayed that Vermeer uses as a central focal point in these images to really explore what is at stake .

Enigmatic

Though they differ in scale, action and perspective, the curators say the three works create enigmatic narratives , a hallmark of Vermeer, who often painted everyday life set in light-filled domestic spaces.

Two of the paintings (The Love Letter and Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid) appear to have been important to the painter's wife, Catharina Bolnes, who was widowed with 11 children and used them to pay off a debt to a local baker, hoping to one day recover the money. Whether she ever succeeded is unknown.

The love letters exhibition is the first Johannes Vermeer exhibition in New York since 2001, and the first show at the Frick Collection museum since its reopening in April after a five-year closure for renovations.

Two years ago, the Rijksmuseum organized a major exhibition dedicated to the Dutch artist, featuring 28 of his approximately 35 surviving paintings.

But New York is now an excellent destination for lovers of Vermeer's work: in addition to the five of his paintings currently on display at the Frick Collection in Manhattan, there are another five owned by the neighboring Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), notes Frick Collection curator Aimée Ng.

Almost a third! of his paintings, he exclaims.

Vermeer undoubtedly continues to captivate and inspire people today.