Irene Bohus (sometimes Irene de Bohus), was born in New York in 1913, and died at the age of 72 on 27 March 1985 in a Mexico City hospital. Her parents, both born in Hungary, were Paul Bohus (1886-1966) and Irene Jelfy, who lived in Mexico City at the time of his death.
Irene Bohus’ link to Lake Chapala is via a work included in her solo exhibition at the Galeria Arte Contemporáneo (Amberes 12, Mexico City) in December 1953. At the exhibition, Bohus showed 26 oil paintings, including a self portrait and a portrait of Diego Rivera, and 8 brush drawings, one of which was titled Chapala.
While it remains unclear precisely when she was in Chapala, or whether she ever painted any other works based on her time there, Bohus is an important figure in Mexican art, not only on account of her own career, but also because of her close, even intimate, relations with both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Irene Bohus sketching image of diver Helen Crlenkovich for San Francisco mural. 1940. (WPA photo).
Irene Bohus apparently studied art with private tutors in Berlin, Paris and Budapest. Examples of her paintings are in the permanent collections of some major museums.
Hayden Herrera, in his biography of Frida Kahlo, explains that Bohus was an assistant of Diego Rivera in Mexico City and shared his studio when Diego and Frida divorced. In May 1940, alerted by American actress Paulette Goddard (another of Rivera’s paramours at the time), Bohus helped Rivera avoid police when they came to question him about the first (unsuccessful) attempt on Trotsky’s life. Bohus drove him to safety as Rivera hid under a pile of canvasses in the car. Not long afterwards, Bohus and Rivera shared a house at 49 Calhoun Terrace on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, where Rivera was working on Pan American Unity, the mural he created in 1940 for the 1939-1940 San Francisco World’s Fair, also known as the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island.
Rivera had planned to include a portrait of Bohus in this mural, but she left him, apparently at the insistence of her mother, before it was complete, and so Rivera painted Emmy Lou Packard, another of his assistants, instead. It was widely rumored at the time (1940) that Irene was pregnant with Rivera’s child.
By the time the mural was finished, Diego and Frida had remarried. But Bohus and Frida had become close friends, and testament to the strength of their friendship, Bohus’ name remained on Frida’s bedroom wall up to the time of Frida’s death in 1954. Frida also had a copy of Village in the Sun, the Ajijic-based book by ‘Dane Chandos,’ in her personal library.
Irene Bohus. 1940. Portrait of Modesta.
Several of Bohus’ own paintings from her time in San Francisco are in U.S. museum collections. Portrait of Modesta (charcoal and colored chalks, 1939) is in the de Young Museum/Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and three works from 1940, including Mexican Boy, are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Bohus left San Francisco early in 1941 and eloped to Maryland with Orlando Weber Jr., ‘a society ornithologist’ and the son of a wealthy executive of a 500-million-dollar chemical corporation, whom she had first met a couple of years earlier. They married in Elkton, Maryland, in March 1941, and honeymooned in Mexico City. Later that year, Weber went birding in Chiapas and Bohus was given a major part in El barbero prodigioso, a comedic drama directed by Fernando Soler, released in 1942. Bohus’ first short-lived marriage ended in scandal and divorce. The acrimonious court proceedings included claims that Bohus had affairs with Diego Rivera; Guatemalan diplomat Luis Aguilar de León; a married Mexican Army officer, Lt. Cenfuejo; and German-born movie actor and director Fernando Wagner. For her part, Bohus wanted an annulment and brought a $250,000 lawsuit against her parents-in-law for ‘fraud and conspiracy.’
Bohus’ second marriage, to Mario José Sebastian, was more successful. She continued to paint, and occasionally exhibit, and undertook family portraits for several prominent Mexico City families until well into the 1970s. And her influence lives on. Among other lasting achievements, Bohus was an inspiration to Marta Wiley, a talented and ambitious young art prodigy in Mexico City, who has built an extraordinarily varied and successful career as a renaissance thinker, performer and artist.
- Artists with links to both the 1939-40 San Francisco World’s Fair and Lake Chapala.
My 2022 book Lake Chapala: A Postcard History uses reproductions of more than 150 vintage postcards to tell the incredible story of how Lake Chapala became an international tourist and retirement center.
Sources
- Hayden Herrera. 1983. Frida: A biography of Frida Kahlo. Harper and Row.
- Justino Fernandez. 1954. “Catálogo de las Exposiciones de Arte en 1953.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.
- Daily News (New York, New York), 15 May 1942, 228.
Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via the comments feature or email.
Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).