Frida Kahlo is recognized today as one of the most important Mexican artists of the 20th century. She was married to Diego Rivera, the prominent muralist, and preferred to consider her art subordinate to his. However, since the 1980s her art has achieved a revival and heightened status and she now holds a top position in a list of great female artists as well as influential Hispanic painters. She has served as inspiration to many painters since.
Yesterday was the last day of the Frida Kahlo special exhibition yesterday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art showing photographs and about 40 paintings ranging in size and medium including the Mexican ex voto style (offering or thanks for prayers answered). Frida painted about 200 paintings, so this was a showing of almost a quarter of her total output. As usual, each ticket included an excellent audio tour with about 30 commentaries from the curators, directors and historians explaining in detail the works and events in Kahlo’s life. This show’s audio also had several commentaries from living contemporary artists of all sorts describing how they were influenced and inspired by Kahlo’s life and art.
Her work was considered Surrealism, though she commented that she didn’t know she was a Surrealist until she was told she was. She said she painted what she needed to paint. This includes deep insights into her own tragic life which gives her expression a dreamlike, and often nightmarish, look and feel to it. Being self taught, her style was somewhat akin to the French painter Henri Rousseau, who was also self-taught and often considered a Surrealist.
As an active Communist, much of Frida’s artwork is political in nature, often showing her experiences in Capitalist America, and her Communist heroes. These paintings show her heritage as well as modernity, with ancient gods and Mexican folklore sometimes making appearances. Her paintings showed a tragic life of a tumultuous marriage and divorce, spinal operations, and a miscarriage. She was heartbroken to find she could not bear children and this is clearly evident in many of her myriad self portraits, where we often see the significance of pets as in the one above. Some show her with her monkeys all around her, touching her, as she holds one of them like a child. This shows up in a later painting where she holds a baby Diego in one of the few showing him subordinate to her. In order to keep Diego, she said, she must treat him as a child.
My favorite piece of the show is the self portrait above called “Self Portrait With Hummingbird and Thorns.” We see a straight-on view of the artist staring at us with indifferent eyes as a cat stalks the dead hummingbird hanging at her neck. Meanwhile a monkey, perhaps being a little too playful, tugs on the twigs which wrap around her neck, thus forcing the thorns into her skin. The sight of blood is a common occurrence, sometimes coming from gashes, wounds, the miscarriage, a suicide, and even her own exposed circulatory system complete with her heart and arteries as she fruitlessly tries to stop the bleeding with surgical clamps.
Despite all her pain and hardships, her self portraits never seem to be a cry for help or attention but rather they are like log entries depicting the events of her life. We see almost the exact same unemotional expression in her face every time. Even in her photographs of lying in bed immobile from operations, we see the same plain look- not begging for help, never the tragic victim.
The Neomexicanismo art movement of the early 80’s helped to bring public awareness to Frida’s work and several movies and documentaries have since been made about life and work. In 2002, the movie Frida helped to show a young audience all about Frida, played by Salma Hayek, alongside Alfred Molina as Diego.
Leave a comment