'Frida Kahlo' at Art Museum (3rd review)

Artist? Mexican? Woman?
My obsession with Frida Kahlo

F. LENNOX CAMPELLO

In 1975 my parents were vacationing in Mexico City with another couple from New York, which is where my folks had lived since fleeing Cuba as political refugees in the early ‘60s. I was stationed in Florida, finishing my first year in the U.S. Navy, satisfying my desire to see the world before I went to college. When my parents invited me to spend a few days sampling Mexico City and its nightlife and food, I readily acquiesced.

But I hardly spent any time with them. At 19, my interests were more focused on girls, cheap booze and sightseeing. It was while visiting a museum during the last few days of my visit that I accidentally discovered Frida Kahlo.

I remember walking into the museum salon where The Two Fridas hung. This was her largest work, painted in 1939: two gigantic Fridas sitting against an El Greco sky, holding hands and sharing a bloodline. One is a Mexican Frida in her Tehuana dress; the other Frida is bloodied and the dripping vein paints small red flowers on her white dress— perhaps a contemporary European wedding dress of the times.

It was love, or more like witchcraft, at first sight. This large, spectacular painting swallowed my visual senses and attention as no work of art would do again until I first encountered Velasquez's Las Meninas at the Prado in Madrid eight years later.

At that first exposure, I became addicted to the work and imagery of this Champagne Communist Mexican virago. I recall sitting down in the room where The Two Fridas was hung, copying the painting through a pencil sketch done on gift wrapping vellum paper.

‘Just Diego Rivera’s wife’

Kahlo left me gasping for knowledge about her and her work. Her imagery was like nothing I’d seen before, even in a New York childhood that often included daylong trips to the Brooklyn Museum, the Met and MOMA. The more of her work that I discovered, the more I became obsessed with learning about her. In 1975 and the first few years that followed, this wasn't exactly an easy task. In those years, at least in Mexico, Kahlo was still just Diego Rivera's wife, albeit a wife who also happened to paint. Rivera was perhaps Mexico's best-known artist and womanizer, and their relationship was turbulent, to say the least. It also provided the subject matter for some of Kahlo's best-known works. But Kahlo, whose art now represents "Mexicanity" to its most profound depth, was essentially ignored in her own country during and after her lifetime.

In subsequent years I created hundreds of drawings, etchings, oil paintings, watercolors and sculptures about Kahlo. So you can imagine my burning interest in the Art Museum’s current massive Kahlo exhibition, the first in nearly 15 years devoted to Kahlo's work. It includes more than 40 of Kahlo's paintings, including many that have never been exhibited before, and others that have never been seen in the U.S.

Flouting the post-modernists

Kahlo's Mexicanity would grow and progress over the years, and she ferociously embraced the traditions of Mexican folk art and the colonial religious paintings known as "ex-votos"— votive narrative paintings commissioned by someone to celebrate or record an event where someone has survived a dangerous event. The post-modernist war cry of “It's been done before" was something Kahlo flouted with reckless abandon.

Another incarnation of Frida Kahlo was her ability to paint her own pain. Starting with a horrific accident in her youth, which left her body broken and subject to pain throughout the rest of her life as well as countless operations, Kahlo borrowed from her own physical pain to deliver images that make us wince from a different place than the images of a suicide or a stab victim.

It's there in The Broken Column (c. 1944) and also in Without Hope, and perhaps in one of her best-known paintings, The Little Deer, where the pain becomes arrows on the deer's body.

God, Picasso— and Frida

The Art Museum show offers surprises even for a Fridaphile like me, such as The Circle (undated), a round work that looks nothing like any Kahlo work that I have ever seen.

I hope this exhibition will kindle new interest not only among Kahlo’s legions of fans, but also from art scholars and researchers, as many holes and gaps in her life still need to be identified and explored.

Kahlo's obsession with her own image has been reflected in the work of many important contemporary artists and photographers who use their body and image as the canvas for their work. Like Picasso, Kahlo resisted labels and refused to produce one style or genre of work. “God is really only another artist," Picasso once said. "He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the ant. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things."



To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.