"Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird," 1940
Frida Kahlo
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Feb. 20 - May 18, 2008
We were in Philly for a wedding, and took the opportunity to head over to the beautiful Philadelphia Museum for the blockbuster Frida Kahlo show. Even with our $23 timed tickets, there was a long line to get in. Once inside, thankfully it wasn't too crowded.
More than just an artist, Frida's a phenomenon. Little known until some 30 years after her death, her star has steadily ascended thanks to a couple popular biographies, a few kind words by pop singer Madonna and the excellent 2002 biopic starring Salma Hayek.
The cult of Frida is born of her riveting and revealing autobiographical-allegorical self portraits. More than with most artists, it's essential to know something about Frida to know her art. Organized by Walker Art Center in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the show does a commendable job of joining her compelling story and her stunning art. The first major exhibit in the U.S. in 15 years, it's timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mexico's most famous art export.
At the start of the show are several rooms dedicated to the display of a never-before-seen collection of Frida's own photographs. Here are small black & whites marking moments in her life like a family portrait with Frida wearing her father's three-piece suit; her marriage at age 22 to the famous muralist Diego Rivera, 20 years her senior; and the artist in traction following one of the 30 surgeries she endured to treat painful complications from a bus accident that shattered her spine.
This physical pain and the emotional pain of a rocky relationship with Rivera and her inability to have children are all major themes in her work.
She appears a sort of religious martyr in "The Broken Column" (1944), with nails piercing her skin and her torso broken open to reveal a cracked stone column in place of her spine. Amazingly candid, "Henry Ford Hospital"(1932) depicts her miscarriage, revealing her naked and bleeding in a hospital bed, connected by red ribbons or blood vessels to six floating objects, including a fetus and snail. "The Two Fridas" (1939), painted after a breakup with Rivera, shows two versions of the artist sitting side by side and encircled a blood vessels that connect a portrait of her ex-husband with the Fridas' two hearts.
Bizarre allegorical elements like the column, snail and body parts convey a kind of heightened reality that has much in common with surrealism. And while Frida did not see herself as part of that school, Mr. Surrealism himself Andre Breton was one of her earliest champions, organizing a couple of exhibitions that included her work and led to the sale of one her paintings to the Louve -- the first 20th Century Mexican work sold to the museum. Famously he likened her art to "a ribbon around a bomb."
Breton was onto to something. Take the breathtaking masterpiece "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird" (1940) (see above), simultaneously pretty and placid while being threatening and affecting. Cut by thorns, she bravely reveals herself, holding us in her steady gaze.
(Interesting aside: Ms. Museum Hours noticed that Frida is actually more beautiful in her photographs than in her self portraits. Reversing the usual tenancy of the artist to nip and tuck, she adds a unibrow and mustache -- perhaps to further convey the pain or ugliness she feels.)
More than surrealism, the exhibition informs us that her work is influenced by traditional Mexican ex-voto folk paintings, several of which are on display. These typically illustrate a catastrophe such as an accident or a bedridden person and offer gratitude for the intervention of a saint.
A striking example of this approach is "A Few Small Nips" (1935), which tells the true story of a woman brutally stabbed to death by her husband, who told the judge that the multiple stab wounds were just "a few small nips." It is one of only a few of Frida's paintings that aren't self-portraits that I liked (her later cosmic work especially, falls flat).
One quasi-self-portrait, "My Dress Hangs There" (1933), is her f-you to New York City, the capital of capitalism, which she visited with her communist husband. The symbolic landscape depicts her traditional Mexican dress strung between a toilet and a sports trophy -- what she saw as the City's prevailing preoccupations -- and a landscape filled by a breadline, overflowing trash, gas pumps and a church with a dollar-sign stain glass window.
She appears a victim, but is fiercely singular and independent, Frida's story fascinates. But it's her haunting art that speaks to us, allowing us to feel we know her spirit and can feel her pain. Suffering and art have long been intertwined (the painter Brice Marden once remarked that "painting says pain in it"). Frida's work embodies this truth more than any. In my mind she is one of the greatest self-portraitists in art history, right up there with Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso.
