*Artist's Corner- An Exotic Flower- The Art Of Frida Kahlo

In Honor Of Frida Kahlo At The Museum Of Fine Arts In Boston-

February 27 to June 16, 2019-

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Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular

February 27, 2019 – June 16, 2019
Saundra B. and William H. Lane Galleries (Gallery 332) and Saundra B. and William H. Lane Galleries (Gallery 334)

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The influence of Mexican folk art on Kahlo’s work and life

Like many artists in Mexico City’s vibrant intellectual circles, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) avidly collected traditional Mexican folk art—arte popular—as a celebration of Mexican national culture. She drew inspiration from these objects, seizing on their political significance after the Mexican Revolution and incorporating their visual and material qualities into her now iconic paintings.

Following the recent acquisition of Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) (1928), this is the MFA’s first exhibition on Frida Kahlo. It tightly focuses on Kahlo’s lasting engagements with arte popular, exploring how her passion for objects such as decorated ceramics, embroidered textiles, children’s toys, and devotional retablo paintings shaped her own artistic practice. A selection of Kahlo’s paintings—including important loans from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—is brought together with representative examples of arte popular. Bringing fresh attention to Kahlo as an ambitious, ever-evolving painter, this exhibition also opens broader discussions about the influences of anonymous folk artists on famed modern painters.

The MFA’s mission is to be a meeting place of world cultures. Acknowledging the cultural heritage of the artist, gallery labels for this exhibition are provided in both English and Spanish.

La misión del Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) es ser un lugar de encuentro de las culturas del mundo. En reconocimiento a la herencia cultural del artista, los textos de la galería para esta exposición se ofrecen en inglés y español.

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By Laura Perkins

Honestly although I have known the name Frida Kahlo since back in the 1970s when we down to Mexico and along the way went to the famous Blue House Frida and Diego Rivera shared I was not familiar with her work as I was with Rivera and the other male muralists for which Mexico was then famous. I got more familiar with her work indirectly through the film Frida although I would not say I was well versed even then. What I connected Frida to more than art, or rather who I connected Frida to, was the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky who persecuted by Stalin and his agents was on the planet without a place to stay. Frida and Diego through their connections got Trotsky into the country.  Although I had a Trotskyist boyfriend at the time I went to Mexico I was unaware, as I believe he was since he never mentioned it then, of the short love affair between Frida and Trotsky (which would culminate in a Frida painting dedicated to Trotsky now in the Women’s Art Museum down in Washington).       

My real introduction to Frida, live and in person, was several years ago when the MFA displayed (as in this exhibit) her famous Two Peasant Women painting which in many ways shows her artistic skills to advantage and has the addition advantage of showing how close she was to her deeply held Mexican roots. That alone is reason enough to see this exhibition at the MFA if you are in or near Boston between now and June.      

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip On Frida Kahlo (with music in Spanish). No wonder Leon Trotsky (as well as her husband, Diego Rivera)was smitten by her charms.

DVD REVIEW

The Life And Times Of Frida Kahlo, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and others, PBS Productions, 2006

The last time that the name of the Mexican artist extraordinaire, Frida Kahlo, was mentioned in this space was in a review/ commentary of a commercial movie done about her life, “Frida” and an article in the New York Review of Books (May 15, 2008) analyzing her work The article had reminded how much I liked that film, especially the performance by Ms. Hayek (who received an Oscar nomination for her efforts and who bore a striking resemblance to Frida in the film). I have remained fascinated by Kahlo’s art (and by her life, intertwined as it was with the fates of the revolutionary artist Diego Rivera, and for a short time, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky). In the search for more information I ran across this PBS production that goes into much greater detail about her trials and tribulations as a person, an artist, a lover and cultural icon.

The substance of the documentary includes much biographical detail missing in the commercial film that as is almost always true with such commercial efforts spent much more time on her troubled relationship with Diego Rivera and her physical and mental problems that resulted from a severe, life-threatening accident when she was a teenager. This film moreover placed Frida’s life in the context of the exceptional cultural milieu that developed as a result of the bloody Mexican revolutionary period from 1910-20, the breaking up the old colonial mentality with its emphasis on European culture and the dominant role of Catholic Church. Additionally, it addressed Frida’s various romantic exploits (both male and female including with the above-mentioned Trotsky), the relationship between her art and her inner physical and mental turmoil and her struggle, under the weight of Rivera’s fame, to gain recognition as an artist in her own right.

I mentioned in that previous review that the “New York Review” article placed much of Kahlo's artistic work, as reflected in her strong physical and psychic attachment to Mexico, squarely in the camp of naturalist painters. I noted there that I was not enough of an art devotee to make comment on that critique, however, from the several paintings of Kahlo’s that I have seen up close that I would argue a little more toward the surrealist school that virtually every Mexican artist in the 1920’s and 1930’s drew from as they created their work. The various commentaries presented here only make me feel more certain that she was closer to that school than the naturalist school. Frida was, in the words of the French ‘high priest’ of surrealism, Andre Breton a natural self-trained surrealist. That comment hits the mark.

But enough of that argument for now. This film, in its own way, especially through the comments of the “talking heads” that almost by definition are a part of a PBS production, by presenting Frida’s various psychic pains (failure to have the children she desperately wanted, her topsy- turvy relationship with Rivera as she tries to make her own space in the art world and the underlying tensions of combining politics and artistic endeavor) gives a very fine gloss on the trials and tribulations of being a Mexican woman artist in the early part of the 20th century.

Note: Another impetus for my interest in Frida is that for this political junkie and admirer of Leon Trotsky the names Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera conjure up political connections as much as art. One of the strands that briefly is given notice here is this couple’s relationship with the exiled Trotsky when Mexican President Cardenas granted him a visa in 1937. All sources that I have read and photographs that I have seen have mentioned that Trotsky was smitten with Frida’s exotic beauty (to the furor of his long time companion ‘wife’, Natalia). I have noted elsewhere that the old time revolutionaries, especially the Russians, were extremely reticent about discussing personal sexual matters in their memoirs and autobiographies. Trotsky was no exception. Apparently, according to this film, Trotsky and Frida had a brief affair. That clears up a question that I had about a scene in the commercial film. In any case I can now, as always, concentrate on Trotsky’s political wisdom. And Frida’s strangely exotic paintings.