Kahlo the Wild

Robin Rice on Visual Art

by Robin Rice

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Published: Feb 19, 2008

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I watched about 20 minutes of Oprah the other day. A slight man persuaded women to strip down to their undies and hugged them while they tearfully discoursed on their jiggly thighs. The idea was to help women accept their imperfect bodies. However, my question today is: Would such a public display and conversation have been possible if not for Frida Kahlo?

Surely some painter would have eventually explored her own body, psyche and pain in paint, but Kahlo, the subject of a solo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, did it so beautifully. And so obsessively. The real Kahlo suffered all her adult life, physically as the result of polio and a horrific bus accident and psychologically, not least, from a battered and broken heart during her two marriages to egomaniacally unfaithful muralist Diego Rivera. Then, there were her numerous other love affairs with men and women.

According to catalogue essayist Victor Zamudio-Taylor, Kiki Smith called Kahlo the first modern artist because of her unflinching self-revelation. In some ways her physical pain and limitations might be compared to those of Toulouse-Lautrec decades earlier, but notice how he sublimated his sad story to that of the denizens of the demimonde whom he immortalized. Kahlo turned her personal misery into a cottage industry. She unites her image with nature in the form of monkeys, hummingbirds, parrots, dogs, butterflies and myriad specific plant species. Kahlo, martyr, becomes avatar of all.

Kahlo also sites her story iconographically in religious traditions. Raised Roman Catholic, she loved bloody depictions of Christ. From church art, she borrowed the grace, sometimes symmetry and always the rich color and texture that assuage the viewer's pain while permitting an artist to graphically depict gruesome details. In one self-portrait, Christ's crown of thorns becomes a necklace around Kahlo's throat.

She appropriated the conventions of the ex-voto, a popular form. Often a small painting on metal, it illustrates a wish or prayer or gives thanks for the fulfillment of one. In the naïve ex-voto style, A Few Small Nips (1935) illustrates the newspaper account of a wife-murderer's confession, depicting the victim bleeding so profusely that the frame of the picture is stained.

Just as Kahlo, a mestizo, wore indigenous Mexican campesino clothing and jewelry, she appropriated folkloric motifs in her paintings. A group of pre-Colombian objects is part of the show and one senses how the simple expressive forms may have influenced Kahlo, and, even more, Rivera's cubist vision. The painting by Kahlo that most reminded me of Rivera's work (generally very unlike hers) is the flower piece Magnolias (1945) in which fleshy creamy blossoms with one central and starkly exposed stamen contrast with dark green leaves.

In 1939, a painting by Kahlo became the first 20th-century Mexican artwork purchased by the Louvre. Self-anointed surrealist "Pope" André Breton aptly described her work as "a ribbon around a bomb." The fallout ignited diverse artistic imaginations. In her catalog essay, Hayden Herrera, author of the biography behind the 2002 film Frida, discusses a whole congregation of artists, including Philadelphia's Sarah McEneaney, who owe a debt to Kahlo.

The catalog essayists attempt to distance themselves from the cult of personality that has grown up around this artist. Still, the expansion of the show to include a large group of (admittedly fascinating) photographs of Kahlo and her circle, and the placement of these photographs at the beginning of the show, following two of the painter's most ravishing self-portraits and before the rest of her paintings, goes beyond contextualization. This impression is reinforced by a catalog with purple ribbon place markers, like a Bible or prayer book. Whatever the intent, though, those markers are very handy. All exhibition catalog can take on a quasi-cult character if the results are equally functional, but we should remember that painting must say more than "I hate my thighs." Frida's do.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Frida Kahlo

Through May 18, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, 215-763-8100, philamuseum.org.

 

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