Frida Kahlo / Tate Mod 2005

Tate Modern
Frida Kahlo exhibition
July 2005

Frida on White Bench, New York 1939. Photo: Nickolas Muray.

The drawings below – a selection of my humble sketches done at the Kahlo exhibition. It was an exhausting afternoon - there must have nearly 100 artworks in total, spread across 10 rooms. I am still unsure if I understand this artist. I have yet to pinpoint what is so great about her. Some artists paint to beautify, some to make a political statement. Yet others paint to express their emotions: some are good at masking their true feelings beneath the layers of paint, some purged their demons on canvas. It is not clear how much of that raw emotion is honesty and how much of it was dramatised? Wouldn't that be relative to individual experiences? Perhaps for her time, she braved the frontiers. Or maybe I should go watch the movie ... Below are comments from various readings that inform my knowledge of her life.

"Whilst her art has been enshrined in the popular imagination as a bohemian artist, a victim turned survivor, proto-feminist, sexual adventurer who challenged gender boundaries, and, with her mixed-race parentage, an embodiment of a hybrid, post-colonial world."*

She had an "enduring obsession with the universal cycle of life, and her search for harmony between dualistic principles such as life and death, male and female, light and dark, ancient and modern;"*

Kahlo was a tragic wreck from the word go. Struck by polio in childhood (which left her with a withered leg), then a near-fatal bus accident (body pierced by a trolley's metal handrail) – her life was a battle against the slow deterioration of her body, and countless operations and hospitalisations. Her pre-occupation with mortality and the intensity of her painting however, does not compare to the reality of her pain.

Self-portrait wearing a Velvet Dress, 1926.

'Her earliest-known portrait and her first serious painting. She made this for her boyfriend, fellow student Alejandro Gómez Arias.'* Strongly influenced by Rennaisance painters, she wrote to him, “Your ‘Botticelli’ is fine, but deep down you can see a certain sadness in her that, naturally, she cannot hide.”

The Bus, 1929.

" ... made the year she and Rivera married, she satirises the class divisions of Mexican society, portraying different types as they ride on the bus. The lower-middle class matron, the proletarian worker in blue overalls, the Indian mother with her infant, the capitalist gringo with a bulging money bag, all line up for our scrutiny. The modern young woman at the end of the bench could be taken for Kahlo herself.'*

" ... an attractive "primitive" showing all the ranks of Mexican society seated squarely together on a bench in a tram or else a tram-like bus. It is a reminder that Frida Kahlo took up painting after she was seriously injured when a tram ran into the bus in which she was travelling. On the bench is a cashier in his suit and weskit, blue-eyed as a Gallego, taking a bag of change to the bank with a bare-kneed flapper sitting next to him. Next to them are a ladino women with a basket and a dark-skinned skilled factory worker in overalls and tie with his tools. Here is Mexican society, lined up together, roughly but not rigidly stratified by ancestry and colour. But there is also present an "Indian" woman, shawled up like a Muslim, holding her baby like a Welsh grandmother, her awkward bundle like a furoshiki contrasting with the neat basket of the woman next to her." **

A Few Small Nips, 1935.

Kahlo loved Diego as much as Diego loved painting - obsessively. Rivera attributed her as: 'the only artist in the history of art who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings.' A Few Small Nips (1935) is based on newspaper accounts of a brutal murder. Kahlo related to a friend that it related to her feelings of 'being murdered by life'. Rivera's affair with her younger sister Cristina, had wounded her deeply. Her biographer Hayden Herrera, noted: "Every time Diego left her, there's another painting with tears or gashes."

Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera, 1931.

Wedding photograph, 1929. Photo: Victor Reyes

Their marriage consisted of love, affairs with other people, creative bonding, hate, and a divorce in 1940 that lasted only for one year. Their marriage has been called the union between an elephant and a dove, because Diego was huge and very fat, and Frida was small (a little over 5 feet) and slender. *****

Diego had the utmost regard for Frida's art. He wrote this glowing recommendation to Samuel Lewisohn about an early exhibition of her work: "I recommend her to you, not as a husband but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work, acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly's wing, loveable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life." ****

Exquisite Corpse.

In New York Frida spent little time painting. She visited with friends, went to movies, and spent a lot of time shopping. Otherwise, she became indolent. In eight months she produced one painting. She watched Diego paint on the scaffold while she "sucked hard candies." Herrera adds, "Another pastime was the game of cadavre exquis [exquisite corpse], an old parlor game adopted by the Surrealists as a technique to explore the mystique of accident. The first player starts by drawing the top of a body and then folds the paper so that the next player draws the next section without seeing how the figure has been begun. When Frida was a player, the resulting monsters were hilarious. She had a lurid imagination, and her fascination with sexual organs, also seen in the drawings in her journal and in a number of paintings, burst forth in the exquisite corpses." Frida was bad. One player recalls, "Some made me blush, and I do not blush easily." She would show an enormous penis, dripping with semen. When they unfolded the paper, they found a well-dressed woman with big bosoms, until they got to the penis. Diego laughed and said, "You know, women are far more pornographic than men." ***

The Little Deer, 1946.

'Kahlo's head is conjoined with the body of a stag, which is pierced with arrows. No doubt the work relates to Kahlo's suffering due to her failing health and turbulent relationship with Rivera, but it is also a summation of a world view in which different cultures and belief systems combine.'*

(More thoughts on this posting to come, please visit again)

Text credit note:
* from accompanying exhibition guide from Tate Modern.
** 'The Lies of Feminism, The Lies of Mexican Identity - a personal view of Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern' by Christie Davies. http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000505.php
*** 'Life Study' article in Provincetown Arts magazine, author uncredited. http://www.provincetownarts.org/2003coverarticle.html
**** 'The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo' a film by Amy Stechler, on the PBS website.
***** 'Biography of Frida Kahlo'. http://members.aol.com/fridanet/fridabio.htm