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 Vallarta Living | Art Talk | March 2008 
The Dual Roles of Frida Kahlo on Display in Exhibit
 Blake Gopnik - Washington Post
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| | (Georgia O'Keefe) | | |
Kahlo's crucial artwork is herself in a role: as a woman, and an ethnic woman.
There aren't many artists whose reputations have yo-yo'd like Frida Kahlo's.
During her lifetime and for decades still beyond her death in 1954, she was "just" the colorful painter-wife of the superstar Diego Rivera. Then, beginning in the 1970s, her star eclipsed his: She became the icon of female and ethnic empowerment and of radical self-expression.
And now she may be starting to lose out again. Lots of artists that I've talked to say they've had enough of her: In light of current art, her painting can seem overwrought and underskilled, more fussy than profoundly complex. There's something to those complaints about the paintings, but I also think they get the artist wrong. That's because it's not Kahlo's paintings that matter; what matters is the larger act of self-creation they document. She was a master of performance art before the term was coined.
HER ROLE
Her crucial artwork was herself in a role: as a woman, and an ethnic woman, and an ethnic woman artist such as the world had never seen.
It took Kahlo a while to come up with that trademark character. At least for a moment, one day in 1926, Kahlo wondered how much she wanted to be known as a woman at all. A formal photograph of the Kahlo family taken that year shows everything as it should be, with Frida as tidy and composed as other members of the bourgeois clan - except that the 19-year-old is dressed in one of her father's suits and wears her hair slicked back like a man's. That first glimpse of Kahlo gives a hint that, for the rest of her life, who she makes herself out to be will be as important as what she makes as a painter.
Mostly, she doesn't take the transvestite tack (though there are moments when her self-portraits try it on). Instead, she constructs a vision of herself as an idiosyncratic woman, immersed in her own homemade visions of femininity and Mexicanness and resistance to norms - social, sexual, artistic and political.
One of the most important and unusual features of Philadelphia's Frida show is that it lets us watch the building of that vision from the outside, through the eyes of others, as well as in the more constricted view that Kahlo's paintings give.
The show begins with more than 100 photos of the artist, taken from the 400 now held in the private Vicente Wolf collection in New York and never before on public view. (They were once owned by Kahlo herself.) Of all these stunning pictures, by some of the great names in modern photography, there's hardly one in which Kahlo doesn't look as though she's onstage, dressed up rather than just dressed. She wears thick lipstick even for a sickbed photo where most of her face is hidden by medical straps. Kahlo appearing out of costume or out of character would be like Picasso giving up his brush.
Kahlo adopted and adapted an eccentric, hybrid version of Mexican folk dress. She could cross a magenta rebozo shawl across her chest in the bandoleer style of Mexico's female revolutionaries, the famous soldaderas, and also wear colonial white lace. Cloth she got from craftspeople in the country's south could be mixed and matched with ancient jewelry left over from defeated Aztec cultures farther north. And she topped off those outfits with a range of exotic hairdos and garlands that mixed indigenous styles and invented conceits. Like her unpolished painting style, Kahlo's alien costume sets her up as an authentic "primitive" - a tribe of one - unsullied by the studied artificiality of European modern art.
HUNGARIAN NAME
Given how well Kahlo established herself as one of the most Mexican of artists, I wonder how many of her American fans even realize that the name "Kahlo" is, in fact, Hungarian. It arrived in the New World only when the artist's Jewish-born father Wilhelm (later Guillermo, and an atheist) emigrated from Germany in 1891. He married into a family that was equally hybrid, with roots in both colonial Spanish and indigenous Indian culture.
Kahlo's self-portraits are often praised as acts of searching self-inquiry, but I find them more theatrical than probing. Frida the boldly authentic Mexicana is, of course, front and center in her self-portraits. Those paintings (about half her total works) actually make her out to be less gorgeous than she comes off in the photographs, maybe because personal beauty isn't part of her artistic image as a monkey-taming "primitive."
The same constructed identity is evident in everything Kahlo paints, whatever the subject. Her crude style, for instance, always borrows from the votive paintings, known as retablos, turned out by Mexico's anonymous folk painters. They made them for devout Mexicans, in commemoration or anticipation of miraculous relief from suffering. By painting as she does, Kahlo appropriates some of the exotic authenticity and fervor of those earlier pictures. ("Magic" imagery from much older Aztec objects could also find a place in her art.)
The abstruse, even unintelligible symbolism Kahlo sprinkles through her work also sets her up as a cultural rarity, out in a world of her own. By using imagery that is so hard to understand, Kahlo becomes something like the last speaker of some vanished tongue.
I can't say I admire Kahlo's faux-naif, pseudo-primitive way of painting. In the hands of an absolute sophisticate - which she was - it can seem cloying and contrived, or just unskilled. The handful of antique retablos on show in Philadelphia have more grace and emotional intensity than Kahlo's self-conscious derivations from them.
TOO MANY RIDDLES
And I don't have much patience for her symbol-slinging: Whatever wisdom her riddles finally reveal rarely repays their deciphering.
But the larger picture that Kahlo's art presents, of someone committed to investigating how identities get built - by building one herself, on canvas and in life - strikes me as absolutely radical and fascinating. It has parallels in Marcel Duchamp's experiments with gender-bending early in the last century. And it anticipates the great photographs Cindy Sherman made in the late 1970s, which let us watch as their everyday female protagonists (always played by the artist herself, as it happens) take on roles they've learned from Hollywood.
The weaknesses in Kahlo's paintings are irrelevant so long as you think of those pictures as nothing more than documents or ephemera left over from the larger creative project of her life.
Frida Kahlo is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, www.philamuseum.org. |
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