[The City of Detroit declared
a financial emergency in March 2013 and in July filed the largest
municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history. The Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of
Michigan declared Detroit bankrupt in December citing $18.5 billion in debt
and declaring that negotiations with its creditors were unfeasible. In
November 2014, the court approved a restructuring plan allowing the city to
begin exiting bankruptcy. Detroit successfully left
municipal bankruptcy with all its finances returned to city control in December
2014.
[After Detroit declared
bankruptcy in July 2013, creditors targeted the collection of the Detroit
Institute of Arts as a potential source of revenue. The state-appointed emergency manager
hired Christie’s, the art auction house, to determine the market
value of the art purchased with city funds.
To prevent the sale of the works, DIA supporters developed what was dubbed
“the Grand Bargain,” under
which the museum and the State of Michigan would raise sufficient funds to keep
the museum afloat and guarantee municipal workers’ pensions. In return, the City of Detroit would cede
ownership of the collection and the building to the non-profit entity that
already operated the museum. Though this
plan was challenged by some city creditors, last November, a judge approved the
Grand Bargain which didn’t require DIA to sell any art. Thousands of art-lovers in Detroit and
elsewhere breathed a huge sigh of relief.]
[On 15 March, a new exhibit, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
in Detroit, opened at DIA, and while the
show was conceived nearly a decade ago, its opening came right on the heels of
the happy outcome of the anxious 20-month bankruptcy scare. (The show is scheduled to close on 12 July.) In part one of “Rivera, Kahlo, and Detroit,”
I’ll discuss the two fascinating artists and set the scene for the creation of
the great murals Rivera painted on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts
in 1932-33.]
In 1932 and ’33, revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera
and his wife, painter Frida Kahlo, were living and working in what was then the
home of the world’s largest manufacturing industry, Detroit. He was creating the now-beloved and -esteemed
murals known as Detroit Industry on
the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in
Detroit, the new exhibit at that very DIA, throws a spotlight on the murals and 70 other works by both
painters showing the evolutions of their careers as well as the tensions
between their separate styles and approaches—which the New York Times characterizes as “a kind of contest
between a hefty hare and a tiny tortoise”—a tension that was also manifest in
their personal relationship as well.
Diego Maria de la
Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez (1886-1957)
was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, to a prosperous family. (He was
a twin, but his brother, Carlos, died when they were 14 months old.) Raised
a Catholic, Rivera acknowledged his heritage as a Converso, Mexicans whose
Jewish ancestors had been forced to convert during the Inquisition in 15th- and
16th-century Spain and Portugal, passed down through his mother’s line. (I posted an article on ROT on Chicano Americans in New Mexico who discovered their
Converso roots in the 20th century, “Crypto-Jews:
Legacy of Secrecy,” on 15 September 2009.)
Though he never practiced Judaism or affiliated with the Jewish
community in Mexico, in 1935, the then-famous painter wrote, “My Jewishness is
the dominant element in my life. From
this has come my sympathy with the downtrodden masses which motivates all my
work.” As an avowed communist, of
course, Rivera was an atheist.
The future muralist
began drawing the year after his brother died, using the walls of his family’s
home as his platform. His parents,
rather than getting angry, merely lined the house’s walls with canvases and
chalkboards and encouraged their son’s budding artistry. At the age of 10, Rivera was sent to Mexico
City to study at the Academy of San Carlos until 1905. In 1907, the governor of the State
of Veracruz sponsored his further art studies in Europe, first in Madrid
and then in Paris, the modern-art capital of the western world at that time. Like many young artists before him, Rivera
settled in Montparnasse, the bohemian center of Paris’s art scene, where he
became friends with such artists as Russian painter Chaim Soutine, Frenchman Henri
Matisse, Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani (who painted his portrait in 1914), French painter Robert Delaunay, Spaniard Pablo Picasso, and French
Cubist Georges Braque.
Under the influence of Picasso and Braque, both working in
the cubist style at the time Rivera arrived in Paris, the Mexican painter began
working in the new form, too. Between 1913
and 1917, the young artist painted cubist canvases until, inspired by Paul
Cézanne, he switched to Post-Impressionism.
(In 2004, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., mounted The
Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera:
Memory, Politics, Place, a small
exhibit of Rivera’s cubist works.) With this shift in style, Rivera’s art began
to attract notice and he exhibited in several Paris shows.
My impression of Rivera’s art of this period, however, is
that he began trying out all the current styles, the Cubism of Picasso, Braque,
and Marcel Duchamp; and the Post-Impressionism of Cézanne and Auguste Renoir, for brief
periods, trying to find his own voice.
(Rivera also experimented with Surrealism in the early ’40s, but it was
a short-lived exploration.) None of
these experiments lasted very long, and there weren't many cubist works in the NGA
show—and most of them were interesting only as curiosities the way Picasso's
realistic works as a young artist are. They merely contrast with the more
identifiable works of the maturer artists—in Rivera's case, the murals and
Mexican history and folklore he worked with for most of his career. In any case, the Mexican painter left Paris
in 1920 and traveled through Italy to study the art there, particularly the Renaissance
frescoes of Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca, and Masaccio.
Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 to take part in the
government-sponsored mural project planned by the new Minister of Education. Also involved in the effort were José
Orozco, David Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, all among Mexico’s most
renowned artists today. (Among my
favorite pieces in my parents’ art collection is Personaje de Perfil, a 1980 Tamayo print.) In January of the next year, Rivera
painted his first important mural, La
creación, in Mexico City’s National Preparatory School.
Upon his return
home, the young artist immediately joined the revolutionary movement, even
claiming to have fought with Emiliano Zapata against the dictatorship of Porfirio
Díaz to enhance his bona fides. (Zapata
was a leader of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-20, but Rivera never bore arms in
the struggle.) In 1922, the painter
helped found the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters and
Sculptors and subsequently joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), eventually
becoming a member of its Central Committee.
The painter’s first wife, Russian émigrée Angelina Bellof, had introduced
him to communism in Paris and he remained loyal to the party all his life—even if
the party wasn’t always loyal to Rivera.
(Disenchanted with
Rivera’s independence and individualism, after having invited the artist to
Moscow for the 10th anniversary celebration of the October Revolution in 1927,
Joseph Stalin expelled him from the Soviet Union for “anti-Soviet” activities. When he returned to Mexico, Rivera was
commissioned to paint a mural for the Secretariat
of Public Education, but the Mexican party saw in its depiction of a Trotskyite
leader who was assassinated in Mexico City evidence that Rivera knew about the
crime beforehand. The muralist was labeled
a Trotskyite himself and ousted from the Mexican party for ideological
“deviation.” Leon Trotsky, who became an adversary to Stalin in Russia, was
a friend of the Riveras and even spent 1937 as the houseguest of Rivera and
Kahlo, who was also a PCM member. Trotsky is reported to have had an affair with Kahlo
when he lived in her home. The Russian
revolutionary and his wife moved to their own house near Kahlo’s in 1940 and he
was assassinated there by Stalin’s agents in 1940. The artist, a somewhat fractious party member
from the beginning, though expelled by the PCM, spent the rest of his life
trying to get back in.)
Rivera’s domestic life was also tumultuous. He was famously married to Mexican artist
Frida Kahlo, but she was his third (and fourth—he married her twice) wife. Rivera’s first wife, Angelina Beloff, seven years his senior, was a Russian artist he met in Paris
the year she arrived there, 1909, and they married almost right away. The couple had a son, Diego, in 1916, but he
died in 1918 (possibly a victim of the Spanish influenza pandemic). When Rivera left Paris in 1921, he divorced
Beloff and left her behind—though she moved to Mexico herself in 1932 and did
most of her painting there. She died in
Mexico City in 1969, at the age of 90.
(While he was still married to Beloff, Rivera had a daughter, Marika, with Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska, a Russian-born
Cubist painter. Marika became a French
film actress in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s and died in England in 2010 at 90.)
In 1922, after he’d
returned to Mexico, he met and married Guadalupe Marín, a model and novelist. She figured in several of her husband’s
paintings, and was even the subject of a portrait by Kahlo, whom Rivera met
while he was married to Marín. Rivera
and Marín had two daughters, Guadalupe (born 1924) and Ruth (1927); Rivera
divorced Marín in 1929, the year he married Kahlo; she died in 1983 at 87.
When Rivera met
Kahlo, she was an art student of 22 and he was 43. They’d already been corresponding, as Kahlo
reached out to Rivera for advice and guidance for her career as an artist. They had a tempestuous marriage, and they
both had numerous affairs and dalliances.
(Some of Kahlo’s relationships were with women, notably Josephine
Baker.) They divorced in 1939 but remarried
a year later. Kahlo pursued her own
career, frequently living separately from her husband (though often near him),
and a year after her death in 1954, Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his agent for
eight years.
Magdalena Carmen
Frieda Kahlo y Calderón (1907-54) was born in Coyoacán, a small town on the
outskirts of Mexico City that’s now part of the metropolis. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a
German-born photographer (his birth name was Carl Wilhelm Kahl; when he arrived
in Mexico, he hispanicized it) and her mother, Matilde Calderón y González, part
Mexican Indian, worked in a jewelry store.
Frida Kahlo was the third of four sisters; there were two older half-sisters
from her father’s first marriage (which had left him a widower).
When Kahlo was but
three years old, the Mexican Revolution broke out, lasting for the next ten
years with sporadic gunfire erupting in the streets of Mexico City. (She often gave the year of her birth as 1910
to indicate that both she and revolutionary Mexico had begun life in the same
year.) At six, Kahlo contracted polio
which left her right leg thinner than her left.
She took to wearing long, brightly-colored peasant dresses, for which
she became famous, to cover the deformity.
She nonetheless participated in several sports.
In 1925, the teen schoolgirl was riding a bus which collided
with a streetcar. Kahlo was badly hurt,
suffering a list of serious injuries almost too daunting to read. Undergoing dozens of operations, she spent
three months recovering in a hospital encased in a full-body cast. Her injuries healed and she ultimately
recovered her ability to walk, but Kahlo suffered bouts of extreme pain
periodically throughout her life which forced her return to a hospital, and
several of the injuries permanently destroyed her ability to bear children. (As part of the DIA exhibit, on display is Accidente, a pencil sketch of the collision
drawn in 1926 while the then-novice artist was still recuperating.)
Kahlo had been heading for a medical career before her
accident but she abandoned that pursuit after her hospitalization. She taught herself to paint to pass the time
during her recuperation and she took to art professionally after her discharge. She was isolated for so much of her
convalescence, unable either to go anywhere or to see other people, that her
principal subject was herself. The
predominance of self-portraiture in Kalho’s work was the result: “I paint
myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” Her mother devised a special easel on which
Kahlo could paint in bed while she recovered and her father lent her some of
his brushes and paints, and the young patient used painting both to occupy
herself while she was sequestered and to convey her pain. Her best-known works—over 50 of her 140
paintings—are her self-portraits, usually in the colorful peasant dresses she
favored and frequently incorporating some kind of text in a banderole.
The portraits often continued to depict her persistent
suffering, including her inability to bear children, frequently in symbolic
representation. (Kahlo didn’t flatter
herself in her paintings, either, usually portraying herself with a slight
mustache and a bristling unibrow.) One
of Kahlo’s works in the DIA show, for example, is Henry Ford Hospital (The Flying
Bed) (1932), painted while she was in Detroit, showing the artist bleeding in
a hospital bed after the painful end of one of her pregnancies, either from a
miscarriage or a termination. Made soon
after her hospitalization, Henry Ford
Hospital depicts Kahlo as “glassy-eyed, with a frightened and drawn
expression,” writes Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post. Painted on metal to provide an industrial
quality that reflected the Detroit she’d come to hate (while Rivera admired its
industrial strength and productiveness), it depicts the looming skyline of Ford’s
River Rouge Plant in the background.
Kennicott describes the painting as showing “a woman in a hospital bed,
with the date and place inscribed on the bed rails. She lies naked and supine, yet connected by
cords to small anatomical, zoological and industrial images, including a fetus
or baby, a snail and a rendering of the pelvis.” (The exhibit also includes a pencil sketch of
the same image, displayed next to the painting.)
It was Kahlo who first approached Rivera, already a
well-known artist in Mexico City. While
he was at work on a mural in 1927, Kahlo went to him and showed him some of her
work, asking if he thought she was talented.
According to the common account, he recognized her gift immediately and
encouraged her and advised her. Though
he was 18 years older than she, Rivera was a frequent and welcome visitor at La
Casa Azul (The Blue House), the Kahlo home in Coyoacán. The tyro painter
had long admired the famous muralist, whom she first met when she would watch
him working on La creación at the
National Preparatory School the same year Kahlo became one of only 35 girls—among
2000 boys—enrolled there. Rivera never imposed
his style on her, rather encouraging Kahlo to find her own vision. She never deferred to him nor tried to
compete with him, either. Like her
mentor, however, Kahlo was very taken with indigenous Mexican folklore and
culture and often incorporated its imagery in her paintings, most notably the
monkey figure, a symbol of lust in Mexican mythology but seen as protective by
Kahlo (Self-Portrait with Monkey,
1945; oil on masonite).
Having abandoned Cubism as too “elitist,” Rivera painted his
murals and canvases in a Mexican-infused (he was heavily influenced by Mayan
and Aztec imagery and well as Mexican folk art) form of Socialist Realism, the
official art style of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Kahlo’s work was much more
fanciful. Often compared to Surrealism,
an artistic movement that drew on dreams and the unconscious, Kahlo rejected
the label, arguing that her work was less informed by her dreams than her
reality. (She’d seen a historic show in
New York before going to Detroit, the Surrealist group show at the Julien Levy
Gallery which displayed works by Picasso, Max Ernst, Duchamp, and Salvador Dalí. Six years later, Kahlo had her only solo U.S.
exhibit at Levy’s gallery, a well-received introduction of her work to this
country and a number of prominent artists who viewed the show. Surrealist icon André Breton wrote the introduction
to the exhibit’s catalogue—and then invited Kahlo to Paris in 1939 where she
exhibited her work again.)
The artist gained an international reputation in her
lifetime—one of her self-portraits, The
Frame (oil on aluminum and glass, 1938), was bought by the Louvre from the
Paris show, the first artwork by a 20th-century Mexican artist purchased by the
Paris museum—but mostly among cognoscenti and devotees of her husband’s art;
after her death at 47 in 1954, however, her fame and popularity increased. Mexican art became known to the public in the
1970s and ’80s, with exhibits in big museums around the world, featuring
indigenous Mexican artists including Kahlo.
Interest in and knowledge of Latin American art increased in galleries,
museums, and auction houses; Sotheby’s and Christie’s reported, for instance,
increases in sales from an average of $2.25 million in 1981 to $20.65 million in 1989. (The opera Frida by Robert Xavier Rodriguez premièred in Philadelphia in 1991
and the bio-film of the same name directed by Julie Taymor came out in
2002, with Salma Hayek portraying the artist and Alfred Molina as Rivera. Other works about Kahlo have appeared in
recent years, focusing attention on both her life and her art.)
Kahlo also became a potent symbol of female independence and
empowerment during the late 20th century in recognition of both her artistic
output, which always followed her own vision, and the way she lived her life,
from her style of dress to her intelligence and intellectual independence to
her candor and honesty to the hardships she endured and triumphed over to her
strength in adversity to her sexual unconventionality. Her style of dress made her something of a
fashion star as well, the subject of a Vogue
pictorial in 1937. (In 2012, a trove of
Kahlo’s clothes, including 300 dresses plus bathing suits and accessories, was
discovered at the Casa Azul museum, secreted from public view for 50 years by
Rivera’s instructions. They went on
exhibit in November of that year.)
Kahlo’s art, which combined the folk-art styles of Mexico
and South America with classical and modern European forms (her early paintings
have been compared to Renaissance portraits), explored her private experiences
while also making political and social points.
In addition, as Hayden Herrera, author of Frida: A Biography of Frida
Kahlo (Harper & Row, 1983), wrote, “Although her paintings record
specific moments in her life, all who look at them feel that Frida is speaking
directly to them.” In the words of
the Times’s Roberta Smith, who also
compared Rivera’s paintings to “a kind of cathedral,” while Kahlo’s are “portable
altarpieces for private devotion,” “Her work is everything Rivera’s art is not:
small in size and suffused with personal emotion and existential torment.” Like Rivera, she used broad areas of vibrant
color and a consciously naïve painting style.
She frequently incorporated elements of Mexican archaeology and pre-Columbian
art in her self-portraits, juxtaposing them with fantastical and strange
images. She shocked many with the
depictions of her fantastic images—Surrealism was still a new form—and her
frank display of sexuality. Her works
are still seen as “graphic and groundbreaking,” in the words of the Detroit News’s Louis Aguilar on the
occasion of the 80th anniversary of Rivera’s DAI frescoes. (She was commissioned by Clare Booth Luce in
1938 to do a portrait of the publisher’s wife and her friend, actress Dorothy
Hale, who’d just committed suicide. It
was to be a traditional portrait as a gift for Hale’s grieving mother but instead,
Kahlo painted the story of Hale’s suicidal jump from a New York high rise. The finished painting, The Suicide of
Dorothy Hale, 1939,
horrified Luce—though critics praised it.)
(Another disturbing work, My Birth, 1932, is part of a series depicting significant
events in Kahlo's life which Rivera had encouraged her to create. Kahlo wrote in her journal that the painting
shows her giving birth to herself. It’s
a gory scene in which the artist’s grossly oversized head is emerging from the
mother’s womb as a puddle of blood forms between the mother’s spread legs. Her chest and head are covered by a sheet and
over the bed’s headboard, a portrait of Our
Lady of Sorrows weeps. The New York Times characterized the
painting as “a bloody depiction
of childbirth whose candor [is] astonishing even in today's unprudish world.” Now owned by Madonna, one of Kahlo’s
best-known fans, My Birth can be disquieting
and the singer has said she uses it to determine who will be a friend and who
won’t: anyone who doesn’t like the painting won’t be welcome.)
Despite the influences of movements such as Surrealism and other
artists, including her husband, Kahlo’s style was uniquely her own, immediately
distinctive and emotionally evocative. She’s
become recognized today as an artist of daring and originality. According to the Post’s Kennicott, the couple’s yearlong sojourn in
Detroit was a turning point for Kahlo. When
she arrived in the city, Kennicott observes, she was painting in her husband’s
“shadow,” exhibiting simplicity and naïveté; while in Detroit, her art gained
depth and complexity. While her subject
often remained herself (she also did portraits of others and still lifes), her
paintings explored ideas beyond the personal to the world around her. The inclusion of her vision of the cold, industrial
Ford plant behind her naked, bleeding body in Henry Ford Hospital, Kennicott points out, demonstrates this
expansion. (The image of the plant
doesn’t exist in the earlier pencil sketch of the scene.) Many of the symbolic figures Kahlo put into
her canvases also reveal a cognizance of wider social and political issues
almost as emphatically as Rivera’s portrayals of workers, peasants, and
radicals. Using her own life as a vehicle,
Kahlo’s art championed the struggle of women to overcome the traditional
barriers of gender. Upon her arrival in
Detroit, in answer to a reporter’s question whether she, too, was a painter,
Kahlo said unabashedly, “Yes, the greatest in the world.” As if to confirm this, the Mexican government
declared her art to be “cultural patrimony of the nation” in 1984 (an honor
also bestowed on her husband). In the
late 20th century, Kahlo became an inspiration and model for a whole generation
of artists from many different communities: Chicanos, Latinos, feminists, LGBT’s,
and young Mexicans.
Rivera’s communist leanings led him to sympathize with the struggles of
the Mexican workers and peasants. The
revolutionary artist insisted, in fact:
To be an artist, one must first be a man,
vitally concerned with all problems of social struggle, unflinching in
portraying them without concealment or evasion, never shirking the truth as he
understands it, never withdrawing from life.
For Rivera, all art was a form of propaganda—or education,
depending on the viewer’s perspective—and his art made people take sides,
regardless of their original point of view.
“Rivera thought that art could change the world,” says Lynn Zelevansky,
curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at the time it hosted a Rivera retrospective.
“So when he did this work, he did it to
communicate real values. They were
teaching tools.” Zelevansky adds that
one of his major thrusts is going
to be this sort of diary of Mexican daily life told from the view of the lower
classes, and he has a vision in his art of a kind of utopia that is a
multiracial, multicultural utopia, and these figures are the embodiment of that
vision.
(It was a sentiment that, when he put it into practice in
the United States, got him into difficulties at times. Notes Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum
of Latin American Art: “Diego would always affirm that it didn’t matter who
sponsored the mural as long as the mural itself was ideologically correct, or at
least truthful to his convictions.” The
DIA murals caused not a little consternation among Detroit’s capitalist and
religious leaders, and the artist’s view of truth and history so angered his
sponsors at New York’s Rockefeller Center, the über-capitalist Rockefeller family, that John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,
ordered the mural Man at the Crossroads,
which he’d commissioned from Rivera for the main lobby of the RCA Building at
Rockefeller Center, destroyed in 1934 before it was completed.)
The artist had
quickly risen in the esteem of his countrymen and in Mexico he became “a
legendary figure on the order of George Washington, Babe Ruth and Charles
Lindbergh” here in the States. For his
people and even the government of Mexico. Rivera was seen as the “definer of
Mexico’s national myth, a champion of its popular uprisings and its fertile mix
of races and cultures.” In the rest of
the world, however, he was yet to be recognized as anything more than a minor
Cubist from his days in Paris or a sidelight to contemporary art and “a master
propagandist for the new Mexican state.”
Zelevansky asserts that Rivera became
one of the great innovators of 20th century art, because what he does
is he takes everything that he’s learned in Europe from European modernism, and
he melds it with the art of ancient Mexico, Mayan and Aztec art, to come up
with a new form that will allow him to express social and political ideas on a
broad scale.
After his death,
however, the art world was beginning to catch up with Rivera’s native country
in its estimation of his importance. By
the time of DIA’s 1986 Diego Rivera:
A Retrospective in celebration of the centennial of his birth, his
status had elevated to somewhere around the second rank of world artists. For a time in the ’70s and ’80s, his
reputation as an artist was eclipsed by that of Kahlo’s. Following the Cleveland show (which
subsequently traveled to Los Angeles, Houston, and Mexico City), some art
critics changed their tunes. Steven Litt
of the Plain Dealer wrote that “Rivera’s art is still politically useful
. . . . It’s also very, very good, which
amply justifies all the renewed attention.”
Co-organizer of Art and Revolution, Luis-Martín Lozano, a Mexico
City-based independent curator, asserted, “[N]ow it’s time—however belatedly—to
reconsider Mexican artists’ role in the international scheme of Modern Art, and
Rivera is a good place to start.” In the
Austin Chronicle, Gerald E. McLeod affirmed that the Houston
exhibit “takes the artist’s varied talent out of the shadow of his great murals
and reveals the full range of his remarkable career.”
One reason for the
slow development in critical esteem is that Rivera’s masterworks are
universally considered his murals, few examples of which exist outside of
Mexico and which, by their very nature, can’t travel to exhibits around the
world so that viewers, critics or the general public, can see and appreciate
them. Rivera’s easel paintings have been
given short shrift as representatives of his art—until, that is, such shows as A
Retrospective, Cleveland’s Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution (1999),
and now Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit. (I don’t count NGA’s The Cubist Paintings
of Diego Rivera because it was a very small show and
narrowly focused. In addition, by 2004,
any reevaluation of Rivera’s significance had already been effected.) At the end of the 20th century, two important
new biographies of the Mexican artist, Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life
of Diego Rivera by Patrick Marnham
(Knopf, 1998) and Diego Rivera by
Pete Hamill (Harry N. Abrams, 1999), were issued in this country, helping to
focus attention on his art. Another
explanation for the reexamination was that by the turn of the 21st century,
Mexico had finally moved past its revolutionary past (the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, or PRI, lost the majority in the Mexican congress in 1997
for the first time since its founding and lost the presidency in 2000),
communism was largely dead (except for a few notable pockets), and the dawn of
the age of industrialism was a distant memory.
Rivera’s art could now be looked at for its aesthetics rather than its
political and social commentary.
[I
have deliberately elided over some of the more complex and problematic elements
of the life and work of both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo here. To have broached these topics, such as their
embrace of Stalinism (notwithstanding a friendship with Trotsky), Rivera’s
conflict with the Rockefellers over Man at the Crossroads,
or Kahlo’s belief (despite later genealogical research to the contrary) that
her father was a Jew, would have expanded this summary to twice its present
length.
In the New York Times of 4 September, art critic Roberta Smith published the following review of 'Frida Kahlo: Mirror Mirror . . .,' running at Throckmorton Fine Arts through 19 September:
ReplyDelete"The legacy and the cultlike status of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) share three inextricable strands: her intensely autobiographical paintings; the pain-racked yet fully lived life that inspired her work; and the many photographic portraits in between that document and mythologize her fierce, ever stylish beauty. The power of Kahlo’s portraits is evident in this exhibition of nearly 40 taken by more than a dozen photographers, including Carl Van Vechten, Gisèle Freund, Imogen Cunningham and Lola Álvarez Bravo.
"The earliest shows Kahlo at 19 and already insuperably self-possessed, if not magnetic. It was taken in 1926 by her father, Guillermo, a professional photographer (which may explain her palpable ease with the camera), a year after a near-fatal traffic accident that would necessitate 35 surgeries throughout her life.
"Three years later, she married her great love, the prominent Mexican painter Diego Rivera, 20 years her senior, and quickly emerged as a celebrity in her own right, while pursuing her art and frequent extramarital affairs with members of both sexes. One lover, the photographer Nickolas Muray, photographed Kahlo in color — including a 1939 shot for the cover of Vogue — revealing the vividness lost to black-and-white film.
"Kahlo rarely breaks character. She almost always looks both regal and seductive, her gravity enhanced by her infrequent smiles. (She found her teeth unattractive.) Her love of clothes is evident, and she seems never to have been less than camera-ready, with braids twisted around her head, usually wearing the rebozo, an Otomi peasant blouse and along skirt typical of traditional Mexican garb, with impressive, sometimes pre-Columbian jewelry. The show includes an intricately smocked and embroidered Otomi that she had made, as she did the simple calfskin jacket that she wears in two photographs from 1935.
"A 1951 photograph by Florence Arquin, an artist from Chicago, shows Kahlo after one of her last surgeries, in a plaster cast that she had painted with a hammer and sickle and a fetus, symbolizing her failed attempts to have a child. The cast sits at the center of this exhibition, an auratic relic fully commensurate with both her art and her cult status."
~Rick
On 20 May 2016, the New York Times reported that on 12 May Chistie's sold Frida Kahlo's 1939 oil-on-metal painting 'Dos Desnudos en el Bosque (La Tierra Misma)' for $8 million, an auction record for Kahlo and the highest purchase price at that date for a Latin American artist's work. The report went on to state that the Kahlo record was surpassed by Phillips Auction House on 20 May in a private sale to Eduardo F. Costantini, founder and president of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba), of Diego Rivera's 1928 painting 'Baille en Tehuantepec' for $15.7 million.
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