Frida Kahlo Introduces Diego Rivera (LatinoLink)

[nopa...@yahoo.com]

What hasn't been said about Frida already? Who cares? She is one of those
great and soulful artists whom one can keep returning to for a lifetime, only
to continue to find new insights in and into her remarkable work. I loved her
rebuke to Andre Breton's (the original Surrealist movement's self-styled
leader) attempt to characterize her as one of his own, quoted below. As they
say, you go, girl! :)

Breton also said that "In the work of (Jose Guadalupe) Posada, we find the
very source of black humor in the Americas." Get a life, Andre. :) Breton was
an important influence and good Surrealist writer at first, but then he took
himself far too seriously, and seemed to annoint himself Pope of Art. Too
bad.

This is a cool article. I hope the culture-loving French public enjoys and is
elucidated by the show. -Dean

Story copyright 1998 LatinoLink

Wednesday July 8 10:17 PM ET

Frida Kahlo Introduces Diego Rivera

PARIS, July 8, 1998 -- During her lifetime and for a good 25 years after her
death in 1954, Frida Kahlo seemed to owe much of her renown as a painter to
the fact that she was married to Diego Rivera, the colossus of Mexican
muralism.

Not that Rivera did not himself proclaim her a great artist in her own right.
It is just that for decades the shadow of Rivera's painting, personality and
politics served to dim most other Mexican lights.

But by the early 1980s, the Socialist Realism of Rivera's vast historical and
revolutionary murals had begun to look outdated. Coincidentally, Kahlo was
being rediscovered as an artist whose unflinching portrayal of her own
physical and emotional pain spoke not only to a new generation of feminists
but also to an era more concerned with feeling than ideology.

Today, at least outside Mexico, Diego has become Frida's husband.

One motivation for "Diego Rivera -- Frida Kahlo,'' an intriguing show that
runs through Sept. 30 at the Musee Maillol in Paris, is therefore to
introduce Rivera to a European public that is barely aware of him. (The
exhibition was seen earlier this year at the Fondation Glanadda in Martigny,
Switzerland.) Another is to bring the artists together, almost for the first
time, so that their work can be compared and their turbulent lives revisited.

With 80 paintings and drawings by Rivera and some 50 paintings by Kahlo, it
is not a complete double retrospective because it lacks many of Kahlo's
best-known self-portraits as well as some of Rivera's most haunting oils. And
Rivera's greatest legacy, his murals at the National Palace and other public
buildings in Mexico, cannot travel. But the show nonetheless conveys a clear
message: Kahlo looked to Rivera as her maestro, but she followed him more as
a man than as a painter.

As it happens, Rivera, 20 years her senior, always encouraged her to go her
own way. In an essay in the catalog, Raquel Tibol, a well-known Mexican art
critic, recalled what Kahlo told her in 1953: "Evoking the episode of Diego
observing her early work, she remembered his comments. `Your will must lead
to your personal style of expression.' And she added, `Then I began to paint
things which pleased him. I followed his painting for only a short time.'''

Yet the cover of the catalog and the poster for the show underline how,
emotionally, Kahlo never escaped Rivera. They reproduce "Diego and I''
(1949), a self-portrait of Kahlo in which she painted Rivera's portrait on
her forehead, with a third eye on his own forehead. And it is only one of
many paintings in which Rivera appeared. In contrast, while Rivera included
Kahlo in several murals, he did only one portrait of her, a 1930 lithograph
of her sitting naked on a bed.

Rivera seemingly had no need for a muse. Although he is best remembered for
his portrayals of heroic Mexican peasants and workers combating
conquistadors, Roman Catholic priests and plutocrats through the ages, he in
fact spent the entire 1910-1917 Mexican Revolution outside Mexico, honing his
skills as a post-Impressionist and as a Cubist in Paris between 1909 and
1921. The Musee Maillol throws light on this little-known Rivera by including
20 paintings from this period.

When he returned to Mexico, though, he quickly rediscovered his roots. "My
style was born, as children are born, in an instant, except that this birth
came after a painful 35-year pregnancy,'' he later wrote. Certainly, by the
time the tall, overweight Rivera married the petite, dark-eyed 22-year-old
Kahlo in 1929, he had both his own style and a strong political agenda and,
along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, he was defining
post-revolutionary Mexican art.

Thus, while Rivera's art looked outward, Kahlo's looked inward, reliving the
terrible traffic accident that shattered her body in her late teens,
recording the pain of her 30 operations, her abortions, miscarriage and
inability to bear children, painting her sorrow at Rivera's frequent
betrayals (even though she too had many lovers, the exiled Trotsky among
them, it is said). Emotionally, though, Rivera needed Kahlo: after they
divorced in late 1939, he persuaded her to return, and they remarried 18
months later.

Where their artistic paths crossed was in Mexico itself. Convinced by now of
the virtues of Mexico's Indian past, Rivera encouraged Kahlo to wear the
traditional embroidered dresses and hair ribbons of the Tehuanas, the
matriarchal Indian tribe of the Tehuantepec isthmus. She was in turn inspired
by the colors and forms of Mexican folk art and the tiny religious metal
plaques known as ex-votos, albeit replacing religious images with symbolic
objects.

If this was often the form of her work, however, the content was largely
autobiographical. "If I paint myself, it is because it is the subject I know
the best,'' she once explained. The first self-portrait in this show has her
standing on the United States-Mexican border in 1932, dressed in a pink
dress, holding a Mexican flag and surrounded by symbols contrasting ancient
rural Mexico with industrial urban America.

But soon the self-portraits become ever more intimate, ever more fixated with
her broken body, as in "The Henry Ford Hospital'' (1932), where she lies
naked in a pool of blood on a hospital bed, attached by veins to an embryo
and other symbols. In "My Wet Nurse and I'' (1937), a baby's body with
Kahlo's head is breast-fed by a dark-faced Indian woman representing Mexico's
roots. Perhaps most despairing is "Without Hope'' (1945), where she is again
bedridden, with a macabre fountain of animals, fish and a skull spewing from
her mouth.

When Andre Breton visited Mexico in 1937, he promptly claimed her for
Surrealism, but she would have nothing of it. "They thought I was a
Surrealist, but I wasn't,'' she said. "I never painted dreams. I painted my
own reality.''

In another essay in the catalog, Christina Burrus, the show's curator,
records a still more mischievous observation by Kahlo. "The problem with Mr.
Breton is that he takes himself too seriously,'' she offered.

Still, Rivera understood that her Mexican art would have universal appeal. In
1953, one year before Kahlo's death, four years before his own, when he was
well enshrined as Mexico's greatest living painter, he gave an interview to
Ms. Tibol, which she quotes in the catalog. "Frida Kahlo is the greatest
Mexican painter,'' he said. "Her work is destined to be multiplied by
reproductions and will speak, thanks to books, to the whole world. It is one
of the most formidable artistic documents and most intense testimonies on
human truth of our time.''

"Moreover,'' he went on, as if anticipating that Kahlo would one day become a
feminist icon, "it is the first time in the history of art that a woman has
expressed with absolutely disincarnate and, we could say, quietly ferocious
frankness these general and specific facts which affect women exclusively.''

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