Frida Kahlo

Symposium on Frida Kahlo – 30 September + 1 October

Q&A: Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern - until 9 October

Frida Kahlo Tequila

Tate Modern has pulled off something of a coup. Not only will it host this important international event this week, but for those not able to travel to London, the entire proceedings will be webcast  

I was gutted on discovering that I couldn’t make it to the Tate myself, so kudos to the Tate for embracing the technology in this way.

The symposium brings together artists, historians and curators from Europe, Mexico and the US to ruminate over the nature of the Kahlo phenomenon.

Participants include Carlos Monsiváis, one of Mexico’s foremost intellectuals; distinguished art historians Whitney Chadwick from San Francisco, Dawn Ades, the UK’s leading historian of Latin American art, and Gannit Ankori from Harvard University; Luis-Martin Lozano, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City; cultural theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey; and artists Amalia Mesa-Bains and Marisela Norte.

Note that the webcast will be archived and available to view online for two weeks after the event. Should be some meaty panel discussions and a great deal of highfalutin discourse.

The Frida Kahlo Season is in full swing…

To celebrate the first solo exhibition of Frida Kahlo’s work in the UK, the BBC’s Creative Director Alan Yentob travels to Mexico to take a closer look at her extraordinary life and marriage to Diego Rivera, but also reassess the complex, and enduring body of work that Frida left behind.

Wednesday 29 June
IMAGINE: FRIDA KAHLO
BBC One,  22:40 pm-23:30 pm

Stephanie Mills adds…
If you rushed off thinking, like me, that Sunday was the last day of the Frida: Portrait of an Icon exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, then you may be pleased to learn that it has just been extended for a further month, until 24 July.

Portrait of an Icon will now overlap for a few more weeks with the high-profile exhibition at Tate Modern.

These photographic images of Frida are for me every bit as captivating as her paintings.

The ‘reality’, as viewed through the lens, seems to be much less harsh and unforgiving than Frida’s own self-portraits. Although many of the photos are just as carefully constructed with backdrops, costume and imagery as the paintings.

The display leads us from early family photographs taken by Guillermo Kahlo, Frida’s adored father, through to the austere young woman who has suffered polio, the terrible tramway accident and the loss of her mother, and on to the vivid, irrepressible Frida who adopts the tehuana costume in self-conscious poses for some of the most influential figures in twentieth century photography.

This is where the photographs come closest to meeting the spirit of the self-portraiture of Frida’s semi-religious paintings.

Some of the most beautiful – and often surprising – works in this exhibition were taken by those closest to Frida.

Photo: Nickolas Muray, 1939; Rochester (NY), International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House

Her lover Nickolas Muray, photographed Kahlo in a serene, wistful pose in her magenta Rebozo (1939), a print which I fell in love with and bought from La Casa Azul when on my first visit to Mexico as a student; and the coquettish Frida, biting her necklace (1933), captured by Lucienne Bloch.

Another personal favourite is the ‘photo-booth’ Frida and Diego (1934), a close-up shot of the couple by Martin Munkascsi. 

You have a few more weeks to see for yourself and compare the Frida behind the camera with the Frida of her paintings. 

SM

Dedicated Frida Kahlo fans who can’t wait until the Tate’s first retrospective of her work opens next week can always content themselves with a little window-gazing at Selfridges in London’s Oxford Street, says Elizabeth Mistry.

Two of the artists’ dresses are currently on display in a corner window.

But don’t make a long detour to see the beautiful Tehuana style smocks and skirts as they are – surprisingly for Selfridges whose windows are usually nothing short of spectacular – badly lit and ill-served by a mock backdrop, designed to represent La Casa Azul, the home in Coyoacán that the artist shared on and off with husband and fellow painter Diego Rivera.

Kahlo owned a large number of traditional costumes from all over Mexico but was most often photographed – and painted herself – wearing heavily patterned or embroidered garments from the isthmus of Tehuantepec in the southern state of Oaxaca.

A number of similar dresses were, according to Ignacio Custodio who works at La Casa Azul, recently found hidden in a room “that had not been opened for many years.”

The two outfits on display in London belong to the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño in Mexico City.

One is a deep plain blue smock and skirt accessorised with a stunning pre-Colombian style gold pendant and a much more intricate red and gold embroidered ensemble with a fine-pointed lacy underskirt.

EM

Steve Bridger adds…

The dresses will be on display (corner Oxford Street & Orchard Street) until 19 June, a 3 minute walk from Bond Street Underground station.

UPDATED: 10 October 2005
Tate Modern tell me that about 340,000 people visited Frida Kahlo, making this one of its most successful shows.

Why is this exhibition so important?

The life and work of Frida Kahlo gives us a unique introduction to Mexico.

This is the first major UK exhibition of Kahlo’s work in over 20 years – since 23 of her works were exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London’s East End in 1982 where they were displayed alongside the work of her friend, the photographer Tina Modotti.

Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern

Today, a whole new audience is hungry to be exposed to her work.

Frida Kahlo is also the first solo exhibition by any Latin American artist to be held at Tate Modern.

Kahlo was rediscovered by art collectors in the 1980s. Since then there has been a steady revival of her work, which has gained new respect among the artistic community.

Kahlo is now recognised as one of the great artists of the 20th century.

Frida is now the world’s most coveted woman artist, consistently smashing international auction records. Her paintings now sell for millions of dollars – more than any other artist from Latin America.

A Taste For Mexican Art – The Telegraph
A report on the resurgence of interest in art from Mexico.

Her face is everywhere. In 2001, the US Postal Service even issued a Frida Kahlo 34-cent commemorative stamp – the first time an Hispanic woman has been honoured in this way.

Is Madonna lending any works from her collection?

Yes, pop icon Madonna has lent two of of her favourite paintings from her own art collection to Tate Modern. Self-Portrait with Monkey (1940) and My Birth.

Madonna previously lent Self Portrait with Monkey to Tate Modern in 2001, where it was a highlight of the Surrealism: Desire Unbound exhibition. Commenting on the loan at that time, Madonna said: “Loaning my Frida to Tate is like letting go of one of my precious children.”

Can you tell me a little about Kahlo?

There is lots to tell. Kate Braverman begins her 2001 novel…

“I was born in rain and I will die in rain.”

In fact, she was born in the Casa Azul located in the (then) Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan.

She died there on 13 July 1954, a week after her 47th birthday – a example of circularity Frida would likely have appreciated. See Chronology.

Frida Kahlo gallery

Frida Kahlo / Tate Modern - Film and Talks programme

Where did she learn her art?

Kahlo was self-taught – an autodidact, is how a curator would put it.

She wanted to become a doctor but turned to art in 1925 after a tram accident left her temporarily bedridden.

She killed time by painting in bed during her many convalescences, with a specially adapted easel.

Is this The Accident of which everyone speaks?

Yes. I’ve used upper case deliberately, as the accident has taken on almost mythical status among many of Frida’s new fans. She sustained multiple injuries from which she never fully recovered – and was in and out of hospital for the rest of her life.

What about the famously stormy marriage?

Frida met and fell in love with celebrated muralist Diego Rivera in 1927, but, the couple always had a complex and stormy relationship. They married in 1929, divorced in 1939, only to remarry the following year.

Frida lived in the shadow of her more famous painter husband during her lifetime. Together, they were a memorably incongruous couple – an “elephant” matched with a “dove”. But if Diego dwarfed Frida in stature, he no longer does in fame.

Isn’t her work difficult to look at?

Much of Frida’s work is violent, painful, passionate, expressive and dangerous. To the average observer, her paintings will often appear to be very dark. But an understanding of her life gives her imagery a wider dimension, reflecting the psychological and physical pain she endured through her tortured relationship with Rivera and countless failed surgeries.

Frida herself said that her painting “carries with it the message of pain.”

Patron Saint of Lipstick and Lavender Feminism - I’m not a huge fan of Germaine Greer, but I’ve read so many articles about Frida Kahlo recently that go over the same ground; at last, a refreshing and well-written essay on the woman and her art.  

What works will be on display at Tate Modern?

A little over half Kahlo’s surviving life’s work feature in the Tate show.

She produced around 140 oil paintings in her lifetime, 60 of which are on display at the Tate. A further 20 works on paper are also on show.

Completely memorable works such as The Broken Column (1944), which depicts Kahlo’s broken body strapped and pinned with nails, are on display for the first time in the UK.

My Birth (1932), the second painting on loan from Madonna, depicts a woman giving birth to Frida.

One of the most important pictures, the tiny still life Fruits of the Earth, is being loaned by the Banco Nacional de Mexico.

What will be the highlights?

The exhibition includes the two paintings Frida painted specially for the International Exhibition of Surrealism held in 1940 in Mexico City.

The two works are among her most well-known – The Two Fridas and The Wounded Table.

A framed poster of her Frida and Diego ‘wedding portrait’ hangs in my bedroom. I saw this displayed in San Francisco and will personally look forward to seeing it again.

The curators at the Tate hope to hang a dozen of Kahlo’s iconic self-portraits in a single room. This would be unique – and alone worth the £10 admission charge.

No fee for under-18s at Tate show

Many of Frida’s paintings are in private hands and so rarely exhibited publicly. Some negotiations have been prolonged but in the end the security and kudos the Tate offers usually wins people over. Another good reason why you should try to get to the Tate to see this exhibition.

I can’t get to London – where can see Frida’s work?

Follow this link for a comprehensive list of where to find Frida’s paintings.

Frida Kahlo was the first Latin American woman to have a painting in the Louvre. Her work caused a storm in Paris in 1939 (at an exhibition entitled Méxique), and the surrealists claimed it as supremely illustrative of their ideas.

At the time, poet André Breton described the art of the volatile Kahlo “a ribbon around a bomb”.

Where can I find out more about Frida’s life and her work?

The relationship between Kahlo and Rivera was explored in Frida, the underrated 2002 biopic of the artist which won Mexican actress Salma Hayek an Oscar nomination.

Hayden Herrera’s Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo remains the best book written on her life.

An exhibition of 50 photographic portraits of Frida Kahlo opens on 3 February at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Admission is free.

The portraits, all taken from the collection of gallerist Spencer Throckmorton, span the life of the artist. They begin with a photograph of a 4 year-old Frida and end with the image of the artist on her deathbed in the Casa Azul a mere 47 years later.

This ‘must see’ exhibition follows Frida’s transition from precocious child to famous artist, documented by photographers including Kahlo’s relatives, lovers and friends, many of whom were also accomplished photographers – Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Manuel Alvarez Bravo among them. Also included are portraits by those who knew Kahlo well, among them her father Guillermo and Nickolas Muray.

The selection of black and white images, and some previously unexhibited works in colour, bring into focus the painter, the paintings, the patient, the wife, the daughter, the lover and the friend. They permit us to peer into Kahlo’s bedroom, sit at her table, visit her hospital room, wander into her garden, view her collections and play with her pets.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated hardback book, Frida Kahlo: Portraits of an Icon, with text by Margaret Hook. It definitely falls within the fine art price bracket – published by Bloomsbury, £40. Alternatively, buy it from Amazon.co.uk who are selling it for £28.

Frida Kahlo: Portraits of an Icon; NPG, 3 February – 26 June 2005 [Editor: extended until 24 July]

Photo: ©Bernard Silberstein, 1940. Reproduction authorized by the estate of the artist

Frida Kahlo with Idol, 1939 © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives, LLC 2004

London will host not one, but two major Frida Kahlo exhibitions in 2005. Frida’s work and her own iconic image will feature somewhere in London for an entire eight-month stretch. I hereby designate June 2005 to be “Frida month”.

The National Portrait Gallery will host the photo exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Portraits of an Icon” from 3rd February to 26 June, while an important exhibition of her paintings has been organised by the Tate Modern. This will run from 9 June to 9 October. It will be the first such retrospective in Britain since the one held in Whitechapel in 1982, the first public gallery in Britain to feature her work.

Photo credit: Frida Kahlo with Idol, 1939 © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives, LLC 2004

The Incantation of Frida K.

“I was born in rain and I will die in rain,” begins Kate Braverman’s The Incantation of Frida K., an imagined life journey of Frida Kahlo, who died fifty years ago today on 13 July 1954.

BBC News Online looks at her life and work and reports of commemorations in Mexico.

I recommend Braverman’s book, which opens and closes inside the mind of Frida, at 46, on her deathbed, taking us through a kaleidoscope of memories and hallucinations… on the threshold of life and death, dream and reality, truth and myth.

When Tina Modotti died in Mexico in 1942, she left a vast number of photographs which were, for many years, left languishing while the work of her former partner and teacher, the American photographer Edward Weston, was more sought after.

Modotti’s eye for detail and texture, the shadow of a maguey, the shape of a mouth or the furry skin of a chayote, was one of her great strengths. Prior to her taking up her first Graflex camera, she had worked as an actress, and was clearly already aware of the potential and power of lens.

The images on show at the newly-reopened Barbican Gallery – work spanning the four years that the pair spent together, on and off, in Mexico from 1923 – offer a remarkable view of the country just when it was undergoing some of the most fundamental changes, socially and politically, of the 20th century.

Tomoko Sato, assistant curator at the Barbican believes that it was not until after Modotti’s death that her work came to be re-evaluated. “It is true that she was not completely unknown but it was the case for a long time that her images were only well known in certain circles.

But by the time Sotheby’s sold her 1924 shot “Roses”, in 1991 for US$165,000 – at that time the highest figure ever achieved for a single photographic image – her work had begun to reach wider audiences. It now features in museums and collections around the world.

Tina’s life was no less international. She was born in the Italian city of Udine in 1896 and, at the age of thirteen left for San Francisco to join her father. She followed poet Robo de l’Abrie Richey, whom she called her husband even though it is disputed as to whether they were actually married, to Mexico where he died of smallpox shortly after. Modotti later returned with Weston with whom she had been having an affair and she ran his studio in return for help with technique.

“She had no formal training, says Sato, “and some critics have been a little bit prejudiced, but by showing their work together, I think we can see what we couldn’t see before, that in fact although Tina arrived in Mexico as an amateur who was to learn much from Weston, she herself exerted an influence, and went on to have an input in Weston’s development. Certainly his pictorialist style prior to their going to Mexico is really quite different to his later work.”

In addition to “Rosas”, the curator Sarah M. Lowe has brought to the Barbican several thoughtful portraits such as “Aztec Mother and Child” and “Manuel Hernandez Galvan” which were commissioned for the billingual magazine Mexican Folkways.

Also worth a second glance is the proud profile of Julio Mella, who ironically for the student activist and founder of the Cuban Communist Party, appears very much the patrician. Modotti was to enjoy a short but intense relationship with Mella, a former athlete whose physique contributed to a large part of Modotti’s own body of work. She was by his side when he was assassinated in 1929 – presumably by agents of the Cuban president Gerardo Machado.

Following the killing, the Mexican government arrested Tina and she was accused of the shooting. The muralist Diego Rivera, who used her as a model for when he painted the murals in the chapel at Chapingo, was one of her staunchest defenders during the subsequent trial.

Silent film

Among the pictures on show at the Barbican, Modotti herself features prominently, in a series of portraits and nudes taken by Weston, and also, in a coup for Lowe, a rare chance to see one of the films she made before swapping life in front of the lens for the challenge of working behind the camera. “The Tiger’s Coat” is a silent melodrama in which she plays, in a strange twist, a young Mexican woman abandoned by her lover when he discovers her background.

When her other passion, her commitment to the Mexican Communist Party, caused her to be expelled from the country in 1930, she entered yet another phase that saw her photographic output reduced as she threw her energies into political activism. In later years she was to undertake several trips to the Soviet Union and Spain where she all but renounced photography to work as a nurse in Catalunya during the last days of the Republic.

Mysterious death

Her death was the subject of much controversy – some claimed she had been poisoned by her last lover and former comrade, Vidali Vittorio but, says Elena Poniatowska, the acclaimed Mexican chronicler, in “Tinisima”, a novelized account of Modotti’s life, this was unlikely and it is now believed that she died of heart disease. Tina Modotti is buried in the Panteon de Dolores in Mexico City.

Tina Modotti and Edward Weston: The Mexican Years is on at The Barbican Gallery, London until 1 August 2004. The gallery stays open until 9pm on Wednesdays.

For more information on the accompanying series of talks and events and a short season of contemporary Mexican films telephone 020 7638 8891 or visit www.barbican.org.uk

Further reading:
Tinisima by Elena Poniatowska, Faber and Faber
Tina Modotti: Between Art and Revolution by Letizia Argenteri, Yale University Press
Tina Modotti: Masters of Photography Photographs by Tina Modotti; Essay by Margaret Hooks, Aperture Books

Introducing Lila Downs and Brazilian Caetano Veloso before their performance of Best Music (song) nominee “Burn it Blue” at last night’s Oscars ceremony, boyish Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal criticised the war against Iraq. “If Frida Kahlo was here tonight she would be on our side… against the war”, declared Gael, the lead in El Crimen del Padre Amaro, itself surprisingly overlooked in the Best Foreign Language Film category. The film is set for release in the UK in May (view trailer).

Less of a surprise was the failure of Salma Hayek’s Frida to convert many of its six Oscar nominations. Nevertheless, by capturing two minor gongs – for Makeup and Best Original Score – the project has been a personal triumph for Hayek, who has herself received numerous award nominations for her performance as Frida Kahlo, including for the Bafta and Golden Globes as well the nod from the Academy. Hayek had earlier applauded Gael’s remarks.

Finally, Alfonso Cuaron – the Mexican co-writer/director of the third Harry Potter film now in production, has to be content that Y Tu Mama Tambien received an unexpected nomination for Best Original Screenplay.