![]() ![]() Based largely on Mexico’s popular art, its hallmarks are naive handling of form and space, literal presentation of imaginary scenes and unexpected combinations of color. Her paintings’ tart charm comes from the artist’s primitivizing style. These misfortunes she transmuted into art with a remarkable frankness tempered by humor and fantasy. And finally there was the anguish of being deceived and abandoned by the man she loved, her husband, Diego Rivera. She longed to have children, but her smashed pelvis led only to several miscarriages and at least three doctor-ordered abortions. Gregarious and venturesome, she was all too familiar with the loneliness and tedium of invalidism. Toward the end of her life, she pronounced with typically self-mocking bravado: “I hold the record for operations.” Until her death 29 years later, she was in and out of hospitals, having some 35 bone grafts, spinal fusions and other surgery. Her spinal cord slowly deteriorated and she had to wear a metal brace to keep the bones from settling on each other. She never fully recovered from these injuries. Kahlo was literally impaled on a metal bar in the wreckage her spine was fractured, her pelvis crushed, and one foot was broken. ![]() On September 17, 1925, when she was 15, her bus was rammed by a street car into a telephone pole. This finery often turns up in Kahlo’s self-portraits, where it both conceals and makes poignant the most important fact of her life: pain. Certainly, too, she would have depicted her long flowing Mexican Indian costume and her jewels, ribbons, flowers and combs-adornments that made her as much an art object as a personality. But from Kahlo’s earlier works, we can be fairly sure that her own nearly beautiful face would have stared out of the canvas, her dark eyes under their thick, connecting eyebrows set in a gaze that was at once impassive and passionate, her full red lips surmounted by the slight shadow of a moustache. Most likely there would have been recognizable images of her husband, Diego Rivera, and of other art-world notables. But most of all, this opening dramatized Frida Kahlo’s central subject-the artist herself.Īlthough the scene would surely have appealed to her, we do not know how Kahlo would have chosen to paint it. It testifies, in fact, to many of the qualities that marked Kahlo as person and painter: her gallantry and indomitable “alegria” in the face of physical suffering her insistence on surprise and specificity her peculiar use of spectacle as a mask to preserve privacy and personal dignity. The occasion encapsulates as much as it culminates this extraordinary woman’s career. One by one, 200 friends and admirers greeted the painter, then formed a circle around the bed and sang Mexican ballads with her until well past midnight. Dressed in her favorite Mexican costume, she reclined on her four-poster bed, which she had bedecked with photographs of her political heroes, Malenkov and Stalin. But an ambulance drew up to Mexico City’s Gallery of Contemporary Art, and she was carried to the opening on a hospital trolley. By that time, her health had so deteriorated that no one expected her to attend. IN APRIL 1953, LESS THAN a year before her death at the age of 44, Frida Kahlo had her first major exhibition of paintings in her native country of Mexico.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |