The Art of Frida Kahlo reflects your battles

Frida Kahlo She liked to tell people that she was born in the same year as the Mexican Revolution, 1910. But the truth is that she was a few years older, born in the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City, on July 6, 1907. Her oft-repeated story reveals much about her politics, which also shines through in her now-iconic artworks, as well as in her habit of self-construction.

Through her artistic talent, Kahlo also created an image of herself as a woman who was simultaneously strong, with her unwavering gaze fixed on the viewer, and a person of unabashed vulnerability, confronted with personal conflicts and years of physical pain related to health. As a result, curators at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) ask: Do we truly know the legendary artist? In the current exhibition, titled “Frida: Beyond the Myth,” the institution sought to understand the artist beyond what she portrayed in her art. “Through this persistent self-fashioning, Kahlo was, in essence, the architect of her own myth—a myth by which she was ultimately devoured,” said Sue Canterbury, Pauline Gill Sullivan Curator of American Art at the DMA, in a statement. “It is only through the eyes of those around her that we can come closer to who she truly was, seeing her as she was seen, not just as she saw herself.”

The exhibition includes approximately 30 works of art that Kahlo created throughout her life, from 1907 to 1954, as well as approximately 30 photographs of her, taken by people in her closest circle. The result is a condensed and intimate portrait of the artist's practice and life. Beginning with photographs of her father, Guillermo Kahlo, showing Kahlo when she was four years old, the exhibition spans her entire life and combines works with related images. A 1952 photo shows Kahlo working in bed on her last completed painting, "Naturaleza Viva," which also hangs nearby.

Several of the photographs on display were taken by Kahlo's husband, muralist Diego Rivera, as well as by her part-time lover Nickolas Muray, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mexican photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo, and art dealer Julien Levy. Interspersed with these are some of Kahlo's artworks that have not been seen in over two decades and rarely leave Mexico, including pastel drawings and sketches.

A statement about the exhibition argues that even the works created by the artist, “which expressed her emotional responses” to significant personal challenges, “complicate our understanding of Kahlo, as she constructed a persona of opposing characteristics: seductress and victim, strong and vulnerable.” While Kahlo may not have used art as a purely autobiographical tool, her paintings remain highly personal forms of expression, raising the question of what they tell us, in all their oppositions, about her as an individual artist.

Indeed, Kahlo reveals intimate details of her life in many of her works, which may refer to personal events, including surgeries and the subsequent pain she felt after an accident as a young woman, as well as a difficult marriage. A masterful but controversial painting, done in 1938 to honor the late actress Dorothy Hale, is not easily dissociated from the artist's own internal struggles and difficult marriage. Another highlight is the painting "My Dress Hangs There" (1933), of Kahlo's iconic Tehuana dress hanging, as if floating, in the center of a tumultuous New York City landscape at the beginning of the Great Depression.

While her artworks were never intended as autobiographical records, they reveal her voice and vision of the world around her through the power of visual language. Combined with the exhibition's documentary-style photographs, one can learn more about her as a person, though even the images can only offer additional interpretations. As for Kahlo's constructed self, based on her paintings, fashion, and false birth date, this tendency may tell us more about her than any photograph or precise timeline of events. Not the other way around.

Source: Artnet News