Unlocking the hidden life of Frida Kahlo
Intriguingly, until 2004, Kahlo’s clothes and other personal items had been locked away for 50 years in the Blue House, the casa-estudio or home and studio in Coyoacán just outside Mexico City that the artist shared with her muralist husband Diego Rivera. Following Kahlo’s death, Rivera had locked the 6,000 photographs, 300 personal items and garments, plus 12,000 documents, away in the bathroom of the house. When they were finally revealed, it took four years for historians to sort and catalogue them, and for the first time, these artefacts and clothes have left the Blue House to be displayed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
In the exhibition Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up, the artist’s dresses and other personal effects are displayed alongside her paintings, showing the intimate connection between the two. She is presented as a kind of performance artist, whose whole self or identity was an extension of her art. Kahlo’s flamboyant Mexican dresses and bold floral headpieces are displayed, along with the handpainted prosthetics and corsets that helped support and mask her physical disabilities. Much more was understood after the discovery of the objects about Kahlo’s accident. Items such as her medicines and orthopaedic aids help illuminate her story, and some of her supportive bodices and spine braces, including corsets that she painted with religious and communist symbols and imagery relating to her miscarriages.
Exhibition co-curator Circe Henestrosa tells BBC Culture that the construction of Kahlo’s identity “around her politics, ethnicity and disability” is the central thesis of the show. “The exhibition aims to provide a personal, political and cultural context for Kahlo’s story. Kahlo suffered a devastating nearfatal accident at the age of 18, which rendered her bed-bound and immobilised. Much more is understood about Kahlo’s accident after the discovery of the objects in the Blue House, and the show illuminates this story through her medicines and orthopaedic aids.”
With the discovery of the artist’s personal effects, new insights are revealed about how Kahlo’s personal style was in part guided by her disabilities. “Clothes became part of her armour, to deflect, conceal and distract from her injuries,” says Henestrosa. “Kahlo endured multiple operations in both Mexico and the United States and had to wear orthopaedic corsets made of leather and plaster. Her corsets were necessary for medical reasons but she also elaborately decorated them. The traditional indigenous dress style she adopted allowed her to conceal these items under long skirts and geometric cut blouses.”
“I think Kahlo’s powerful style is as integral to her myth as her paintings. It is her construction of identity through her ethnicity, her disability, her political beliefs and her art,” says Henestrosa, who also curated the first ever exhibition of the artist’s wardrobe, at the Frida Kahlo Museum in 2012. By the time Kahlo adopted the traditional Tehuana dress, she wanted to look quintessentially Mexican, explains Henestrosa, and the Tehuana dress comes from the Tehuantepec Isthmus, a matriarchal society in the southeast of Mexico.
“Frida understood the power of dress from a very early age,” the curator explains. “As a result of her polio at the age of six, she was left with a withered and shorter right leg, something that led her to choose long skirts. She began wearing three to four socks on her thinner calf and also wore shoes with a built-up heel to mask her asymmetry. This shows how she established a relationship between her body and dress from a very early age. Through the use of her self-portraits and the use of traditional Mexican dresses to style herself, Kahlo dealt with her life, her political views, her health struggles, her accident, and her turbulent marriage.”
The sense of unlocking hidden treasures is central to the exhibition, as its co-designer, Tom Scutt, tells BBC Culture: “There is such a spirit of time and place about this unique exhibition. The action of unlocking a room in the Blue House to discover all these belongings of Frida’s is echoed in the notion of arriving at an exhibition as a visitor and discovering the belongings oneself. Because of this, the exhibition holds an indisputable, magical charge.”
‘Duality, repetition’
The exhibition explores Kahlo’s childhood, and includes an album of architectural church photographs by her German father Guillermo Kahlo. Also shown are early photos and paintings of Kahlo and Rivera with their circle of famous friends, including Leon Trotsky. Kahlo’s cultural pride following the Mexican Revolution (191020) is also further illuminated by the previously hidden items - her interest in the arts, crafts and traditions of the indigenous people of Mexico was a passion. The period of the 1920s and 30s saw what became known as a
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