Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up
V&A Museum, London SW7 (020-7942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk). Until 4 November
Frida Kahlo (1907-54) is one of the most recognisable cultural figures of the 20th century, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. The Mexican artist’s likeness, with her joined-up eyebrows and “singular dress sense – Mexican peasant with a touch of baroque fantasy” – has been reproduced on everything from jewellery to Barbie dolls. Yet she was little known in her lifetime, and even now, most of us have only the “sketchiest idea of who she was and what she did”. This new exhibition at the V&A “goes a long way” towards redressing that. The show narrates the story of her life through her art and possessions, bringing together paintings, photos, documents and personal belongings – many of which were only recently discovered in a previously sealed room in the house she shared with her husband, Diego Rivera, the great mural painter. The show builds up to a “spectacular” installation of Kahlo’s outfits, surrounded by “iconic photographs of the artist and a few of her best-known paintings”. It adds up to a “vibrant” experience that will leave you “charmed and mesmerised”.
“Everything about Kahlo was courageous,” said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. She was struck down by polio as a child and left permanently disabled by a bus crash in her teens. She spent the rest of her life in acute pain, but rather than “endure” it, she “transfigured it, into blazing, visionary paintings” such as her 1943 work Self Portrait as a Tehuana, in which she appears in a “fantastical” white headdress with a tiny likeness of the unfaithful Rivera stamped onto her forehead; looking at it is like “gazing into her soul”. It’s just a pity that there aren’t enough of her works here. Instead, we get endless displays of her clothes, her make-up, her jewellery, her medicines; this is a show that neglects Kahlo’s art in favour of her “iconic image”.
Yet “posing” and self-presentation were all part of Kahlo’s art, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Her clothes and possessions were tools in her “search for beauty”. We are shown, for instance, the surgical corsets she used to keep herself upright. To soften their “sinister” appearance, she covered them with “wild designs”; a committed communist, Kahlo even decorated them with a hammer and sickle. Most striking of all is the prosthetic leg she wore after her own was amputated late in life; she adorned it with a special red boot and silver bells. Thanks to items like these, this “riveting” show provides a “remarkable sense of intimacy”. I don’t think I have “ever felt quite as spookily close to an important artist”.