Faces of Frida
Kahlo’s scrapbooks offer ‘Intimate Portrait’ of Mexican artist
Frida Kahlo was a bright 18year-old student riding the bus home from an elite high school in Mexico City on a September afternoon in 1925. Her life changed when an electric trolley slammed into the bus, breaking her spine in three places. Doctors operated but were unsure if she would ever walk again.
As she lay in bed recovering, her mother had a carpenter make a special lap easel for her and also installed a mirror on the canopy over her bed. Kahlo began painting herself, friends and family, according to a new book by Celia Stahr, “Frida in America: The
Creative Awakening of a Great Artist” (St. Martin’s Press, $14.99).
A candid, outspoken and unconventional woman, Kahlo lived an adventurous life that included drama, jealousy, betrayal, chronic pain and artistic success. The Mexican artist’s intense personality, family life and moments of profound joy are captured in a new exhibition at The Frick Pittsburgh in Point Breeze.
“Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Portrait,” which opened earlier this month and continues through May 30, contains 113 photographs from the artist’s scrapbooks with text labels in English and Spanish. A related pop-up exhibition, “Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray,” is on view through May 9.
Following the bus accident, Kahlo managed to resume walking after three months of intensive exercise. A 1926 portrait shows her seated on a chair and wearing a satin dress. It was taken by her father, Guillermo, a professional architectural photographer.
In another family photograph he composed, his daughter wears a man’s suit, her way of expressing her alter ego, whom she named Leonardo.
Kahlo learned the power of imagery while assisting her father and tried on many guises throughout her 47 years. At age 22, she married fellow artist Diego Rivera, who was 42 and a notorious womanizer. Kahlo’s mother, Matilde, disapproved of the 1929 wedding, saying it was like an elephant marrying a dove.
Rivera and Kahlo spent three years in the United States, starting in November 1930. They lived in San
Francisco, New York City and Detroit, all cities where Rivera worked while his wife came of age as an artist.
Frenchman Andre Breton, a writer and leader of the Surrealist cultural movement, traveled to Mexico in 1938 to meet Leon Trotsky, a Marxist Russian revolutionary. While there, he also met Kahlo and recognized her art as Surrealism, but she rejected that descriptionof her work.
Breton’s visit led to Kahlo exhibiting at the prestigious Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in November 1938. Breton also invited Kahlo to exhibit her work at a show called “Mexique” in Paris in 1939, said Melanie Groves, manager of exhibitions for The Frick Pittsburgh.
Another key figure in Kahlo’s life was Nickolas Muray, a New York fashion photographer known for his
innovative use of color. When he visited Mexico at the invitation of friends in 1931, he met Kahlo. For the next decade, the artist and photographer maintained a friendship and passionate affair.
The exhibition includes a 1939 picture of Kahlo and Muray standing happily together on a balcony. Murray also photographed Kahlo in traction. She underwent at least 30 surgeries to relieve pain from her accident. Her spine was fused in 1951 She died in 1954.
The majority of photographs in the exhibition were purchased at auction in the early 2000s by Vicente Woolf, a New York-based interior designer who mortgaged his home to buy the scrapbooks. Kahlo had left them to the care of her lifelong friend and physician, Dr. Leo Eloesser.
Not long after Woolf bought the 450 photos, a small bathroom that had been closed was opened in 2003 at Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City. The museum is in the artist’s former childhood home, known as the Blue House. That small bathroom held 6,500 images Kahlo had collected.
Visitors to The Frick Pittsburgh will also see color photographs that Muray took of Kahlo. They were exhibited earlier this year at the Reading Public Museum. Groves knew the Muray photographs were bound for Italy, but offered to bring them to The Frick if the Italian show was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Muray photographs on view now will change on April 17 and remain on view through May 9.
Masks and timed tickets are required for this exhibit. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. Tickets are $15, $13 for seniors, students and active-duty military, $8 for children age 16 and under and free for Frick members and children 5 and under. To buy tickets, go to thefrickpittsburgh.org/tickets.