Frida, Inc.
The Denver Art Museum’s Mexican Modernism exhibit features an array of 20th- century artists, but only one is the star of the show
Frida Kahlo would likely love the “Mexican Modernism” exhibit that just opened in Denver, maybe as much as the hordes of “Frida fans” who are rushing to see it. After all, her paintings, and the boho
image she worked so hard to create during her career, dominate the visuals of this large group retrospective, far overshadowing material by her husband, Diego Rivera, and the other 20thcentury art figures whose work is on display.
So much has been written and researched — and made up — about Kahlo and who she was by the time she
died in 1954 ( at the age of 47) that it’s difficult for the public to tell fact from fiction at this point. Was she an indomitable force, sexy and singularly feminist as manifested in actress Salma Hayek’s Oscar- nominated portrayal of her in 2002’ s “Frida,” the Hollywood film that made her the world’s trendiest dead Mexican?
Or was she the accidental hero and “good Mexican wife” that critic Charles Darwen labeled her as when reviewing an earlier version of this traveling exhibition, a reticent celebrity who would have been “mortified at being more famous than Rivera?”
The Denver Art Museum’s “Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism” goes with the power myth, presenting a Kahlo full of brazenness and ego. Truth be told, she painted her own face dozens and dozens of times, and some of her most famous self- portraits are the stars of this 150- object extravaganza. Frida in her finest necklace. Frida on her bed. Frida with monkeys and flowers and fancy frocks. Frida, again and again, staring directly at the viewer with those famous sharp eyes and thick brows that touch in the middle.
Tickets to the exhibition, which opened Oct. 25 and runs through Jan. 24, may be harder to get these days: the museum last week was forced to limit capacity again due to state health mandates. That has sent some visitors with previously purchased and dated tickets back to their calendars searching for the next- best time, given that emails started going out informing them of select, disappointing cancellations on the museum’s part. All ticketholders will get an email update, officials promised.
Beyond the work, there’s a running narrative of Kahlo as the intentional creator of her public persona, who took to wearing traditional Mexican peasant garb from an earlier era as both fashion and artistic statement, who married an older, established man, and who posed eagerly for scores of photos reinforcing her reputation as an exotic, free spirit.
“Mexican Modernism” doesn’t make this stuff up, it presents evidence: Frida with dangling earrings and a red bow in her hair sitting for photographer Nickolas Muray in 1939; Frida done up in braids and lace and holding two birds for photographer Juan Guzmán in 1940; Frida posturing in her studio with one of those pet monkeys for photographer Fritz Henle in 1948.
This show has a striking number of Kahlo images, and some qualify as exceptional artworks
themselves, captured by Lola Álvarez Bravo, a historic figure in Mexican photography and a longtime Kahlo friend. Others are more candid and taken casually by acquaintances as she recovered from one of her spine surgeries or her miscarriage or other tragedies that this show makes point of telling everyone she overcame. It all reinforces her superhero essence.
And, it must be said, so do the piles and piles of Frida junk that fill the museum’s gift shops: lunchboxes, jigsaw puzzles and coffee mugs; magnets, key chains and greeting cards; sofa pillows, serving trays and sticky notes. There’s even a Frida face mask.
In some ways, the gewgaws diminish her, and it’s easy to find the whole exercise offensive.
But in other ways, they are part of the show itself, a necessary addendum for understanding Frida’s role in the art world right now, her iconic stature, her very important place as a driver of foreign tourists to Mexico. The Mexican government is a sponsor of this show, even though the work featured in it rarely gets shown in that country these days.
Neckties with reprints of “Starry
Night” are an insult to van Gogh. But Frida knee socks in 10 different colors? It feels appropriate for an artist who is known to be a role model for the pop star Madonna ( albeit with real talent to back up all the posing).
As for Diego Rivera, who receives second billing in “Mexican Modernism,” there’s less of a chance to get to know him here. Rivera is probably the most important figure in Mexican art, if not for his talent then for his role in defining the national identity that emerged after the country’s revolution, which lasted from
1910 to 1920 and ended — to sum it up with too much efficiency — with a people- powered government in charge rather than the military and Spanish- style aristocrats.
Rivera’s art played a major role in the Mexicanidad movement of his day, and very much alive currently, which combines a reverence for the pre- colonial eras dominated by the Olmec, Maya and Zapotec civilizations with a belief in the possibilities of modernization to improve the social and economic standing of presentday Mexicans.
But he was a muralist. For better, because his art was vast and public and highly motivational. For worse, because it can’t be shrunk and shipped for museum shows. His legacy doesn’t carry in an attraction packaged as tightly for indoor consumption as this one.
Fortunately, there are just enough drawings and oils to connect the dots on his standing. One of his revered paintings, 1943’ s graceful and elegant “Calla Lily Vendor,” is probably the most important object in the exhibition in terms of showing how 20thcentury Mexican painters elevated the working classes through their art. His 1931 “Landscape with Cacti,” a surrealist desert scene that instills an animated, human- like personality into his country’s most prolific plants, is crucial in explaining how artists linked concepts of land, history and current events to reshape what it means to be Mexican.
But “Mexican Modernism” is really a Frida Kahlo show, overwhelmingly, despite the fact that it features work by such important artists as María Izquierdo, Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Carlos Mérida, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and others.
These aren’t just names that ought to be thrown out toward the end of a review; they are key figures, though they are merely context for Kahlo here.
The show would do much better with more of their contributions added to complete the picture of the era, rounding out this array drawn from the collection of 20th- century socialites Jacques and Natasha Gelman. And it could use more information on the Gelmans themselves; in that way, the show undermines the important role of patrons in coalescing the art and social scenes that empower artists of any era.
Visitors may also find the exhibit lacking without the usual audio that accompanies blockbusters events, a minus attributed to the need to forgo shared equipment during the present coronavirus pandemic, but which many other exhibitions have overcome using cellphone- accessed narration. There are so many interesting backstories missing.
It also could use more Diego Rivera, whose wife — actually twice his wife since they divorced once and remarried — now carries the mantle of Mexican art outside of the country.
Still, it’s easy to imagine he would love “Mexican Modernism” as much as Kahlo might. Rivera was a nationalist, and a ferocious proponent of Mexican culture. He collected pre- Columbian artifacts his whole life, more than 60,000 pieces, and spent decades and much of his fortune building a museum — the mass fortress known as Museo Anahuacalli, located in Coyoacán — to put those antiquities, rather than his own work, on display.
He was selfless in his determination to present the whole of his country’s creative soul to the world. “Mexican Modernism” does exactly that, focusing on one short but decisive period, and he’d likely not mind being reduced to an artifact himself, second to Kahlo, but still a force that brings attention to a very long, sometimes overlooked timeline of rich and connected art.