News from the art world
Kahlo’s final hours
Frida Kahlo’s grandson has cast new light on her final days, revealing that her husband, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, may have “helped her” to end her own life “in a last act of love”, says Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer. Speaking to the BBC for a documentary about Kahlo, Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, an art journalist, reveals a long-held suspicion in his family that Diego facilitated some form of assisted suicide. At the time of her death, aged 47, in 1954 (officially from a pulmonary embolism), Kahlo was dependent on drugs and alcohol and riven by illnesses that had “plagued” her throughout her life. “If your companion of life says, ‘I’m tired, I really want to go now, help me’ – well, maybe you try,” said Coronel Rivera. Kahlo survived polio, and suffered an accident at 18 that damaged her spine, as well as numerous miscarriages, which she portrayed in “groundbreaking” paintings; her leg was amputated in 1953. Rivera, though serially unfaithful, remained the love of her life.
Banksy in Margate
Banksy’s tendency to incorporate urban detritus into his artworks has posed dilemmas for another local authority. Council officials in Margate last week removed a freezer around which he had painted one of his murals, says George Sandeman in The Times. Entitled Valentine’s Day Mascara, the piece depicted a 1950s-style housewife in an apron shoving a man into a real freezer that had been left on the street in the Kent seaside town. It is thought to be a comment on domestic violence: the woman is smiling but has “a black eye and a missing tooth”. Soon after it was painted, drawing crowds to the site on Grosvenor Place, Thanet Council took the freezer away to make it “safe to the public”, but later returned it. Subsequently, a representative of Red Eight Gallery, acting on behalf of the property owner, took the freezer away again to “ensure the integrity” of the work. The whole mural will now be permanently relocated to the town’s Dreamland theme park.