Tumultuous history
Frida Kahlo’s works of self-portraiture are central to her enduring legacy
The Albuquerque Museum will open “Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism” on Saturday, Feb. 6. See story on
More than 60 years after her death, Frida Kahlo is a rock star. “Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism” opens at the Albuquerque Museum, 2000 Mountain Road NW, on Saturday, Feb. 6.
Despite the inclusion of famed muralists Diego Rivera (Kahlo’s husband/lover/ nemesis) and David Alfaro Siqueiros; and the painters María Izquierdo and Rufino Tamayo; Kahlo is the draw, the star of the show, the global icon who sold out the exhibition’s last stop in Denver.
Of about 200 works, 20 of the paintings are Kahlo’s. Her work and the bohemian image she conjured throughout her career dominate the exhibition. Visitors also can view some of her Indigenous clothing.
The Mexican Modernists took what had been a Euro-centric vision and transformed it into a celebration of Mexican culture, history and art, museum curator Josie Lopez said.
Siqueiros, Rivera and José Clemente Orozco — known as “Los Tres Grandes” — led the movement celebrating the Mexican people’s potential to craft the nation’s history. Between the 1920s and 1950s, they cultivated a style that defined Mexican identity following the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
Rivera’s intense personality, revolutionary politics and inspiring murals made him a celebrity during his lifetime. Although Rivera once overshadowed his equally talented wife, Kahlo’s fame has far outstripped that of her husband in the years since her death in 1954.
Somewhere between Kahlo’s own mythmaking and her self-portraits lies an evershifting identity. Slipping from Native queen to wounded deer, she was both nursing infant and bedridden bride.
The look was practical as well. The long, full skirts concealed a leg deformed by childhood polio. When she was 18, a wooden bus carrying Kahlo collided with a streetcar. An iron handrail impaled her pelvis, fracturing the bone. She never
fully recovered, enduring 30 operations throughout her lifetime.
In Mexico, they call her the “heroine of pain.”
Painting became a way to explore her identity. When Kahlo was bedridden, her caretakers installed a mirror above her easel so that she could paint herself, a process she continued as her body disintegrated.
“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best,” she said.
Kahlo and Rivera married in 1929. Her parents described the union as a “marriage between an elephant and a dove.”
Devastated by Rivera’s infidelities, including an affair with her sister, Kahlo eventually embarked on her own. The couple divorced in 1939. They remarried in 1940 with the stipulation that they would retain independent lives.
Her 1943 self-portrait “Diego on My Mind” features Rivera’s face inscribed into her forehead.
“She was often in pain and she had a couple of unsuccessful pregnancies,” Lopez said. “You see reflections of her personal life that are very different from what Rivera was doing.”
The painting stands as an example of the turbulence in their relationship, she added.
“The question is, what is the emotional toll that relationship had on her life?” Lopez continued. “There’s love and affection, but there’s also great pain.
“Women were very attracted to (Rivera) in Mexico,” Lopez continued. “He was a very famous painter and he was charismatic. He had this largerthan-life persona.”
Kahlo also had a great love for animals, whom she also painted, as in “Self-Portrait with Monkeys” from 1943.
“When she and Diego split up the first time, she goes back to live in that house (Casa Azul, “The Blue House”), in that home,” built by her father in Coyoacán, then a quiet suburb of Mexico City, Lopez said. “She created a beautiful garden and had lots of pets.”
The mother of Albuquerque artist Catalina Delgado-Trunk (known for her cut paper work) gave Kahlo a Mexican hairless dog. Delgado-Trunk created a paper cut-out of the dog for the show.
“Some scholars have looked at the animals as stand-ins for children,” Lopez said. “They certainly were very special to her.
“If you really look at what she endured and the fact that she kept going, she had a strength and a resilience that came through,” Lopez said. “Even though she was in great pain emotionally and physically, she’s making the artwork to demonstrate that she’s strong.”
Kahlo died in 1954. She was 47. To this day, her death remains a mystery. Her biographer Hayden Herrera maintains it may have been a suicide. There was no autopsy.
The exhibition is courtesy of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art.