Frida Kahlo at the PMA

In addition to the Kahlo paintings, the curators have included over 100 photographs from Kahlo's personal collection. Among them are images by Tina Modotti, Nickolas Murray, Gisele Freund, and many others. These photographs truly complement the paintings and help to create a sense of place and time and aura around one of the most interesting lives of the 20th century.

Furthermore, and unique to Philadelphia, the PMA show also adds some additional materials from the museum's own Latin American collection. These additional works, mostly from a Mexican painting genre known as ex-votos, really add a clear insight into Kahlo's influences. The PMA additions were curated by the PMA's Michael Taylor and Emily Hage.

An ex-voto is a votive painting commissioned by someone to celebrate or record an event where someone has survived a dangerous event. In Mexico, it was generally painted on tin sheets. Often the ex-voto has a narrative style that shows the progression of the event, in a timeline, in the actual work. In the PMA show they form a crucial part to help us understand Kahlo's influences; more on that later.

A proper Kahlo primer for budding Fridaphiles demands the reading of Hayden Herrera's aforementioned biography of Kahlo, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, or at the very least the viewing of Salma Hayek's movie, Frida.

This award-winning film was the most recent of a curious worldwide Kahlomania that continues to grow as Kahlo is exposed and commodified. It is especially curious since the artist who now represents "Mexicanity" to many people was essentially ignored in her own country for many years, both during and after her lifetime (Kahlo died in 1954), and only had one exhibition of her works in Mexico (in 1953), just before she died.

Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico in 1907, the daughter of a Austrian Jewish immigrant and a Mexican woman. In 1929 she married Diego Rivera, who was many years her senior and perhaps Mexico's best-known artist and womanizer.

Their relationship was turbulent, passionate and messy, and together with a trolley accident that fractured her spine and caused her immense pain and multiple operations throughout her life, it provided the subject matter for most of Kahlo's best-known works.

As soon as you enter the exhibition we see Frieda [sic] and Diego Rivera , created in 1931.

Painted while Kahlo and Rivera were living in San Francisco, this work was first exhibited at the 6th Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. It's a somewhat sad double portrait, where Kahlo paints Rivera's profession as an artist, and then depicts herself as a traditional Mexican wife, even taking Rivera's last name when she signs the work Frieda [sic] Rivera. Their hands barely touch each other.

Kahlo was a woman of multiple identities, and many more have been invented by her followers after her death, but the one represented in this painting is not the Frida Kahlo who has become an unexpected icon to the world's feminist movement.

This early work also provides a seminal example to Kahlo's deep debt to Mexican folk art—what Herrera calls "Mexicanidad" (or Mexicanity)—a post-revolutionary idea formulated by Mexico's intelligentsia to attempt to carve out a separate Mexican identity based upon Mexico's rich indigenous history and its present mestizo culture.

In the 1936 painting, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree), Kahlo painted her own family tree, proudly showcasing her own mestizo heritage via her maternal grandfather's indigenous blood.

She also depicts her three Caucasian grandparents, and even depicts herself being sustained inside her mother. Kahlo also lets us witness the moment of creation as a European sperm enters her mother's mestizo egg. Then Kahlo shows herself as a small child in her beloved Blue House. The curators commented that perhaps she's sadly stating the end of her line, as Kahlo was unable to bear children.

In the painting titled The Suicide of Dorothy Hale we witness Kahlo's immense debt to traditional Mexican ex-votos paintings. We also get to see what no one will be able to see as this exhibition travels around the nation: an opportunity to observe, side-by-side, how Kahlo embraced the older ex-voto tradition and brought it forward to her own painting dialogue.

Commissioned by Clare Booth Luce in 1939 (while Kahlo was living in New York as somewhat of a Champagne Communist) to commemorate the suicide of her friend Dorothy Hale, I was told by Hayden Herrera that it "horrified" Luce when she first saw it. It is a painting executed in the direct style of the ex-votos, and somehow the PMA found in its own collection an ex-voto that almost matches the storyline of the Kahlo painting.

In the Kahlo painting, we see Dorothy Hale jumping to her suicide, first as a small figure jumping off her skycraper apartment building; her figure surrounded by swirling clouds echoing an El Greco sky. We then see her body falling, and finally the broken and bloodied woman on the ground. A banner at the bottom of the painting tells the story in Spanish, and Kahlo has bloodied her signature and even the frame.

In the PMA's ex-voto titled Fall from a Balcony, we see a Mexican nanny and child falling through the floor of a balcony, which has given way under their combined weight. We then see them on the ground, having fallen and then somehow miraculously survived the fall. The banner at the bottom relates the story of the fall.

It's a brilliant juxtaposition of two unrelated works that cement the powerful influence of ex-votos upon Kahlo's own work as no words can describe, and only PMA visitors will see it.

And it is precisely from discoveries such as this that I hope this exhibition will kindle new interest—if that's possible—not only from her legions of fans, but also from art scholars and researchers, as there are still many holes and gaps that need to be identified, researched and expanded in this amazing artist's life.

Kahlo's influence on contemporary art also needs serious scholarly examination as Kahlo's clear obsession with her own image has been reflected in the work of many important contemporary artists and photographers who use their body and image as the canvas for their work.

Frida Kahlo
Philadelphia Museum of Art (26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway)
On Exhibit through May 18, 2008
Tickets Required; available here.
Members: Free at all times
Adults: $14
Seniors (ages 62 & over): $12
Students (with valid ID): $10
Children (excluding groups)
ages 13–18: $10
ages 12 & under: Free
Sundays: Pay what you wish all day

The Two Fridas Image via StumbleUpon user Ripzy

Frieda y Diego (1931) Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.