Comprehensive Retrospective of Frida Kahlo’s Work in Mexico City

I have seen Salma Heyek’s great performance in Frida several times. I am more a fan of Frida as a person than some of her art. But I admire her art as a great personal statement. It is the 100th anniversary of Frida Kahlo’s birth and Mexico is providing the largest retrospective ever of her work. There is a good review, Beyond the Myth, Art Endures, in the New Yotk Times. The exhibit “attempts to look beyond what Mexicans call Fridamania. The result is a rich view of her art and her life, one that broadens the perspective on her career beyond the narrow, cultish view that has at times threatened to obscure her work. For the majority who know Kahlo’s painting only from the movie version of her life or the unmistakable power of her face on a T-shirt, the exhibition that opened here last month at the Palacio de Bellas Artes may come as a surprise.”

As the Times goes on to write, “Among the 354 pieces on display are some of Kahlo’s most famous self-portraits, but through lesser-known self-portraits, still lifes, portraits, drawings and watercolors, she emerges as an artist who gathered multiple influences into her own language. Her first self-portrait, in a velvet dress, was painted at 19 for a faithless boyfriend and already shows the unflinching gaze that marked the later paintings. But here she is graceful, almost ethereal, quite different from the confrontational presence she was to become. A tender portrait of her husband, the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, reveals an unexpected naturalism. “

The show runs at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City that continues through Aug. 19, with an exhibition at Museo Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán that runs to Sept. 30. I have been to Mexico City a few times in the 1960s and would love to see the show and where the city has gone but will likely miss it this summer.

Comments

[Mick Mather]

San Diego is as close I've been to Mexico - Mexico City as well come to that. While I'd also LOVE to be able to see this exhibit, it's not very likely that I will either ... which isn't stopping me from making that exuberant call to those among us afflicted with wanderslust: ROAD TRIP!!!