Discovering Frida Kahlo, How She Made Herself Up

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Victoria and Albert Museum catalog cover of exhibit, “Frida Kahlo Making Herself Up”

By Anne W. Semmes
Sentinel Correspondent

From the moment I was ready to board the plane to London on a recent trip, I knew the trip would be memorable. I noted with interest the British Air Captain of the 747 was a blond female with ponytail. Upon arrival at London’s Heathrow airport this journalist visited with Captain Paula Allsop in the cockpit.

Days later when a London black cab pulled up alongside a Starbucks I noted a young female driver jumping out in search of her Macchiato. But what really blew me away was seeing the first time unveiling of the truly personal life of that most challenged female artist from our hemisphere, Frida Kahlo, in the exhibit, “Making Herself Up” at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).

Frida Kahlo may be one of the best known Latin American artists of our time, with her bold, colorful, and endless self-portraits, but the 150 items on display reveal just how courageous this artist, dead at age 47, was in her short life, plagued as she was first by polio and then near fatal injuries – 20 bone fractures – from a bus crash.

These items come from Kahlo’s home outside Mexico City, Casa Azul, Blue House (now the Frida Kahlo Museum), locked away since her death in 1954, partly by her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, but even after his death in 1957, finally revealed in 2004. Her prosthetic leg is there set in an elegant red boot, her immobilizing plaster corsets that she put her paintbrush to, her exuberant clothing that would cover her pain, her pill bottles, her sable paint brushes, her jewelry including pre-Columbian jade beads and a hand-shaped earring from an admiring Picasso, and 2,500 photographs from her life.

What hit me with all the accoutrements of her tortured life was how the V&A staged it all in a series of carved four-poster sets. Kahlo lived a good deal of her life in her four-poster bed, “bejeweled and made up, lying atop carefully arranged bed covers and lace-edged sheets.” Her four-poster served as “both refuge and stage.” She would write, “But I’m not discouraged.”

“Unlike Rivera and other male artists who asserted their artistic freedom by being depicted in paint-spattered workwear,” the show’s curator writes in the splendid show catalog, “Kahlo rarely appeared casually dressed, even at her easel.”

A section of the exhibit featured Kahlo’s exuberant wardrobe looking not dissimilar with a show from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Two little girls under five were as mesmerized as I was at the colorful embroidered long skirts and blouses, the rebozos and native garments from different regions of Mexico. Kahlo employed masterful art in both hiding her disabilities, and establishing her persona.

Kahlo may have been a revolutionary – she would host Leon Trotsky, and paint a communist hammer and sickle on one of her body casts – but it was her Mexican heritage, her country’s culture that drove her fashion interests.

Kahlo’s fame would come only after her death – her first art exhibit was in the year before she died. Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera writes movingly of Kahlo’s astonishing arrival at that exhibit in Mexico City. “Dressed in her favorite Mexican costume, the artist was carried on a hospital stretcher to her four-poster bed…installed in the gallery that afternoon. The bed was bedecked as she liked it, with photographs of her husband, the great muralist Diego Rivera…”

Throughout her “loving yet tempestuous” marriage – the couple divorced and remarried –  Kahlo lived under Rivera’s shadow. But today, her fame appears to have eclipsed her husband’s. “From cupcakes, to tattoos, the signature eyebrows, the coils of hair, the decorative ornaments and ribbons,” the public of the world can identify with Frida Kahlo.

What drew this eye also in the exhibit were the documents, the diaries, the books she read – she would insert flowers or birds’ feathers in pages that inspired her – that so illustrate her preoccupation with her creative process.  Her inscriptions are everywhere and on everything.

“I paint my own reality,” was her mantra. “Painting herself bleeding, weeping, cracked open,” so writes Herrera, “she transmuted her painting into art with remarkable frankness tempered by humor and fantasy.”

It’s all there to be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but hurry, as “Frida Kahlo, Making Herself Up” closes on Nov. 4, and it’s not traveling.

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