La Chingona: Frida Does Dallas, Part 1, October 2024

January 26, 2025  •  Leave a Comment

  

Frida: Beyond the Myth/ Mas Alla del Mito  went on exhibit at the Dalllas Museum of Art in August 2024.

 

          During her lifetime, the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was best known as the idiosyncratic, perennially maltreated spouse of the muralist Diego Rivera.  In the intervening decades, Kahlo has been resurrected as a feminist totem.  Her fame has eclipsed that of her philandering husband, and perhaps that of every other woman artist.  Even those with scant interest in art can identify Kahlo from her image, duplicated on mugs, tote bags, T-shirts and umbrellas.  The dead painter has become a commodity, with an identity as malleable as the market requires.  

          I am as guilty of contributing to the cult of Frida as anyone waiting in line to enter her last home in Mexico City.  HL and I, too, made our obeisances to La Kahlo when we visited La Casa Azul, the Blue House.  It was the most crowded of any of the tourist attractions in the illimitable conurbation that is Mexico City.  

HL and I were at La Casa Azul in 2019.

 

          It is undeniable that Frida Kahlo overcame tremendous adversity in pursuit of her art and identity.  As a young child, she contracted polio, a disease that shortened and weakened her right leg.  At eighteen, she was injured in a trolley accident and suffered multiple fractures, including a broken spine.  Throughout her life, she endured pain that incapacitated her periodically.  Yet Kahlo pursued a career in painting at a time when few women in Mexico were taken seriously as artists.  She embraced her mother's Zapotec heritage, wearing embroidered Tehuana dresses from Oaxaca, when most mestizos in her country were emphasizing their European origins and obscuring their indigenous ones.  She joined leftist student groups advocating radical social reforms to remove the landowning class, the military and the Catholic Church from power.  Though she was married to Diego Rivera, twice in fact, Kahlo had both male and female lovers.  Accomplished, outspoken, alluring and passionate, it is no wonder that Kahlo inspired the feminists of the 1990's and became a one-woman growth industry.       

          The Kahlo show at the Dallas Museum of Art purported to reveal Frida as a woman as well as the painter who crafted her persona as artfully as she did her paintings.  By woman I had supposed that the curators meant human being, someone who had been born into a particular family, and had certain experiences and desires that inspired her, but I was wrong.  Instead, the exhibit focused on Frida the Woman, that wounded chimaera of seductress, celebrity and victim.   It obscured the glimpses of the talented, tormented individual that one could derive from the very artworks and photographs on display. 

          The gallery, aptly enough, had one portion hung with translucent panels of royal blue, decorated to evoke the courtyard of La Casa Azul.  It was apt that the diaphanous material revealed and camouflaged the space simultaneously. 

          I shall write more about the exhibition and the portrait (pun intended) of Kahlo that emerged from it my next entry.  Though I do not make formal resolutions for the New Year,  I intend to curb my natural loquacity in 2025 in order to preserve your patience.   

 

 

 

 

 

  


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