La Chingona: Frida Does Dallas, Part 2, October 2024

February 04, 2025  •  Leave a Comment

Kahlo painted this oil on canvas, Autorretrato en un Traje de Terciopelo/Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress, in 1926, when she was nineteen years old.

 

          I had been curious to see which aspects of Frida Kahlo would emerge in the DMA's show.   Fascinating though even the least histrionic Kahlo biography may be, I have always been most interested in the artist.  Her talent was precocious, manifest in her earliest works.  She strove ceaselessly to master her medium and seems to have done so.  The fact that she was bedridden when she produced her last, exquisite still lifes is, to me, a distracting detail.  Painting was more than Kahlo's vocation; it was her compulsion.  She was a teacher as well as an artist, the center of a creative community.  In using herself as her main subject, she fused her private with her public image.  Yet, the consummate Surrealist, Kahlo remains elusive.  

          Kahlo made it easy for others to project their own preoccupations onto her.  She continues to be a woman for all reasons.  So I wondered how Frida would be costumed at this point in the 21st Century, in this country.  There were more photographs of her family and friends than I had seen in other exhibitions.  The curators did not shy from showing her with the men and women with whom she was assumed to have dallied.  There were references to her membership in the Communist Party, but they hinted that Kahlo participated in order to please her husband, the unfaithful, overbearing Rivera.  In fact, Kahlo was a campus radical and a committed Marxist long  before she met Rivera.  Their politics formed one of the couple's strongest bonds.  After Rivera and she spent three years in the United States during the Great Depression, from 1930 -1933,  Kahlo was more convinced than ever of the inherent evils of capitalism.  I might have guessed that open marriage and bisexuality are more acceptable than Communism these days.

 

El Sol y la Vida/Sun and Life, 1947, oil on masonite

Soy de Samuel Fastlicht/ I Belong to Samuel Fastlicht, 1951, oil on masonite

 

 

              The most appalling assertion that I read explained one painting as an expression of the grief that Kahlo felt after her husband forced her to have an abortion.  Diego Rivera may not have wanted to be a parent, and the same may have been true of Kahlo.  Kahlo's internal injuries from the trolley accident that made her carrying a pregnancy to term uncertain could have been more of an issue.  We cannot know if the medical opinions of almost a century ago dictated that Kahlo terminate her pregnancies because bearing a child might be lethal for her.  All of the principals are dead.  The interpretation of Kahlo as a woman whose unborn children had been ripped from her womb by sadistic doctors reflects the current, woefully successful, campaign to deny reproductive choice to American women.  Doubtless the same text may accompany the exhibit wherever it travels, and mine may be the only protest.  The reversal of Roe v. Wade indicates that attitudes once restricted to states as benighted as this one have infected the entire body politic.

 

 

 

          For every show that the museum mounts, there is merchandise with the same theme on offer in the gift shop.  That was where I came upon the T-shirt emblazoned with the word Chingona.  I was taken aback, as the term was a slang one that I had learned in the Southwest.  Then, it was applied to a domineering female, and it was not at all admiring or even polite.  The closest English equivalent would be bitch.  Just as contemporary women have claimed that former insult as an accolade, so, too, has Chingona's meaning changed.  Now it signifies Boss (Girl Boss) or Badass, roles that the covers of self-help books exhort women to inhabit.  I like to think that Frida would have been pleased to claim the title La Chingona, inspiring others of her sex to exert their power unapologetically.  And the shirt's colors would have suited her.


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