Frida Kahlo

Andy WarholThomas Arthur Brown

Frida KahloDaniela Bongusto

Pablo Picasso

Andy WarholThomas Arthur Brown

Pablo PicassoDora Madonia

Andy W

arhol

Andy WarholThomas Arthur Brown

Andy WarholThomas Arthur Brown

Futura og egendefinert A

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Hungarian Jew, whose parents had fled persecution under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and settled in Europe. He arrived in Mexico aged 18, married, was widowed, put his children into an orphanage and re-married. His second wife Matilde, Frida’s mother, was of mixed Mexican back-ground – an Indian father, and a Creole mother who was the daughter of a Span-ish general. Guillermo Kahlo was a pho-tographer. His business in Mexico City combined bread- and butterportraiture with more adventurous landscape work, including the recording for the govern-ment of ancient architectural remains. As a child, Frida was very close to her father and helped him in his studio. While no direct connections can be established with certainty between her art and her father’s photography, a childhood spent steeped in the everyday business of picture-mak-ing cannot but have helped to encourage her own confidence in that direction

The Accident

The dreadful, near-fatal accident that happened to Kahlo when she was 18 transformed her life. In September 1925, she was going home from central Mexico City, when the bus in which she was traveling was crushed by a tramcar. She was thrown from the wreckage and her spine, pelvis, foot and collarbone were all broken in numerous places and a metal handrail pierced through her pelvis. Several others were killed in the crash and Kahlo was not expected to live. Although she had been a diminu-tive child, never very strong, and already had one atrophied leg as a result of polio, there-had been no reason to expect that she would not fulfill her ambition to train in medicine. Now, however, she became a semi-invalid and during the remainder

of her life underwent over 30 operations, often requiring protracted periods of convalescence, when she was fitted into constricting plaster corsets. Her injuries may also have contributed to her inability to carry a child full-term, and she subse-quently had three abortions. Hospitals, operations, the intimate diagrammatic depiction of human organs as though laid out for dissection, all later feed into the art of Frida Kahlo and become one of the most distinctive parts of her personal iconography. Kahlo became an artist through her accident. During her initial convalescence she painted with pigments, which her father used for coloring in and retouch-ing photographs. ‘Nothing, she said, seemed more normal than to paint what had not been fulfilled.’ Her first pictures, however, were not focused on her own losses but were portraits of her sisters and school friends. They tend to be painted to type, three-quarter length, with the sitter staring to the right, and the edges of face, figure and fabric hard and linear. Back-grounds are treated more as flat backdrops and left plain, with a selection of symbols indicating the interests of the portrayed figure. Shadows are rarely shown as cast, but rather as soft burred edges on the inside of a circumscribing line. This, together with her use of almond-shaped eyes and faces, suggests the classicizing conventions for drawing, painting, ad-vertising and, importantly, photography, which were inspired by the nineteenth century French painter Ingres and were fashionable and popular in the mid-1920s. The awkward and calculatedly ‘primi-tive’ quality of these works derives from Kahlo’s sensitivity to another source, the colonial and post-colonial provincial por-traiture of nineteenth- century Mexico. The naive pursuit of the sophisticated conventions of European portraiture often gave intensity and a distinctive charm to

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Kahlo and Rivera were feted when they first arrived in New York in 1933, but their visit was curtailed after Rivera refused to delete a figure of Lenin from his Rockefeller Center fresco.

She even lied about her birth in order to have people believe that she had been born in 1910, the altogether more roman-tic year of the Revolution’s beginning, rather than 1907, this is the year of her actual birthday. Kahlo grew up as the Revolution unfolded. Consolidation of revolution-ary changes – and stability in Mexican political life – was not achieved until the mid-1920s. As a student in Mexico City, she attended the prestigious National Preparatory School where, from 1922, she was at the very heart of an educational reforming climate that had been fostered by the radical Minister of Education, José Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos was responsible for largescale programs of school and library building, and a massive literacy drive among the rural poor. Kahlo’s privi leged education (she was one of 35 girls among 2000 students), intended to lead to her becoming one of the few female doctors in Mexico, was at the apex of this pyramid of national educational improve-ment. One of the more idiosyncratic features of Vasconcelos’s educational reforms in the arts was his commissioning of murals to decorate public buildings, including the walls of Kahlo’s own school. Among the artists who worked on the paintings at her school from 1921 was the 36 year old Diego Rivera, who subse-quently became Frida’s husband (twice) and her lifelong companion. Although the couple were not apparently introduced to each other until several years later, both Kahlo and Rivera developed different ac-counts of the mutual attraction that each felt for the other, dating from a meeting they had when Kahlo was at school. This was characteristic of the retrospective myth creation that was indulged in by the both of them. Murals created on public buildings by Rivera and others during the 1920s cel-ebrated the achievements of the Mexican

Revolution, as well as rather naively por-traying some of the more grandiloquent hopes for the future. They also reflected much of the contradictory and conflict-ing nature of that extraordinary upheaval. Mexico’s revolution had resulted in a government whose reforms included the breaking up of efficient agrarian capitalist estates, in order to return land to commu-nal and village-run subsistence economics, as well as a program for modernizing in-dustry. Trade unions were directly linked to the government by open and secret deals, and given a special protected status in exchange for co-operation. Mexico’s revolution was not so much a socialist revolution (although many of its strongest supporters, including Rivera and eventu-ally Kahlo, saw themselves as socialists), but rather a corporatist creation in which poor peasants, proletariat, the army, the middle classes and the intelligentsia were brought together into a government of national unity. With a distinctly nation-alistic tone, which was anti-colonial and often anti-Western, the governmentys various attempts to fuse the historic and the modern were at best anti-rational, and at times downright mystical. To outsiders, like those European and North American socialist revolutionaries whose univers-alistic beliefs were rooted in proletarian internationalism, the Mexican Revolu-tion seemed a perplexing compromise. It is important to understand that Kahlo’s own political awareness, nurtured in such a climate, was deeply influenced by this blend of contradictory influences. The polarity of the ancient and the modern is a consistent feature of many of her self-portraits, in which she projects herself as a vibrant amalgam of the two. There is a sense in which Kahlo’s oeuvre is at times paradigmatic of Mexico itself. Frida’s own family had a mixture of Mexican and European antecedents. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was an emigré

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Frida Kahlo Introductionl

Kahlo’s elaborately coiffed hair was used symbolically in certain portraits to express the state of her relationship with Rivera.

Frida Kahlo Introductionl

Camille Pissaro, The Gleaners, 1889, 17 × 24 cm

The society had been constituted as a ‘soclété anonyme’ (a limited liability com-pany) open to anyone prepared to pay 60 francs a year. Each artist was entitled to have two pictures hung – though this rule was not adhered to. All members had equal rights and could participate in the election of the committee of fifteen members. Originally the Impressionists intended to publish a journal, but this ambition was not realized until 1877. To cover expenses, a commission of 10 per cent was levied on sales. Exhibits were to be grouped in alphabetical order of artists’ names, according to size, and hung no more than two rows deep. The hanging was in the hands of a committee chaired by Renoir, who did most of the work himself as other members failed to turn up and help him. There were 165 works in the exhibi-tion, including five oil paintings and sev-en pastels by Monet; four oils, two pastels and three water colours by Morlsot; six oil

paintings and one pastel by Renoir; ten works by Degas; five by Pissarro; three by Cézanne; and three by Guillaumin. Some of the pictures were on loan, including Cézanne’s Modern Olympia, Morisot’s Hide and Seek (owned by Manct) and two Sisley landscapes that had been bought by Durand-Ruel. Works exhibited that are well known today included Degas’ At the Races in the Countg, Monet’s Impression: Sunrise and his Boulevard des Capucines, Morisot’s Re Cradle, Pissarro’s The Or-chard (painted in 1872) and ofcourse also Renoir’s La Loge. The majority of the participants were not connected with the so-called Batignolles group and had been recruited by one or other of the sixteen founding members, Degas being especially active in this respect. Most of these ‘outsiders’ were regular exhibitors at the Salon. Some of the subscribers to the society did not participate. There were 175 visitors on the first day of the exhibition and 54 on the

last, the total attendance being around 3500. Nor was the exhibition disastrous from a selling point of view, although some exhibitors had pitched their prices too high – Pissarro wanted 1000 francs for The Orchard and Monet asked the same for Impression: Sunrise, neither of which never been sold. Admittedly Sisley sold a landscape for 1000 francs, but that may well have been the result of a manoeuvre by Durand-Ruel. The sum that accrued to the society from the 10 per cent commission on sales amounted to 360 francs, which implies that 3600 francs worth of pictures were sold. It is known that Monet received a total of 200 francs, Renoir 180 francs and Pissarro 130 francs, while Cézanne got 300 francs for his House of the Hanged Man. Although Renoir failed to achieve the 500 francs he wanted for La Loge, later he managed to sell it for 450 francs to Père Martin, a small-time dealer and loyal supporter of the group. Neither Morisot

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lImpressionism The first impressionist exhibition

Edgar Degas, Absinthe Drinker, 1876, Oil on canvas,92 × 68 cm, Museum d’Orsay, Paris, France.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Bathers, 1887, 88 × 113 cm

lImpressionism The first impressionist exhibition

lFrida Kahlo Kahlo and Surrealism

The Little Deer, 1946, Oil on Masonite, 22,9 × 30,5 cm, Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art, New York

Frida Kahlo Kahlo and Surrealisml

Diego and I, 1949, Oil on Masonite, 29,5 × 22,3 cm, Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art, New York

lEdvard Munch The years in France

August Strindberg, 1892, oil on canvas, 79 × 108 cm

The years in France

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In the autumn of 1899 Munch held a large separate exhibition in Kristiania, and was thereafter awarded a state travel grant for three consecutive years. Natu-rally, he went to Paris, where for a short time he was a pupil of Léon Bonnat, but he became more inspired by acquaint-ing himself with the city’s art life. At that time a Post-Impressionist breakthrough was in progress along with different anti-naturalist experiments. This had a liberating effect on Munch. ‘The camera cannot compete with a brush and can-vas,’ he wrote, ‘as long as it can’t be used in heaven and hell.’ The first autumn, shortly after Munch arrived in France,

he was informed that his father had died. The loneliness and melancholy in the painting Night (1890) are often seen with this in mind. The dark interior with the lonely figure at the window is completely dominated by tones of blue a painting of nuances which may be reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler’s nocturnal colour harmonies. This modern and inde- pendent work is also an expression of the ‘decadence’ in the final decade of the nineteenthv century. At the Autumn Exhibition in Kris-tiania in 1891 Munch showed among oth-er works Melancholy. Great curved lines and more homogeneous colour surfaces

dominate here; there is a simplifying and formalizing of the motif similar to that found in French Synthetism. ‘Symbolism – nature is formed by one’s state of mind,’ wrote Munch. At this time Munch did the first sketches of the well-known The Scream. He also painted several pictures in an Impressionist style verging on pointillism, with motifs from the Seine and from Kris-tiania’s promenade, Karl Johan. However, it is the impressions of the soul, and not the eye, that are Munch’s main interest. The Scream is often described as the first expressionistic picture, and is the most extreme example of Munch’s ‘soul paint-

lRijksmuseum Amsterdam Johannes Vermeer

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Johannes Vermeer, The kitchen maid, canvas, 45,5 × 41 cm

Johannes Vermeer, The love letter, 1669–1670, canvas, 44 × 38,5 cm

Johannes Vermeer, View of houses in Delft, also known as The Little Street, 1658, canvas, 54,3 × 44 cm

Johannes Vermeer, Woman reading a letter, 1662–1663, canvas, 46,5 × 39 cm

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam Johannes Vermeerl

Johannes Vermeer (borne October 31, 1632 – buried on December 15, 1675) was a Dutch painter, who lived and worked in Delft. He is also sometimes referred to as Vermeer of Delft or Johannes van der Meer. Alongside Rembrandt, Ver-meer is the best known painter of the Dutch Golden Age, and his paintings are admired for their transparent colours, careful composition, and brilliant use of dramatic lightning. Johannes Vermeer of Delft was one of the most talented painters in the Dutch Golden Age. He created a number of paintings in the 17th century. His work shows everyday life in the city of Delft in the Netherlands. His work and life had been forgotten for centuries, but now Vermeer is considered to be one of the greatest painters. There are thirty-four paintings which scholars overwhelmingly agree should be attributed to Johannes Vermeer. A prob-able thirty-fifth, Young Girl with a Flute at the National Gallery in Washington, , was likely begun by Vermeer but

finished or restored by another; its lack of Vermeer’s characteristic refinement has discouraged most scholars from making afirm attribution. For an informed discus-sion of this painting, see Arthur Whee-lock’s article, Young Girl with a Flute, in the catalogue of the 1995–1996 National Gallery of Art Johannes Vermeer Exhibi-tion. It is therefore cited by the National Gallery of Art itself as a work merely ‘at-tributed’ to Vermeer. Like his fellow artists from Delft, Vermeer was fascinated by space and the play of light on surfaces. The illusionistic interiors of Pieter de Hooch (1629 – after 1683), who settled in Delft around 1652, must have made an especially strong impression on Vermeer, for around 1658 he too began to devote himself to this particular genre. Unlike De Hooch, how-ever, he concentrated on a single figure in a corner of a room, standing by a window with sunlight entering through it. The light played over the figure and the ob-jects in the room, thereby giving it shape. Vermeer was a careful worker, with an eye

for the tiniest details. Yet often it seems as though he has caught his subjects in the middle of some activity such as reading a letter, or pouring out milk. The effect is almost photographic. Vermeer produced transparent colours by adding the paint onto the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with pointillism). David Hock-ney, among other historians, has specu-lated that Vermeer possibly used a camera obscura to achieve precise positioning in his compositions, and this view seems to be supported by certain lightand perspec-tive effects which would be the result of lenses and however, the issue is disputed by many other historians.

lPablo Picasso The Blue and The Rose

Woman Ironing, 1904,Oil on canvas 116 × 273 cm. Guggenheim Museum

La Vie, 1903, Oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art

The Old Guitar Player, 1903, Oil on panel, 121,3 × 82,5 cm The Art Institute of Chicago

At 9 o’clock on the night of February 17, 1901, in the back room of a Paris wine shop, Picasso’s friend Carles Casagemas shot himself in the right temple. The suicide stunned Picasso. Dogged by poverty and failure himself, he sank into a deep despair. Somehow, he continued to work. And, reflecting his mood, he began to paint in melancholic, cold tones, predominantly blue. These pictures – one a memorial to his dead friend – reveal Picasso’s compassion for the destitute,

the blind and the lame, the outcasts of Paris society whose harsh lot he shared. In painting such moving and evocative pictures as the one shown at the right, he created a unique personal style, his first and perhaps his best known. This was Picasso’s Blue Period. Abruptly, in 1904, Picasso’s life changed and his art changed too. He fell deeply in love for the first time, and as his mood brightened he adopted a warmer palette, painting tranquil pictures in deli-

cate roseate tones. Among the most lyrical and captivating of Picasso’s paintings, they are loosely grouped as works of his Rose Period. The first of these, paintings of cir-cus performers and their families, radiate a gentle happiness, but later ones contain less and less emotion until finally his work is almost completely empty of sentiment. In the end Picasso concentrated on figures and figures alone, a concern with form that presaged radical changes not only in the style of painting, but also in the

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lPablo Picasso The Blue and The Rose

Campbell’s Soup II: Old Fashioned Vegetable, 1966.Screen print on paper 88,9 × 58,4 cm

Andy Warhol Introductionl

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Truman Capote, 1979. Acrylic and silkscreenink on canvas, 101,6 × 101,6 cm

Andy Warhol Introductionl

Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans are key works of the 1960s Pop art movement, as many artists began making work derived from popular culture. Warhol’s soup cans raise the simply popular or everyday to the status of art. Campbell’s and its red-and-white label date from the late nineteenth century and became more and more familiar in the twentieth, particularly with the increase in mass production and advertising after World War II. Warhol himself said, ‘pop art is about liking things’ and claimed that he ate Campbell’s soup every day for twenty years. For him it was the quintessential American product: he marveled that the soup always tasted the same, like Coke, whether consumed by prince or pauper. Warhol was a fan of the Rolling Stones from the moment they arrived in New York City. A photo from the mid-1960s

shows him cheerfully wearing a button with their photos printed on it, and his archives include a ticket stub for their concert on November 5, 1965. Some of their early s were among his possessions at the time of his death: Between the But-tons, Aftermath, and Beggars Banquet. Their hit ‘Satisfaction’ can be heard over and over on audiotapes made at the Fac-tory in 1965. In the 1970s Warhol became more closely associated with the famous band: he and Craig Braun designed the well-known zippered album cover for Sticky Fingers in 1971, and Warhol cre-ated the punk-inspired Love You Live in 1977. The Stones used the artists Mon-tauk home as a retreat and practice space during their United States tour in 1972. A large felt banner of their lascivious tongue logo owned by Warhol may have been stage decor for this tour. Contrary

to popular belief, Warhol did not design the famous tongue. Warhol loved to read about the private lives of celebrities and was a great fan of actress Elizabeth Taylor, whose offscreen romances, eight marriag-es, and health problems were great fodder for the tabloids. Taylor has been in the spotlight from her first starring role at age twelve in National Velvet (1944) through a prolific career that includes two Oscars for best actress (1960s Butterfield 8 and 1964s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ). In the 1970s and 1980s Warhol, now a celebrity himself, frequently attended Taylors New York charity events and was able to con-verse with the star he regarded as an icon. In 1978 Warhol told Liz, then married to Virginia Senator John Warner, ‘Elizabeth, it would be great to see you in the White House,’ to which she replied, ‘Oh but I