World of Antiques and Art article
EXHIBITIONFrida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican ModernismThe
Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection13 July 28 October 2001
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The self-portraits of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo are
extraordinarily compelling. While her physical features and
elaborate costumes are striking, it is her interior life that seems
to explode beyond the canvas: as the Surrealist writer Andr Breton
once remarked, The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.
Combining the familiar with the strange, marrying naturalistic
depiction with bizarre symbolism, Kahlo invented a singular
portrait style that cuts straight to the heart of deeply felt
passions and sorrows. We are always convinced of the psychological
veracity of her paintings in spite of their often implausible
content. Celebrated by the Surrealists in her own lifetime, Kahlo
has attained cult-like status both for her extraordinary art and
her tempestuous love life with Diego Rivera, Mexicos most prominent
modern painter.An outstanding selection of works by Kahlo and
Rivera forms the centrepiece of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman
collection. Jacques Gelman, the Russian emigr film producer, and
his wife Natasha lived in Mexico and developed a collection which
is regarded as the most significant private holding of
twentieth-century Mexican art. Upon Jacques death in 1986, the
Gelman collection of European modernism was donated to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.Frida Kahlo was born in 1907
in Coyoacn, on the outskirts of Mexico City. At eighteen she was
involved in a bus accident and severely injured, leaving her with
chronic health problems that would prevent her from bearing
children. In 1929 she married the mural painter Diego Rivera, and
thus began a life-long tempestuous relationship fractured by
infidelity, divorce and jealousy. Kahlos paintings speak of
psychological and physical pain often related to her accident and
difficult marriage. Much ink has been spilled over the question of
whether Kahlo was a Surrealist. While Andr Breton described her
work as pure surreality, Kahlo publicly denied knowledge of the
French art movement, commenting that, I never knew I was a
Surrealist till Andr Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.
However, the reality was more complex. As recent research has
shown, Kahlo was aware of European art movements and the ideas that
motivated them. Before meeting Rivera, she had experimented in a
variety of painting styles. Encouraged by her Austrian-born
photographer father, Kahlo studied the classics of European art and
literature. While a student at the National Art Academy in Mexico
City, she was influenced by Italian Futurism. Like European artists
Andr Derain and Carlo Carr during this period, Kahlo privileged the
untutored art of indigenous peoples and children. She was also
particularly interested in the Latin American tradition of the
retablo painting simple religious images depicting a miraculous
event in a saints life. Surrealist ideas and images had made their
way to Mexico before Bretons arrival in 1938 through art journals
and personal contacts. Artist such as Max Ernst and Joan Mir who
belonged to the Surrealist movement explored automatic drawing
techniques and biomorphic forms to transcend rational thought.
While Kahlos work displays little similarity to that of those
artists, it does conform to the Surrealist aspiration to express
the functioning of the mind. In her paintings objective reality is
penetrated by bizarre elements motivated by an interior, mental
truth. However, the fantastical elements of her work are never an
abstract exercise in breaking down rational thought but rather
serve to elucidate very real and deeply felt psychological
experiences. Two of Kahlos greatest works are in the Gelman
collection, namely Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on My Mind)
and Self-Portrait with Monkeys, both from 1943. In the first
painting, Kahlo depicts herself in the elaborate wedding headdress
of the women of the Tehuantepec region of Mexico, stressing her
relationship to Diego Rivera. This image bears a close resemblance
to the Catholic tradition of the crowned sister painting which
commemorated a nuns entry into monastic life. Literally becoming
the bride of Christ, such women were depicted crowned with flowers
and bearing an image of their spiritual husband, similar to the way
in which Kahlo shows Riveras image emblazoned on her forehead.
Their marriage, the cause of both joy and suffering in Kahlos life,
can be compared with a nuns mystical marriage to Christ. As she
wrote in her diary, Diego is the beginning, the constructor, my
baby, boyfriend, painter, my lover, my husband, my friend, my
mother, myself, and the universe. To convey her powerful attachment
to Rivera, Kahlo appropriates elements of Christian and indigenous
Mexican symbolism. Moreover, the sprawling threads of the dress are
intertwined with tendrils from the crown of flowers, conveying the
pervasive quality of her feeling. Accompanying this testament to
her passion is a sinister quality; the strands and roots threaten
to become tangled and all-enveloping, and the impassive image of
Riveras face on her forehead speaks of Kahlos psychological
obsession but also of her philandering husbands notorious
indifference to her feelings. In Self-Portrait with Monkeys the
artist is depicted surrounded by four spider monkeys. Rivera gave
Kahlo a pet monkey as a surrogate for the child that she was unable
to bear. While the technique in this work is highly realistic and
precise, this painting is not simply a realistic portrait. A key to
the disturbing subtext of this painting is given by the monkeys
which impishly peep out from behind leaves and with disturbingly
long arms and fingers cling to her body and toy with her clothing.
In this image, as in many others showing her intimately associated
with plants and animals, Kahlo proclaims her connection to the
natural world while emphasising the unnaturalness of her childless
state, a source of great despair to her. As Rivera argued in the
year this image was painted, Frida is the only example in the
history of art of an artist who tore open her chest and heart to
reveal the biological truth of her feelings. While the monkeys seem
to mock her predicament, from her steely gaze we sense that she
remained proud in spite of her fate, giving birth not to children
but rather to powerful, living documents of her interior life.
Diego Rivera was born in 1886 in Guanajuato, moving to Mexico City
soon after with his parents. He was an exceptionally gifted
painter, and studied at Mexicos National School of Fine Arts. In
1909 he visited Europe where he came into contact with contemporary
avant-garde movements and studied Italian Renaissance fresco
techniques. In 1921 he returned to Mexico and began painting the
grand mural works that made him famous. In the enormous painting
commissions of the 1920 and 1930s, Rivera synthesised various
strands of art, including Cubism, Tuscan quattrocento painting, and
Mexican popular art. In the 1930s Rivera and Kahlo settled in the
United States where Rivera painted some of his most extraordinary
and controversial commissions. His mural for the Rockefeller Center
in New York was destroyed at the order of the Rockefeller family
when the artist refused to remove a portrait of the Communist
leader Vladimir Lenin. Both Rivera and Kahlo were members of the
Communist Party, and like many other Mexican artists of their time,
felt that their art should reflect strongly held political
beliefs.The works by Diego Rivera in the Gelman collection reflect
a number of different aspects of his work. The early Cubist
masterpiece The Last Hour, painted while Diego was in Paris in
1915, shows his full embrace of that avant-garde painting style.
Recognisable objects such as books, vases and a newspaper have been
reduced to two-dimensional geometrical elements that appear to
shift and scuttle on the picture plane. In his subsequent work he
returned to a more classic rendering of form, without the visual
distortions seen in Cubist painting. While the Gelman collection
does not contain any work directly related to Riveras mural
painting activity, the Calla Lily Vendor of 1943 borrows a theme
from one of his frescoes at the Mexican Ministry of Public
Education in the 1920s. The symmetrical composition, simplified
forms and indigenous Mexican focus evident in this painting are
qualities that are pervasive throughout his later work. In another
painting, Portrait of Natasha Gelman of 1943, Rivera paid his
Hollywoodian tribute to feminine beauty. In this work his approach
was more indulgent, and he abandoned the severity of his signature
style, emphasising the sinuous curves of the elegant Natasha which
are echoed by the extravagant bunches of lilies adorning the
background.Beyond Frida Kahlos work, Mexican modernism has a strong
surrealist current as is evident in a number of paintings in the
Gelman collection. One of the most important artists working in
this mode was the English-born painter Leonora Carrington, who
moved to Mexico in 1942. Born in 1917 in Lancashire, England and
educated in convent schools, she studied with Amde Ozenfant before
meeting Max Ernst, the Surrealist painter. She exhibited with the
Surrealists in Paris until the Nazis interned Ernst in 1940, when
she fled to Spain. Committed by her family to a mental hospital in
South Africa the following year, she subsequently escaped to Mexico
where she lived and painted until 1985, meeting Diego Rivera, Frida
Kahlo and other Mexican artists.Carrington has been credited with
giving impetus to the Surrealist movement in Mexico. As in the work
of Surrealists Max Ernst or Giorgio de Chirico, objects and figures
are combined in her work in surprising juxtapositions. However,
like Frida Kahlo, her work is less fantastical than that of her
male counterparts and relies on emotionally laden connections
between animals, objects and people. In Carringtons paintings
combinations of realistic and implausible elements heighten her
paintings to the point where they open a window onto the intense
experiences of the artists interior life. The Powers of Madame
Phonecia, painted in 1974, depicts an elderly woman in a heraldic
pattern surrounded by various creatures, including ducks,
armadillos, scorpions and goats. A believer in the subversive
nature of female power Carrington was inspired by Robert Graves
book The White Goddess to privilege potent female figures. Drawing
on ancient mythology, Celtic religion and indigenous Mexican
rituals, animals feature prominently in her work and are attributed
with quasi-magical powers. The occult efficacy of the old woman in
the picture is symbolised by the streams of hair-like substance
emanating from her nostrils. While less realistic than her earlier
work, the relation between woman and nature is still a subject.
Forms of magical power are alluded to, and the image has the form
of a religious mandala in its extreme symmetry.Frida Kahlo, Diego
Rivera and Mexican Modernism: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman
Collection, will also display work by other famous painters such as
Jos Clemente Orozco and Rufino Tamayo, giving the audience the
opportunity of viewing the work of Kahlo and Rivera within the
broader context of twentieth-century Mexican art.
CAPTIONS
1. Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait with Monkeys, 1943, oil on canvas,
81.5 x 63 cm. Vergel Foundation, New York. Reproduced courtesy INBA
and Banco de Mexico 2. Frida Kahlo, Diego on my Mind, 1943, oil on
masonite, 76 x 61 cm. Vergel Foundation, New York. Reproduced
courtesy INBA and Banco de Mexico3. Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait with
Red and Gold Dress, 1941, oil on canvas, 39 x 27.5 cm. Vergel
Foundation, New York. Reproduced courtesy INBA and Banco de
Mexico4. Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait with Necklace, 1933, oil on
canvas, 35 x 29 cm. Vergel Foundation, New York. Reproduced
courtesy INBA and Banco de Mexico5. Diego Rivera, Calla Lily
Vendor, 1943, oil on masonite, 150 x 120 cm. Vergel Foundation, New
York. Reproduced courtesy INBA and Banco de Mexico6. Diego Rivera,
The Last Hour, 1915, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm. Vergel Foundation,
New York. Reproduced courtesy INBA and Banco de Mexico7. Diego
Rivera, Portrait of Natasha Gelman, 1943, oil on canvas, 115 x 153
cm. Vergel Foundation, New York. Reproduced courtesy INBA and Banco
de Mexico8. Leonora Carrington, The Powers of Madame Phonecia 1974,
42.5 x 44.5 cm. Vergel Foundation, New York
