Displaying a
troubled life

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

As Frida Kahlo lay bedridden for much of her adult life, the victim of childhood illnesses, a life-altering bus crash and dozens of surgeries meant to relieve repeated bouts of chronic pain, she found plenty of time for contemplation.
Kahlo naturally thought often of her own deteriorating physical condition, her stormy marriage to acclaimed muralist Diego Rivera, the revolutionary politics of her native Mexico and her complex Euro-indigenous heritage.
A new major exhibition of Kahlo’s paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explores all of those themes within the context of early 20th-century modern art, as well as the growing public interest in the artist in more recent times.
Frida Kahlo is the first major exhibition dedicated to the artist in the United States in 15 years. Philadelphia will be its only East Coast venue. The display includes 42 paintings, some of which have never before been exhibited in the U.S. or anywhere.
The works have been drawn from the museum’s own collection, as well as those in Mexico, France and Japan. Meanwhile, more than 100 photos from Kahlo’s personal collection supplement the exhibition, offering viewers a glimpse into her day-to-day life beyond the canvas.
Kahlo is considered influential for both her style and subject matter. Though claimed by her Surrealist contemporaries as one of their own, Kahlo rejected such a label, according to curators of the exhibition.
"She felt she wasn’t painting her dreams or exploring her subconscious," Emily Hage, an assistant curator of modern art at the museum, explained during a recent tour. "She was painting reality."
One can only conclude that Kahlo’s reality must have seemed surreal on more than a few occasions.
Born in 1907 to a professional photographer from Germany and a mother of Native American descent, she contracted polio at a young age and may have suffered from a congenital spinal disorder. At age 19, she broke her spine, pelvis, ribs and leg in a bus accident and would spend the rest of her life in and out of acute medical care.
She began painting during her initial recovery from the crash and later developed a personal relationship with Rivera, who was 20 years her senior, as she sought his artistic mentoring.
The pair married in 1922 and, notwithstanding a brief separation in 1939, remained essentially together until Kahlo’s 1954 death despite infidelity by both and her failure to bear him children due to her poor health.
Kahlo is widely recognized for her small-scale but intricately detailed, highly symbolic and emotionally intense works, as well as her strong feminine voice.
She painted many iconic self-portraits, portraying her physical pain in works like 1932’s Henry Ford Hospital, depicting her own miscarriage, and 1944’s The Broken Column, in which her spine appears as a crumbling classical column and nails pierce her fleshy torso and arms.
As is the case in many of her paintings, the background of Column is barren and parched Earth, representative of the arid Mexican terrain as well as her cracked, damaged body, a theme evident in many of the self-portraits.
Kahlo’s complex relationship with Rivera inspired telling and powerful works like 1931’s Frida and Diego Rivera, along with 1939’s The Two Fridas.
She painted the former as a wedding portrait, positioning Rivera as the central foremost figure and herself to the side, almost in the background, as the stereotypical adoring wife. However, the work foreshadows problems to come, according to Elizabeth Carpenter, co-curator of the exhibition and associate curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
"Diego is a bit of an egomaniac," Carpenter said, pointing to the giant "D" belt-buckle included by the artist on her husband’s image.
Though Rivera remained a staunch supporter of Kahlo’s art, the same couldn’t be said of his commitment to monogamy. Kahlo largely accepted her husband’s infidelities and largely expected them, according to Carpenter.
Kahlo even engaged in her own extramarital romps with both men and women. But she could not accept Rivera’s affair with her younger sister, Christina. Kahlo left him briefly, only to return.
Following Kahlo’s return from a trip to Paris in 1939, they divorced at Rivera’s insistence, only to remarry the following year.
The Two Fridas embodies Kahlo’s despair over her failed marriage. The painting depicts two self-portraits. One wears a traditional Mexican Tehuana costume and represents the Frida that Rivera loved, the artist would later explain. The other figure wears a Victorian wedding garment and represents the woman rejected by Rivera.
Rivera, meanwhile, is portrayed as a boy in a portrait held by the Tehuana Frida. A blood vessel travels from the portrait through the hearts of both women, but comes to a halt in the lap of the Victorian Frida, where a surgical clamp ceases its flow.
Though physical and emotional suffering permeate Kahlo’s self-portraits and many of the third person works in the exhibition, its curators insist a message of perseverance and hope emerges as a common thread.
That optimism is evident in 1940’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, according to Michael Taylor, the museum’s head curator of modern art. In the painting, thorns draw blood from Kahlo’s neck, but thriving wildlife surrounds her head, including a cat, a monkey, butterflies and lush vegetation.
"Frida is surrounded by a menagerie of pets," Taylor said. "In a sense, they’re like her surrogate children. Her suffering is seen as kind of a universal suffering. She’s borrowing Christian symbolism and using it to her own ends." ••
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com