Reclaiming Frida
Mexico City — AMONG the dozens of spooky, iconic images made by Mexico's most spookily iconic artist, few pack more potent symbolism than the 1939 double self-portrait "The Two Fridas."
On the right side of the large oil painting, Frida Kahlo depicted herself in traditional Mexican garb, her heart hovering outside her body like a phantasm, while in one hand she cradles a small portrait of her then ex-husband, Diego Rivera, rendered as a little boy. On the left side, Kahlo portrayed herself in a lacy white gown, her heart cleaved in two, blood leaking from a severed artery.
At the time the painting was made, Kahlo and Rivera were divorced (though soon to be remarried), and this famous work expresses the Sturm und Drang of the artists' tempestuous union. It also conveys the lifelong struggles within Kahlo's twin-chambered soul: European and Mexican, white and mestizo, artist and woman.
As this capital city braces for a months-long fiesta of all things Frida to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth on July 6, 1907, it's evident that there were not two Fridas but many. But her native land appears to be making an unusually concerted effort this season to reclaim its enigmatic daughter as, first and foremost, a distinctly Mexican artist, deeply rooted in the history, culture and politics of her own time and place.
Mexico's treatment of Kahlo hasn't been without ambiguity. During her lifetime, her genius wasn't always fully recognized at home, especially compared with the worshipful attitude accorded Rivera. Kahlo's small-scale, achingly introspective portraits didn't fit the country's post-revolutionary, socialist-realist public art agenda the way that Rivera's Marxist-themed murals did. Since her death at 47 in 1954, however, Kahlo has been embraced not only by platoons of art critics, scholars and curators but also by those who have found validation in her life and work for their own personal struggles and aspirations
"Frida has been an icon for many groups, for incapacitated people, for lesbians, for foreigners, for mestizos. And this is always the focus that has been given," says Juan Coronel Rivera, grandson of Diego Rivera and co-curator of one of the largest exhibitions ever devoted to Kahlo, which opened here Wednesday at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes.
