However we managed to find some time Thursday, and it was wonderful.
I've never really been into Frida Kahlo's work before. I think it's just that it wasn't created for me. And she is coming from a place of so much pain and anger and passion; a place that my life experience has never prepared me for.
Someone once said that Kahlo's work was like a ribbon wrapped around a bomb. The museum had this quote up along one wall, though I forget now, who said it. I thought that was a clever turn of phrase. But then as I wandered from frame to frame, that statement hit me again and again. It really is like that.
For one thing, there is a purposeful naivety to most of her work. On this one hand, she is reducing elements down to more of a symbol of a thing than a realistic representation of the thing itself. Hands, skies, backgrounds, these are an icon of an idea, not a representation. But then you look at the details in fabric, lips, eyes, and the details of her hair. A million single strokes, delicate and light and intensive. hours and hours must have been spent to create this hairline, this ribbon...
And then beyond that, and really before that, there is the overwhelming way she has of kissing and slapping you, all at once. Something beautiful and emerging out of it, a fetus, or blood, or something amputated and severed, but not quite. Something that screams at you to pay attention, and something calm that sits back and watches you, as you take a moment to try to understand it.
The eyes are so calm, and these images, these symbols, are so horrific. It's hard to watch and hard to turn away from.
I think, looking at this impressive collection of her paintings, that you can't help falling in love with her. All her pain, her love, her political stubbornness, her very strong opinions... and the many self portraits where she is staring you straight in the eye.
"Do you see it now?" she seems to be asking you. That it's this that she lives with, and it's almost unbearable but she can bear it because this is who she is. The beauty and the pain. The delicate details and the brutality. It's in there, in the paintings, and in her eyes staring out at you.
I can't help trying to imagine how things might have been different for her. If she had gone to art school. If she had not loved a man that seems so unlovable. If she had not had the terrible accident so early in life that caused her to be in so much physical pain for the rest of her life.
Maybe these pains were the source of her passion; the source of her drive to paint. But maybe they held her back. Maybe she would have been compelled to paint what she felt no matter what, and what would she have done then?
Image of Frida, circa 1932, (I'm not sure of the photographer here either), via Karlsruhe.de
This painting, the Two Fridas, caught at me. There is something so much more alive about it when you see it in person. This was painted during the year that she and Diego Rivera had divorced. They say that many of her greatest paintings were painted during this year. I don't know. I think she had so many amazing paintings throughout her life. In this one, the Frida on the right represents the woman that her husband had loved. The Frida on the left represents the woman he no longer loved, the heart dissected and bleeding, despite her attempts to stem the flow of blood. Both the loved and the unloved Frida are connected by the veins that run through their hearts and wind around to a small image of Diego as a child, that the once loved Frida holds in her hands. And there is something too, that you can read into the image, of a woman in isolation, comforting herself. Does it say that I am the only one I can depend on to be there for myself? Does it say that, though I am in pain, I am strong within the comfort of my own company? Is it a statement of grief and loneliness and despair? or of grief and the agony of heartbreak and loss, but bounded by personal strength? I don't know enough about Kahlo to know, but I like to think it's the latter. Or maybe all of that, and more.
If you have a chance, the exhibit is well worth going to. It ends September 28th.
On the floor below the Kahlo exhibit, there was also an amazing collection of some of the photographs of Lee Miller.
They covered her early days as a fashion model; as a muse and inspiration to Man Ray; and then moved on to her own career as a photographer. What an incredible woman she must have been. To have seen so much, and to show so much in her images. I wanted to know more.Sometimes, there is so much out there in the world..
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