Frida Kahlo Photographs in Calgary
Frida Kahlo with the doctor Juan Farill by Gisèle Freund, 1951 ©Frida Kahlo Museum
Scores of Frida Kahlo fans converge daily, like pilgrims, to visit La Casa Azul, the late artist’s home in the ritzy Coyoacán area of Mexico City. Kahlo was born and died in this colonial-style building, now a museum. She haunts it still.
Inside, the holiest relic is the artist’s death mask, placed on her four-poster bed and staring, seemingly for eternity, up at the mirror beneath the bed’s canopy. The cramped room pays tribute to a woman who created some of her most famous self-portraits in bed – at home or in hospital – seeking inspiration from her own reflection.
Visitors to the cobalt-blue house can see Kahlo’s favourite Mexican peasant dress in her wardrobe. An easel and palette remain in her studio, as if ready for a new painting. Meals seem about to be prepared in the kitchen. Isabel Alcantara and Sandra Egnolff, in their 1999 book, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, wrote that it “all makes us expect the owners to walk in at any moment.”
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Frida Kahlo by Lola Álvarez Bravo, circa 1944 ©Frida Kahlo Museum
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Frida Kahlo in the Blue House, anonymous, 1930 ©Frida Kahlo Museum
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Frida Kahlo by Guillermo Kahlo, 1926 ©Frida Kahlo Museum
And, in a way, this celebrated husband-wife team did return to the house in 2007 when a box of 6,500 photographs, forgotten for half a century, was found in a storage room. The photos, some by Kahlo and others by friends and famous photographers, are more personal and candid than the more familiar images of a carefully staged woman in colourful dresses and ostentatious jewelry, her long, braided hair worn like a crown with ribbons and flowers.
Since 2007, the museum’s exhibition of 240 of those photographs has been touring the world, including the United States, Brazil and Australia. On Feb. 3, Frida Kahlo: Her Photos opens at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. “The exhibition promises to reveal insights into Kahlo’s rich and deeply personal world, and tells a fascinating story of an artist, a place and an era,” says the Glenbow. The exhibition, part of Exposure, Alberta’s photography festival, continues until May 21.
The exhibition images are contained in a book, also called Frida Kahlo: Her Photos. There are family photos, including a darling one of Frida at age five, and some of her favourite sister, the beautiful Cristina, who had a short affair with Rivera and was eventually forgiven by Kahlo. Many of the family photos were shot by Frida’s father, Guillermo, a commercial photographer who liked to take self-portraits.
Frida Kahlo at the age of five, anonymous, 1912 ©Frida Kahlo Museum
There are images of Rivera, including one with pink lipstick marks where Kahlo kissed it. Their relationship was stormy. They were married, divorced and then remarried. Images of Rivera’s extramarital lovers, including American actress Paulette Goddard, are in the collection. There are also photos of Frida’s own extramarital lovers, including Leon Trotsky, the Communist rebel who fled Russia and lived for a time in La Casa Azul. Another of her lovers, American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, was photographed by Edward Weston. This photo, like many others, has handwriting on the back. In this case, Noguchi wrote: “For my darling, my love.”
Diego Rivera in his study at San Ángel, anonymous, circa 1940 ©Frida Kahlo Museum
Most shocking are the images of Kahlo in a wheelchair or in bed, grimacing, trussed up in various braces or plaster casts after the dozens of painful surgeries she underwent throughout her life, the result of a horrendous trolley crash at age 18. In 1954, shortly before she died, she had her first solo show in Mexico at the Galeria de Arte Contemporáneo, where she greeted fans from her canopied bed, which had been moved from La Casa Azul. Her life of near-constant pain drove her to drink and to pills, and, in the end, possibly to an overdose suicide, although her cause of death, at age 47, is officially listed as a pulmonary embolism.
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Frida Kahlo painting in her bed, anonymous, 1940 ©Frida Kahlo Museum
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Frida Kahlo after an operation by Antonio Kahlo, 1946 ©Frida Kahlo Museum
The exhibition stopped last year at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. Victoria Gerard, a curator at the museum, described it as a visual diary of Kahlo’s life. “It’s just as if someone today collected family or friends’ photos on Instagram,” Gerard told the Los Angeles Times. “Of course her paintings were so autobiographical, but a snapshot photograph gives a different perspective than a painting does.” The photographs reveal “the emotional pull that her passionate life took on her,” says Gerard. “You can see it in the expressions on her face.”
The exhibition is a Who’s Who of early 20th-century photography in the United States, Europe and Mexico. Photographers include Man Ray, Martin Munkácsi, Tina Modotti and Nickolas Muray, with whom Kahlo had an on-again, off-again affair from 1931 to 1941. Muray took many of the photographs that cemented Kahlo’s iconic image. Also present in the exhibition is the husband-wife team of Manuel and Lola Alvarez Bravo, two of Mexico’s most famous photographers. It was Lola who dressed Kahlo for her public funeral in 1954 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, an important cultural institution in Mexico.
Nickolas Muray and Frida Kahlo by Nickolas Muray, 1939 ©Frida Kahlo Museum
After the funeral, Kahlo’s coffin was carried through the rain to a crematorium. Authors Alcantara and Egnolff describe the scene: “As the iron bier with Kahlo’s body on it was shoved into the fire, a strange thing happened. Her body was lifted upright and, catching fire, her hair glowed like a wreath about her face … When the cart returned from the fire, Rivera made a sketch of her skeleton before pouring her ashes into a cloth.” Those ashes were put into a pre-Columbian urn and placed in La Casa Azul.
These days, it’s impossible to escape Kahlo and Rivera in Mexico. His face is on the obverse side of the 500-peso note, hers on the reverse. In Mexico, Rivera remains the dominant artist. Elsewhere, Kahlo has eclipsed him. Luis-Martin Lozano, one of Mexico’s leading curators, laments that foreign museums are obsessed with Kahlo exhibitions: “Frida, Frida, Frida, that's all anyone wants to talk about.” ■
Glenbow Museum
130 9 Ave SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 0P3
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