Museum exhibit displays work by Frida Kahlo

By Eric Donovan
Senior Staff Writer
February 20, 2007

As part of a large 100th birthday celebration of the acclaimed artist Frida Kahlo, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has opened a new exhibit that features hundreds of original artworks and artifacts from the life of the famous artist. Opening Feb. 20, the exhibition will display art from over 30 different Kahlo collections from across the world, including quite a few that have never before been on public display in the United States, according to the museum’s Web site.

In recent years, Kahlo has been garnering a great deal of post-mortem popularity, especially after the release of the highly-acclaimed Frida (2002), directed by Julie Taymor and starring Selma Hayek. Winning several Academy Awards and nominated for a number of others, the movie became a hit. The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in Kahlo’s work. However, her real resurgence began in Mexico during the Neomexicanismo, a large-scale Mexican art movement in the 1980s. Before that, Kahlo was merely remembered as being the wife of the famous artist Diego Rivera.

As part of the worldwide celebration in honor of Kahlo, her work has been featured in several renowned museums including the Museum of the Fine Arts Palace. This museum was Kahlo’s first comprehensive exhibit in Mexico, according to the Agence France Presse. Now, as a continuation of this celebration, the same place that Rocky traversed the steps of will become the home of Kahlo’s works for a few months.

“I hope this show will make her known less as a saint and more as an artist,” said Hayden Herrera, noted Kahlo expert and museum exhibit consultant, in a Philadelphia Inquirer interview.

This exhibit is an attempt to separate the personality from the artist and show the world more about her life as an artist than her life in other aspects, which have seemed to garner more popularity and interest in recent years.

Included in the exhibit are almost 100 authentic photos of Kahlo and Rivera, a marriage that would live on in notoriety after their several reported affairs and a divorce that also resulted in remarriage in 1940. According the museum’s Web site, many of the photographs have never been on display and come from such photographers as Gisele Freund and Lola Alvarez Bravo. These photos feature Kahlo with noted figures such as Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky, with whom Kahlo was reported to have had one of her affairs during her marriage to Rivera.

Even more enticing about the exhibit is that it features many of her most popular works, including several of her self-portraits such as The Two Fridas (1939), Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and The Broken Column (1944). These paintings offer great insights into the life and mind of one of the world’s most fascinating artists.

What is most unique about this exhibit is that it is one of the only large-scale exhibitions to be held in the United States in the last 15 years. As part of this special celebration, Walker Art Center is publishing a book with more than 100 color plates as well as articles by Herrera, Elizabeth Carpenter and Latin American art curator and critic Victor Zamudio Taylor.

Tickets for the event can be purchased online at philamuseum.org or upon arrival at the Art Museum. There is a student price of $17, so be sure to bring a student ID. The exhibit is open now and will be on display in the museum until May 18.

donovane1@lasalle.edu