With the monumental spectacles generated by today's film industry, I expect to emerge from a film more emotionally affected than from an art exhibit. Not so for the haunting Frida Kahlo. Her art speaks more loudly for her than anything or anyone else can.
After the delightfully bird-like mischievousness of her self-depiction in "Frieda and Diego Rivera" (1931), her art as exhibited at SFMOMA is a series of intensely painful and individual experiences. She poured her pain directly into her paintings, transmitting it to the viewer in an uncannily visceral way. The honesty of her autobiography in art is stunning enough, but seeing her torn asunder by her philandering husband in "The Two Fridas" (1939) is almost mortifying. Staring into "Moses" (1945), her ongoing search for a belief system, one sees a fanatically cluttered foreground which reveals almost no depth, and yet one gets the distinct experience of looking into infinity.
Kahlo's pain seems to end or at least reach a reconciliation as one enters the last room, filled with eye-popping, joyous still lifes and "The Love Embrace of the Universe" (1949). This redemption is just as a viewer would hope. Yet she was in her worst physical condition by that point, having undergone endless operations and an amputation. Had she truly achieved peace, or was her artistic joy a forced Act III? "I hope to leave joyously -- and never return." What happy, unhaunted soul says such words?
Diego Rivera specified that Kahlo's room remain locked for fifty years after her death. It has finally been opened, her extraordinary Tehuana / Chinese / Indian wardrobe discovered in pristine condition, the colors still intense. One cannot help but wonder at how she stands out in every photograph, whether she is alone or with a crowd. She is inevitably the most dignified, proud, and eye-catching. Is it her majestically un/traditional wardrobe, her tightly-bound hair, her features, her high forehead, her masculine air, or the way she holds her chin that mesmerizes? Or can the fire of one's spirit blaze through one's face to the camera lens?
Speaking of Kahlo's wardrobe, if you are looking for a reproduction of the shirts and skirts she wore in her self-portraits, you can buy them at SFMOMA for $200 to $1800 a pop. Having garnered limited recognition during her lifetime, I am sure Kahlo would have been proud to see the queues winding down the stairs at SFMOMA for her exhibit. But what of the gift shop?
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