Thursday, April 24, 2025
By Sheila Wickouski
While movies, documentaries and books tell the story of legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, “Frida: Beyond the Myth” —?at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond through Sept. 28 — reveals?how Kahlo created not only iconic art but her own identity.??
Born in Coyoacán,?part of Mexico City, on July 6, 1907, Kahlo would later change her birth year to 1910, aligning her birth with the Mexican Revolution. She was close to her father, Guillermo Kahlo, a photographer. In his portrait, “Frida at Age 18”?of 1926, Frida sits carefully posed with a serious expression, wearing a fine dress and holding a book in her lap.??
Kahlo married painter Diego Rivera in 1929. Over the next two decades, they?had?many affairs with others, divorced, then remarried and?were together?at the end of her life in 1954.?Their complex relationship is depicted in her work “Diego and Frida 1929-1944,” in its original frame of painted shells. Kahlo shows them united as one person, each with half of a face: his in a smile and hers sad. ??
Like many artists of the time, both were committed communists.?While the exhibition does not go into the history of their politics, a 1933 photograph by Lucienne Bloch, “Frida in Front of the Unfinished Communist Unity Panel, New Workers School,” shows Kahlo posed before Rivera’s depiction of Vladimir Lenin. ??
A work noted for the controversy that ensued is “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale” of 1938.?Kahlo was commissioned by Clare Boothe Luce to create a recuerdo?(a portrait of remembrance) for the mother of the actress, who took her own life by jumping from a high-rise apartment building. Kahlo’s graphic depiction of the suicide, which shows Hale’s body on the ground and in midair, falling, incensed Luce, who wanted to destroy it. The exhibition includes newspaper clippings, a postcard of the building, New York’s Hampshire House, and other related materials.
Perhaps the most heart-stopping picture in the exhibition is Bloch’s 1932 black-and-white photograph “En Route from Detroit to Mexico.”?In the photo, Kahlo is going home after an abortion to recuperate in Mexico, where her mother will die following surgery.?She looks out of the window, her face devoid of any posed expression, as in her self-portraits. ????
Throughout the exhibition, there are moments?that give pause,?like a 1944 photograph, “Frida in Thought,” by Sylvia Salmi — an unexpected?pose with half her face covered by her hand, her eyes closed. There are paintings that connect to other artists,?like “Magnolias”?of 1945, inspired by a work by her friend Georgia O’Keeffe, whom she met in the U.S.
Also on display are Kahlo’s painting of her favorite pet dog, Mr. Xolotl, and “Frida Facing Mirror with Two Hairless Dogs” by Kahlo’s friend Lola Álvarez Bravo, the first Mexican woman photographer and one of the most significant of the 20th century. In this candid image,?Frida is looking in a mirror, showing?that there were indeed “two Fridas.”?
Representing her last decade, the exhibition explores both her expanding fame and her? physical decline.? ??
One of Kahlo’s late self-portraits is “Self-Portrait with Lose Hair” of 1947. Painted following an unsuccessful spinal operation, the work shows her without adornment, long hair uncombed. ?
Kahlo’s final works were created when she was restricted to her bed or in a wheelchair. “Still Life (I Belong to Samuel Fastlicht)”?of 1951 features a colorful?array of fruits and vegetables, along with a statue of a clay Itzcuintli dog (a hairless Mexican breed). Fastlicht was her dentist at the time; notably, she never shows her teeth in her self-portraits.?
The exhibition concludes with photographs, such as Florence Arquin’s “Frida Wearing Plaster Corset”?of 1951, in which Frida looks down at her upper body cast, painted with a red hammer, sickle and star.?“Frida Painting ‘Naturaleza Viva’”?of that year, by an unidentified photographer, shows her in bed as Rivera sits by her side.?The “living nature” work she is painting features beings who are fully alive, an affirmation of life.?
At the end is Bravo’s “Frida Kahlo’s Death Portrait”?of 1954. Kahlo’s last words in her diary were: “I?hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return.”?
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