The Philadelphia Museum of Art Presents Today Frida Kahlo

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will be the only East Coast venue for the first major exhibition in 15 years to be devoted to Frida Kahlo in the United States. Frida Kahlo (February 20-May 18, 2008) examines the art of one of the most influential artists of the last 50 years. The exhibition includes more than 40 of the Mexican artist’s self-portraits, portraits, allegorical and symbolic paintings and still lifes, among them paintings that have never been exhibited before and others that will be seen in the U.S. for the first time. The exhibition is drawn from more than 30 collections in the U.S., Mexico, France, and Japan. Two of the most important and extensive collections of Kahlo’s work – the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City and the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art, Cuernavaca – have lent many of their most treasured Kahlo paintings.

Generally small in scale, Kahlo’s distinctive, jewel-like works are vividly detailed compositions often filled with powerful personal symbolism. In her iconic self-portraits the artist assumes multiple identities and reflects upon pivotal periods in her life, painting painful and often difficult subject matter, including an unprecedented depiction of a miscarriage she suffered. In The Broken Column (1944) the artist shows herself standing in tears in a vacant landscape after surgery, her injured spine an exposed crumbling column, with nails piercing her body in a manner that recalls the martyred Saint Sebastian. Some paintings reflect the artist’s notable wit. In Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932), which Kahlo painted during an unhappy period in Detroit, she wears a long pink dress and lace gloves – proper attire for an American society woman at the time – but she also subversively holds a cigarette and a Mexican flag, evidence of her resistance to accepted codes of conduct in the U.S. Other highlights include two works that have never been exhibited in public before: Me and My Parrots (1941) and Magnolias (1945). Other iconic pictures, The Two Fridas (1939) and Diego and Frida 1929-1944 (1944) have not been exhibited before in the U.S.

In addition to the self-portraits and portraits of friends, the exhibition includes Kahlo’s animated and often autobiographical still lifes, which the artist called naturaleza viva (alive nature). In Still Life with Parrot and Fruit (1951), Kahlo shows fruit cut open, a possible reference to the surgeries she endured throughout her life. The abundance of fruits and flowers in these paintings reflects the obsession of the artist, who was not able to bear children, with fertility. … more>>