Frida Kahlo

Video by brendafohio

The World of Dante

A multi-media research tool intended to facilitate the study of the Divine Comedy through a wide range of offerings.

Google brings masterpieces from Prado direct to armchair art lovers

Globe-trotting technology allows works of Goya, Velázquez and Bosch to be seen in finest detail.

The Exile’s Palette

Ever wondered why so many figures in Marc Chagall’s paintings fly? At age 79, Chagall described how his mother buoyed him, back when he was Moshka Shagal, “her breasts so warmly nourishing and exalting me, and I feel I could swing from the moon.”

Jackie Wullschlager’s Chagall is a colossal mama’s boy. When sustenance from one source dried up, he quickly got it from another — first his mother; then his teacher, Yuri Pen; his friend Viktor Mekler; his girlfriend Thea Brachmann; the poets Apollinaire and Cendrars; his wife, Bella; his dealer Vollard; his daughter, Ida; his lover Virginia; his second wife, Vava. Every­one embraced him, nursed him, held him aloft. But — though the biographer doesn’t put it this way in “Chagall” — one mother rebuffed him, despite his lifelong attempt to please her: Mother Russia.

Wullschlager, the chief art critic for The Financial Times and a biographer of Hans Christian Andersen, doesn’t seem to like Chagall much. That’s O.K. In her engaging, almost painting-by-painting biography, she backs up her dislike (drawing on archival letters and memoirs). Chagall appears as a social climber and a prince of self-pity. He thrived in a bloody century that killed many friends. (Wullschlager’s many concise lists detailing other artists’ fates show how lucky he was.) But he saw himself as Christ on the cross.  …more>>

Jan Van Eyck and his wife reunited for Renaissance exhibition

Jan Van Eyck’s self-portrait is one of the National Gallery’s most familiar works. It shows a middle-aged man looking sternly out at the viewer. Now, after several centuries apart, the oil painting of the Renaissance painter is to be reunited with a portrait of his wife, Margaret.

The pair of portraits is one of the highlights in a major exhibition of Renaissance portraiture which opens at the National Gallery in London in October.

“Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian” will feature more than 70 masterpieces by the biggest names in 15th and 16th century art, including Raphael, Botticelli, Holbein, Dürer, Lotto, Pontormo and Bellini.

The exhibition, a version of which has just opened at the Prado in Madrid, aims to show how lifelike portraits began to be commissioned during the Renaissance to mark key moments in life – childhood, courtship and marriage, old age and death.

The self-portrait of Van Eyck is dated 1433, while the painting of his wife Margaret, on loan from the Groeningemuseum, Bruges, was painted six years later. … more>>

Sistine set-up: the 500-year-old art mystery

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel has inspired and enthralled millions but none who has craned in admiration of the “divinely inspired” work realises it was born out of base rivalry and petty jealousy.

Five centuries after the artist signed the contract to decorate the Pope’s personal chapel in the Vatican with scenes from the book of Genesis, the true story of how Michelangelo came to create one of his greatest works can be told.

The artist was awarded the commission unaware that he was the target of a conspiracy hatched by Donato Bramante, the architect of St Peter’s Basilica, and the painter Raphael, who persuaded Pope Julius II to oblige Michelangelo – a sculptor with little painting experience – to take on the commission. They believed that, faced with a work on such a vast scale, he was bound to fail and be humiliated. …more>>

The Frida Kahlo conundrum

By Kathy Brewis in Times

She crafted her own image with exquisite care, creating herself on canvas over and over again, always the paradoxically triumphant victim. The legend she built around herself is so powerful it inspires and intrigues half a century after her death. Because at its heart remains a mystery.

Her intense, troubled marriage to her fellow Mexican painter Diego Rivera is well documented. So are her lovers, male and female, the childhood polio that left her with a thinner right leg and the terrible accident that broke her spine and pelvis. She painted her abortions, her back operations, her physical suffering. Others have focused on her mental pain and defiant spirit – in books, exhibitions and films.

Yet, despite all of this, Frida Kahlo is oddly elusive. The woman who made dozens of self-portraits in the 1940s and early ’50s was not lying when she called herself “the great concealer”. She painted her own narrative in bold swathes of colour, perhaps hoping that nobody would dare read between the brush strokes.

“Kahlo is still an enigma,” says her biographer Hayden Herrera, “because she held back a great deal, and part of her creative energy went into inventing her persona. Everyone who knew her talked about her alegria [cheerfulness]. It was important for her to appear strong, perhaps in order to fortify herself. I suspect that she was much less happy than she pretended.”

“She was vulnerable,” says Salomon Grimberg, the author of two new books on Kahlo – one focusing on her still lifes, including some that came to light during his research, and the other centring on a previously unpublished interview she gave to a psychologist friend. “We’re all vulnerable. We create a self-image to feel right about ourselves, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to protect it.” The difference is that Kahlo’s self-images have huge commercial value: her 1943 painting Roots sold for $5.6m at auction two years ago.

In Mexico, Kahlo is known as the “heroine of pain”. “I am alone,” she confessed in capital letters to her diary. But publicly, emphatically, she denied this universal truth. “She couldn’t tolerate being on her own,” says Grimberg. Her house was covered in mirrors – on the canopy of her bed, on tables, on her wardrobe doors, even in the garden. Did her reflection provide comfort? She often drew herself by looking in the mirror; in one drawing she appears to be left-handed, because it’s a mirror image.

“Here I am sending you my portrait so you will remember me,” she wrote on her first known self-portrait, a pencil sketch from 1920. “As long as she was in the mind of others, she existed,” says Grimberg. “If she got the attention of other people, she mattered.” Grimberg is, unusually, both a psychiatrist and an art historian. “I was always interested in why people make art,” he says. “Art is no different from the symptoms that psychiatric patients have, except you can visualise it.” He has been writing about Kahlo for 20 years. He lives in Dallas, Texas, and completed his medical training in the States, but he grew up in Mexico – and a member of his family was on the medical team that amputated Kahlo’s right leg below the knee in 1953. “I grew up listening to stories about Kahlo,” he says.

In the 1960s he worked at the Galeria de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City. “Even then, a Kahlo still life was $4,000 – you could buy a small house in Mexico for that then. Her Self-Portrait with Loose Hair came up for sale for a little less than $10,000 and I tried to persuade my father to buy it, but he said, ‘What an ugly woman! Why would I want that in my house?’ And when he heard the price he said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ”