Frida Kahlo on display at the Palais Galliera
"Through her art and her style Frida Kahlo has been able to define herself, instead of letting herself be defined by illness" says Circe Henestrosa, creator and commissioner of the exhibition "Frida Kahlo, audelà des apparences", staged at the Palais Galliera from September 15th to 5th March 2023 , after a first exhibition in Mexico City and a second in 2018 at the Victoria & Albert in London.
«I was interested in reconstructing their identity through an analysis tell me how disability, ethnicity and gender identity in rupture with previous readings that made him a victim of the disease. The Paris exhibition is all the more significant because Frida made a sensation there in 1939, when Breton called her to exhibit his paintings in a group show entitled “Mexico” ». Frida Kahlo , whose work was defined by Breton as “a ribbon around a bomb”, participates with 18 works that fascinate the artists present at the vernissage, Tanguy, Picasso, Mirò, Kandinsky.
A tangible sign of his success is the acquisition by the French state of a self-portrait. «Paintings that after Paris should have been exhibited in London at the invitation of Peggy Guggenheim , a project that was not carried out due to the outbreak of the war. This is the reason why I agreed to bring the exhibition to London: I would like the next stops to be San Francisco and New York, the only other places outside Mexico (besides Paris) where Frida has exhibited her paintings ». Also linked to Kahlo on a personal level (it was her aunts who provided the artist with some of her finest traditional Tehuana dresses), Henestrosa selected more than 200 objects from the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, the house in a suburb of Città of Mexico which belonged to Frida's parents, where she was born and died in Chedal 1958 is home to the museum that bears her name. Casa Azul (so called for the color chosen by the Rivera to refurbish it in the 1930s) exhibits part of the painter's objects put under seal by her husband Diego Rivera on his death in 1954 and rediscovered in 2004: 22 thousand documents, 6 thousand photos, as well as traditional clothes, indigenous artifacts, pre-Columbian finds, votive images ...
"Frida was six years old when she fell ill with polio, remaining with one leg shorter than the other, to the point of putting on more socks one over the other to recover a few centimeters" . Then at the age of eighteen she suffers an accident in the tram which will cause her terrible suffering throughout her life and various surgeries up to the amputation of her leg. But it is precisely during the first, interminable convalescence that forces her to bed for months, that the teenager begins to paint, self-taught, covering the plaster bust that she is forced to wear with butterflies. Despite being obsessed with her husband, whom she divorced in 1939, ten years after the wedding, only to remarry him the following year, Kahlo has many lovers, both men and women.
"His way of representing himself, the mustache, the joined eyebrows, make him a queer icon" Circe Henestrosa
"Even if around the age of 20, and in particular when he goes to the US for the first time with Rivera, he adopts a Mexican style that brings together various regions and cultures of his country, in part to cover the defect in the leg, in part to claim his indigenous origins - his mother is half Spanish, half indigenous from the Oaxaca region, while his father is a German immigrant - but above all to put himself at the center of attention. She combines long and voluminous dresses with embroidered blouses, large shawls and jewels from pre-Columbian tombs, which she partly remade herself. We found one partially covered in paint, perhaps he was trying to match it precisely in one of his paintings. For the Galliera I have added a section dedicated to the time she spent in Paris, with objects never shown before, in particular photographs documenting her friendships, with Duchamp , whom she loves how hard Breton and the Surrealists struggle to endure, with Jacqueline Lamba , the Breton's wife who inspired him "L'Amour fou", with Dora Maar , with Alice Rahon , all women with precise artistic vocations but at the time better known as muses of their companions (Maar had an affair with Picasso , Rahon was married with Wolfgang Paalen , ed.). The sense of camaraderie between them was very strong ».
Among the exhibits, which one do you personally find most intriguing? “The prosthetic leg, which you decorate with a Chinese dragon. In the exhibition there is a section dedicated to the influence that Frida has had on contemporary fashion, from Gaultier to McQueen to Rei Kawakubo . Unfortunately there are no prosthetic boots created by McQueen for the Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins for the issue of Dazed & Confused which he had guest edited in September '98, but they were one of the starting points of my reflection ».
There is a certain irony of history in the fact that Rivera, then considered an art giant, famous all over the world for his murals that told the history of Mexico, is now relatively unknown outside of Latin America, while Frida Kahlo, a lifelong cultist of her husband's artistic immensity, is today a global pop icon ... "To give an idea of the fame Rivera enjoyed, it is enough to say that he was the second artist after Matisse to be the subject of a retrospective at the MOMA in New York . He had always supported her a lot, convinced of the exceptional nature of her work. She is simply now more relevant for the resonance of certain themes in the contemporary, including the obsession with one's own image and the gaze on the body. Not only did Frida paint an impressive number of self-portraits, but I think it is no coincidence that many of her friends were photographers, authors of her particularly impactful portraits, from Dora Maar to Imogen Cunningham to Lola Alvarez Bravo to Toni Frissell who took her. for Vogue. And of course Tina Modotti. Here, the next exhibition that I hope to realize will be about her ».
