Just her name alone can send people into fits of starstruck excitement. The fetish of Frida Kahlo isn’t just about excessive devotion to her and her work; it’s that she has effectively become a symbol for strength, sexuality, and sensuality
— worshipped for her unrelenting feminist spirit. Besides their dueling mustaches and commitment to their work and love lives, both Dali and Kahlo create rich narrative images rife with personal symbolism that can walk the line between dreamscape and reality, which is what makes
Frida Kahlo at the Dali Museum a pretty perfect fit.
Life was downright brutal for Kahlo, from a bus accident that left her permanently impaired to a crappy marriage-divorce-remarriage to artist Diego Rivera (a.k.a. cheating womanizer), miscarriages, spinal surgery, leg amputation and an early death at the age of 47. Most people would give up in such circumstances, but Frida seemed to brush everything off and carry on despite her immense physical and emotional pain, which is what makes her a heroic figure to many.
She was always her own support system, a concept that’s especially apparent in her painting “La columna rota (The Broken Column).” Despite its small size, the painting packs heat, from her delicately rendered breasts to the details in the ant-sized teardrops that stream from her face. Nails penetrate her body, and even though she stands tall through the pain with a crumbling Roman pillar representative of her spine, even the strongest of buildings are susceptible to crumbling. Across all of her works, suffering and destruction are juxtaposed against beauty and rebirth to reveal the joys and sorrows of her life.
Unaware of Kahlo’s drawings, I was surprised that I was most impressed by her sketchbook pieces and other works on paper. It’s not that her paintings aren’t impressive, but the rawness of her drawings is undeniable — something that the well-worked-out paintings don’t match in quite the same way. Writing on both sides of her journal, pages are tiled with faces and words, or sharp-edged shapes in marker, watercolor, pen, and other anonymous stains from daily wear and tear.
Feeling like a naughty sibling reading your sister’s diary, there’s some discomfort in having access to such personal and heartfelt drawings that perhaps weren’t meant for audiences to see. On one page, she professes, “Diego estoy sola,” translating to, “Diego I’m alone.” In the unrefined beauty of these hectic lines that go between written word and pictorial messages, you can feel the energy still lingering behind each mark made.
Taking the show name at face value, I was assuming this would be a Frida retrospective. I hate to be a bit of a downer on an obviously crowd-pleasing exhibition (just look at the social media comments if you questioned Kahlo’s fandom), but “Florida’s First-Ever Solo Kahlo Exhibition” felt like a bait and switch since it was less about her work, and more of a biography of her life and work — which is great and all, but isn’t exactly a solo exhibition of her art.
Between 15 paintings, 7 drawings, and 45 more documentary-style photographs from her collection (not necessarily taken by her, since mostly are of her), I could see where diehard fans would be disappointed in the small amount of actual artwork presented. On the other hand, Frida presents a case that made her work indistinguishable from her life.
Watching Kahlo in the video clips on view — coyly sitting at the foot of Rivera, holding his arm and kissing it in admiration — and even in the way she presents herself in photographs like the sensual portrait of the artist in New York City by Julien Levy, you can tell she loves the camera and is ever aware of its presence, but the camera loves her more. The problem occurs when we try to untangle who she actually was from the public image she crafted for herself. The Dalí’s solution to the impossibility of detaching the art from the artist is to create a show that weaves art and artist together as one entity, not putting emphasis on one over the other.
The main question I had when leaving the exhibition was if the show continued to capitalize on the idolatry of her aura rather than make her works the main attraction, or if that’s a moot point since her work is explicitly about herself on an incredibly intimate level. Regardless of expectations, Frida’s work is remarkably moving and worth seeing in person.
Frida Kahlo at the Dalí
Through April 17. The Dalí Museum. 1 Dalí Blvd, St. Pete. thedali.org.
Caitlin Albritton, CL Tampa's visual arts critic, spends her time tracking down art you might not see anywhere else. She's also an artist in her own right. Follow her on Instagram or read her blog.
This article appears in Dec 22-29, 2016.