Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera: radical aesthetics

A rather small number of works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are at the heart of an Art Gallery of NSW exhibition.

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico) Diego, I and Senor Xolotl; Self-portrait.

Putting together an exhibition on a significant figure in the history of art is a difficult task: it is not always possible to borrow the best works, or those that most aptly tell the story you want to convey. Even the greatest international museums cannot always obtain all the pieces they want, and institutions in Australia are accustomed to compromises, even if they still too often put quantity before quality.

On the other hand there are easy options, such as taking a pre-packaged show from a ­museum, the trustees of an artist’s estate, or a private collection. But then the results can be uneven to say the least, as we have seen with several recent exhibitions based on the contents of an artist’s studio at his death.

And the exhibition devoted to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, drawn from a private collection in Mexico, illustrates the problem in a particularly acute way.

The show consists of a small number of works by each of the two artists — already seen at the National Gallery of Australia in 2001 — filled out with walls of photographs and timelines. The supplementary material is interesting enough, but it ends up being an exhibition about Kahlo and her life rather than one in which we can form a full idea of her range as an artist, which was limited but not quite as limited as this makes it appear.

Rivera, meanwhile, a world-famous figure in his time, here largely plays the role of Frida’s consort. Nor does his work, essentially public and impersonal, sit particularly well with Frida’s, which is intimate and self-referential. Only in one or two pictures can we see how much she may have derived of her simplified, quasi-folk style of painting from him.

One can’t help wondering why the Art Gallery of NSW would settle for such a slight exhibition rather than seek to borrow further works — if only from other Mexican collections — to produce something more substantial and satisfying. Are those in charge simply desperate for big names to improve attendances? Do they think that visitors won’t notice?

Or is it just the lack of curatorial resources? For although this show is accompanied by a small catalogue with a basic introductory essay by the new curator of modern and contemporary international art, it has not required much if any curatorial contribution from the gallery. With the departure of many senior curators in recent years and the apparent shifting of responsibility to exhibition managers, the gallery seems to be drifting towards a future as a retailer of pre-packaged products rather than an originator of significant exhibitions.

There are indeed some current and future shows from the collection to look forward to, including one on Asian calligraphic traditions with loans from Malaysia. It would be a pity for the gallery to slip even further behind our two leading galleries, the National Gallery of Victoria and the NGA, and hardly consistent with the present director’s megaplex expansion plans.

As for Kahlo, the exhibition does at least remind us of one thing, which is that her art is almost entirely about herself. Seven of the 10 paintings by her are self-portraits, one of them an allegory that includes a self-portrait. Almost all of Kahlo’s pictures in fact, and certainly the best-known ones, are based on self-portraiture.

What is more, they reflect her concern with the construction of a certain image, in life as in art. She generally wore brightly coloured native Mexican dress, even when she was in the US, with flowers in her hair. This was a self-conscious performance, for her background seems to have been a mixture of Hungarian, German, Spanish and native Mexican. To privilege one quarter of her origins in this way might be considered as an expression of Mexican cultural ­nationalism, but was perhaps even more importantly a way of marking herself as a distinct individual not be overshadowed by her more ­famous husband.

Rivera was already internationally known and the most important modern Mexican artist when they married: he was 42 and she was 22. In photographs they are physically ill-matched, he tall, fat and physically unattractive in a shapeless suit, she small, dark and intense in her Mexican folk dress. It was a difficult relationship too, although each adored the other: there were affairs on both sides, a divorce and a remarriage.

Rivera is best known for large-scale murals, but this aspect of his work cannot be shown here. Instead there is a cubistic work with a label that rather hopefully tries to compare him to Picasso, and a memorable painting of Natasha Gelman, one of the collectors of the works in the exhibition. She reclines on a sofa in a rather seductive way, surrounded by still more sexual lilies. Nearby is a smaller and much drier portrait of her by Frida.

Of Rivera’s other works, the two most striking are a pair of lithographs, each of a nude woman. The first is a strikingly frank picture of a friend who was also a collector. The treatment suggests they may have had an affair, for Rivera, like the even less attractive Jean-Paul Sartre, seems to have been irresistible to women.

The other is of Kahlo, the year after their marriage, outwardly more demure but undressing for bed.

Kahlo, although talented, intelligent and attractive, was handicapped by the consequences of a terrible accident in her youth, which left her in chronic pain and led eventually to an early death. This is surely an important factor in her apparent self-obsession, for she could never forget her own body, or lose herself, as most of us can from time to time, in contemplating something beyond the self.

When she was only 18, Frida was involved in a bus and trolley-car collision in which she sustained a series of terrible fractures, including to the spine, collarbone, right leg and foot. A metal rail drove through her abdomen. She spent three months in a full body cast and although she was able to walk again, suffered recurrent bouts of extreme pain through her life.

In 1932, a few years after her marriage, she became pregnant but suffered a miscarriage, apparently due to her earlier injuries. She painted herself lying in a hospital bed at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, and this exhibition includes two impressions of a lithograph relating to the same event.

One of her most famous pictures is a self-portrait from 1944, The Broken Column (Mexico City, Museo Dolores Olmedo) in which she represents herself wearing a brace and with a shattered Ionic column in place of her spine. This is the sort of work in which Kahlo, at her best, transcends the personal and turns her own suffering into a universal metaphor.

Later, in the 1950s, she underwent a series of operations on her spine and spent much time in hospital in a cast or confined to a wheelchair, as we see in the photographic documentation included in the exhibition.

Sadly, these operations do not seem to have succeeded in repairing the damaged spine, and in 1954 she died at the age of 47.

Most of her pictures in the exhibition are self-portraits, and the effect — even with so few works — is still repetitious. The best of these pictures, aside from the late allegorical self-portrait, are Diego on My Mind (1943) and Self-Portrait with Monkeys (1943) showing the artist, newly appointed as an academic at the School of Painting and Sculpture in Mexico City, surrounded by monkeys that allude to her inner circle of faithful pupils as well as, more generally, to her love of animals of all kinds.

A lithograph, The Miscarriage (1932), evokes the pain of the events mentioned above, and once again illustrates — and even reflects on — the way that Frida’s poetic imagination transmutes personal experience to connect with more universal themes. She represents herself naked, mourning, bisected vertically as though to represent her dual role as woman and as artist (she holds a palette in her left hand). Images of cell division and the dead foetus are one side, while on the other, the palette side, blood drips from her womb into the earth below, seeming to fertilise it and cause it to bring forth strange plants with biomorphic forms: the woman’s suffering, the image suggests, becomes the inspiration of the artist.

In contrast to this memorable image, there is a small group of drawings in which she is trying to compose an anti-American image based on the Statue of Liberty in New York. Both Kahlo and Rivera were devoted to the ideology of revolution that seemed so plausible to many in the last century. They had grown up in the Mexican Revolution, a bloody affair that descended into civil war between competing interests; they were members of the Communist Party and although they sheltered Leon Trotsky in Mexico for a time, they later lent their support to Joseph Stalin, by whose agent Trotsky was assassinated in 1940.

Kahlo had been to America and even had an exhibition in New York in 1938. The earliest Statue of Liberty drawing is from circa 1945, just after the war in which the Soviet Union had been our ally in the struggle against Adolf Hitler, and at the beginning of the Cold War, as Stalin’s Iron Curtain descended over Eastern Europe.

All of a sudden, in this context, president Harry Truman can be equated with Hitler and various fascist dictators, while the rest of the image is overloaded with symbols of capitalism, oppression, the atomic bomb and so on. The imagery is intellectually dishonest — Stalin murdered far more people than Hitler — but above all ludicrously incoherent. Frida’s artistic inspiration, once again, was strictly personal and intuitive; she had no gift for political statements.

Perhaps all art tends to be ultimately, and in the broadest sense, either religious or political: the latter seeks an understanding of human experience in our relation to our fellow humans, the former in our relation to nature, the cosmos or the divine. Kahlo certainly inclined to the religious sensibility, as we can see in The Love Embrace of the Universe (1949), the most significant picture in the exhibition.

Here she appears as the Virgin Mary, holding an infantilised Diego in her lap in the attitude of a Pieta. Her husband thus becomes the child she could never have. But this group is in turn embraced by the allegorical figure of the earth, milk dripping from her nipple — or rather, if we look more closely, a composite of the feminine earth and masculine sky, which appears behind and as though embracing and fecundating the earth. Here Frida finds her own imaginative self-identification as an embodiment of the life-giving forces of the cosmos itself, pursuing a perennial vision of nature that transcends history as well as the incidents of her life.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Art Gallery of NSW. Until October 9.