Learn Chinese online - Mexico City hosts largest ever Frida Kahlo exhibit

ENTERTAINMENT / Theater & Arts






Mexico City hosts largest ever Frida Kahlo exhibit

(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-06-13 09:08





A cameraman films Frida Kahlo's painting 'Las dos Fridas, 1939' (The two
Fridas, 1939) which will be exhibited along with her other works at
Mexico City's Bellas Artes museum, June 12, 2007. [Reuters]

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The Mexican capital will host the largest ever
exhibition of Frida Kahlo's works this week to mark 100 years since the
birth of the artist, who has become a feminist icon in the past decade as
her fame blooms.

More than 300,000 people are expected to attend the two-month show
starting on Wednesday at the Museo de Bellas Artes museum.

"I don't think anyone, after seeing this, will have any questions about
Frida's artistic journey," said Teresa Franco, head of the institute that
runs the museum.

About 350 pieces will go on display, including some on loan from
collections in the United States, as well as 50 of Kahlo's personal
letters and 100 photographs.

Kahlo began painting as a teenager while convalescing from a horrific
tram crash in 1925 in which she broke her back in three places and
fractured other bones.

The accident and a legacy of childhood polio left her in constant
physical pain and unable to have children. That suffering is often
depicted in her work, which dwells on themes of pain and female
disfigurement.

Twice married to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who was nearly 20 years
her senior, Kahlo also reportedly had an affair with revolutionary Leon
Trotsky after he fled the Soviet Union. Kahlo died in July 1954 after
suffering a bout of pneumonia. Rivera died in 1957.

Her feminism, lifestyle and Communist political beliefs have become
inseparable from her art.

"Frida has to be read on one hand as an artist and on the other as a
figure who put strong emphasis on an archetypal feminine problem," Franco
said.

Some critics warn that Kahlo's colorful lifestyle and cult status are
obscuring her work's artistic value.

"I think the ongoing Fridamania would be something she herself would
critique, as she critiqued the social mores of the early 20th century,
such as the expectation that she would want to have a child," said
Margaret Lindauer of Virginia Commonwealth University, author of a book
on Kahlo's art and popularity.

Many museum visitors look forward to the exhibition, which is scheduled
to run until August.

"She forms an important part of Mexican history," said Sylvia Serrand, a
doctor.












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