Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism
National Gallery, Canberra
By Katy Stiffe
When I discovered that an exhibition entitled "Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism" was showing at the National Gallery, I was so excited by the prospect that I immediately started to plan a trip from Melbourne to Canberra for the specific purpose of exploring the works of the Mexican modernists. The promise of the beautiful and powerful works of Kahlo held a strong attraction to me. I am both a proud feminist and a devout lover of all art, especially in its modern forms, so an exhibition of such a prominent female artist grabbed my interest immediately. I did not know much about the Mexican modernist movement but I had always liked Kahlo and was very interested to learn about her peers.
When we arrived at the gallery I was literally bouncing with excitement. It was all I could do to stop myself from knocking the people in front of me down as soon as the doors opened. After gaining control over myself I wandered toward the exhibition. It was set up in a series of four rooms. The central room housed paintings by Frida Kahlo and was clearly the focus of the exhibition. The surrounding rooms contained paintings by a wide range of artists including, Diego Rivera and Leonora Carrington.
The centrepiece of the collection, work by Frida Kahlo, was by all means the highlight of the show. The room in which these pieces were hung was slightly dimmer than the rooms that housed the rest of the exhibition. A bright light shone on to each individual piece illuminating them in such a way as to make them appear to glow independently. Kahlo’s pieces, mainly self-portraits, used a combination of surrealism and symbolism to provoke an emotive reaction. The colours used were realistic and the faces, although fairly two dimensional, strike the eye with a photographic realism, which is not done justice by reproductions of her work. The sideways glare common in the eyes of her self-portraits was quite piercing, especially in conjunction with her unsmiling red lips.
Kahlo also makes a point of emphasising her own facial hair. To a western feminist it is a delightful rebellion against western beauty ideals, but was apparently a feature that Kahlo thought very beautiful, as it was the fashion in Mexico at the time when she was painting. Regardless of her reasons for emphasising this aspect it created a theme that made Kahlo’s pieces instantly recognisable. Portraits of Diego Rivera were also central to the exhibition. In addition to his portraits, images of him were also included in two of Kahlo's self-portraits. There were also several drawings which were very metaphorical as well as a painting of a table covered in fruit entitled The bride who became frightened when she saw life opened.
One subject that permeated much of the exhibition were the portraits of Natasha Gelman. This is the collection owned by Jacques and Natasha Gelman and contains portraits painted by Kahlo, Rivera, Cidoncha, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and Angel Zarraga. These portraits create a very nice contrast between the styles and techniques used by the various artists and truly add to the impact of the entire show.
The style of the paintings in the surrounding rooms varied from surrealism to abstraction. Artists such as Rivera and Rafael Cidoncha created images with a sharp sense of realism with a surreal edge, as well as some abstract pieces. Miguel Covarrubias’ work contained a comic depiction of reality. Jesus Reyes Ferreira used bold lines and a simplistic style to create his emotive pieces. Gunther Gerzso dabbled in a combination of cubist forms and softer shapes, as well as in the relationship between colour and mood that created some very beautiful and moving pieces. Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo used photography and photomontage to create some quite surreal images. Carlos Merida used bright colours to give life and a great deal of energy to his sharp cubist images. Carlos Orozco Romero’s pieces lie somewhere between surrealism and abstraction. The depictions of characters in his paintings are two dimensional and obviously abstracted. It is quite clear that they are representative and figurative pieces as well as containing metaphorical significance. The presence of works by Leonora Carrington who used surrealist techniques and metaphors highlighted the connection between this movement and the surrealist movement in Europe. This collection is very well tied together despite the variety of styles it represented.
I was delighted to discover that this show had been well worth the many hours of driving required to see it. Kahlo was indeed a master painter and the messages, metaphors and emotion of her pieces will continue to remain relevant for many generations.
