Frida Kahlo, Whose Self-Portraits Spoke to the Soul
She defined herself by her painting, especially when she painted herself. Revisit the life of Kahlo who died 62 years ago.
Frida Kahlo, Whose Self-Portraits Spoke to the Soul.弗麗達．卡洛 (Frida Kahlo)
Today, we bring you another focus challenge, inviting you to spend uninterrupted time looking at a piece of art. This painting — “The Two Fridas” — by Frida Kahlo was made in 1939, and keep in mind that it’s nearly life size, at almost six feet by six feet.
(These challenges are published on the first Monday of each month. Sign up here if you’d like to be notified.)
Think about these questions as you look:
How are the two figures alike? How are they different?
What emotions do you see Kahlo trying to convey?
Do you relate to anything in the painting?
Tomorrow the exhibition "Frida Kahlo. Self-Portrait with Monkey. From the Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico" will be opened. It is the first exhibition of this famous Mexican artist at the Hermitage.
弗麗達．卡洛 (Frida Kahlo)
Happy birthday to Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, born on this day in 1907. Celebrate with this portrait of the artist.
Nickolas Muray (American, born Hungary, 1892–1965) | Frida Kahlo | 1939 | Photo by Nickolas Muray, © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives
Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art’s excellent display of 20th-century South American drawings at 23 East 73rd Street includes a fantastic if anomalous drawing by Frida Kahlo titled “The True Tease” (1946). A dense, extended doodle, it embeds a lexicon of Kahlo motifs — a hand, veins, some eyes, several breasts — in a geodesic constellation fraught with stars and spirals that seem straight out of late Kandinsky.
FEATURE
Patron saint of lipstick and lavender feminism
Frida Kahlo I
1 May 2005
Frida Kahlo
Self-Portrait with Monkey 1938
Self-Portrait with Monkey 1938
© 2005 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust and INBAL
Frida Kahlo and her husband both referred to her as ‘the great hider-away’, as if she were a mystery-maker. Fifty years after her death she is idolised for having revealed essential truths about all kinds of female experience, yet partly mythologising her life. Germaine Greer explores the life of the Patron saint of lipstick and lavender feminism
Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera both used to refer to her as ‘la gran ocultadora’. The expression is an odd one, meaning ‘the great hider-away’, as if she were a mystery-maker. Fifty years after her death, Kahlo is credited with having displayed in art for the first time the interior reality of a woman’s life. She is idolised for having revealed essential truths about all kinds of female experience – about disablement, rejection, miscarriage, suffering, Mexican-ness, Jewishness, homosexuality, revolution, subversion, devotion – in 200 or so coloured images, painted in oils on metal or hardboard, and occasionally canvas, the greater part of them depicting or purporting to depict the painter herself.
As a self-portraitist Kahlo fits right into the tradition of women’s painting. Her contemporaries include other practitioners of the same genre, Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, for example. Since the dawn of Western art, women have painted many more self-portraits than their male counterparts; indeed, a significant proportion of their rather small number are known to us only from a single surviving self-portrait of the artist as a beautiful young woman. A woman painter was a curiosity of just the kind that collectors wanted in their cabinets. Gallant patrons complimented them by asking for no other subjects from their hand but their own fair selves, and an artist such as Angelika Kauffmann, to name just one, was in no position to refuse. Like Kahlo, she painted herself time and again, in a variety of costumes, sometimes as an allegorical figure, as Kahlo does. What is not clear is whether the women portrayed are faces or masks; whether the reality is not inevitably ocultada.
在卡羅的半身自畫像中，姿勢幾乎總是相同的：雙肩正對觀者，與畫框平行；頭部側轉四分之一，通常朝向左肩；雙眼直視觀者，目光堅定不移。臉部毛髮通常被誇張化——眉毛在鼻樑上方連成一線，形成著名的連眉，上唇也明顯長滿了濃密的黑色絨毛。從卡羅的照片中可以很容易地判斷出這幅肖像與藝術家本人的相似程度，而卡羅的照片數量遠遠超過了她的畫作。當她意識到鏡頭的存在時，她會盡力重現畫中形象略微側轉的頭部和不苟言笑的眼神。她很少讓自己的臉部照片表達出身份以外的任何訊息，照片的風格如同護照照片一般程式化，只露出一隻耳朵。所有的肖像都以同樣的語氣說著：「我是弗里達·卡羅」。這就是她的成就——弗里達·卡羅畢生的表演。在這一點上，她也延續了女性藝術家作為異類現象的傳統：羅莎爾芭·卡列拉和安吉莉卡·考夫曼只是當時被稱為“女畫家”的眾多藝術家中的兩位，她們必須通過演奏樂器、唱歌以及創作藝術作品來取悅贊助人。
說卡羅是史上第一位真正的行為藝術家，而且她的表演貫穿一生，並且她不知疲倦地年復一年、日復一日地進行著，這絕非誇張。她投入在角色扮演的裝扮上，其精力至少與繪畫創作本身不相上下。她還精心佈置了一個合適的場景，擺放著各種奇特的道具——動物、鮮花、床上的石膏骷髏、瓶中的胎兒，以及構成科約阿坎別墅的所有其他奇特物件和幻象。她也創作了一篇文本，作為表演的伴奏，並最終以此紀念這場表演——一篇選擇性地、部分神話化的弗里達·卡羅傳記。麥當娜和尚保羅高緹耶都是她的粉絲，這並不令人意外。他們都是表演藝術家，都像卡羅一樣，以操控同樣的素材為生。卡羅或許會為她的家人（她沒有給他們留下任何畫作）成功地將她的名字註冊為商標而感到高興，但如果她能看到fridakahlo.us網站上銷售的那些廉價無用的服裝和配飾，她一定會義憤填膺。
與弗里達·卡羅現象頗為相似的是她同時代的“巴西性感女神”卡門·米蘭達的職業生涯。米蘭達原名瑪麗亞·多·卡莫·米蘭達·達·庫尼亞，1909年出生於葡萄牙的一個省份。和卡羅一樣，米蘭達粗俗、迷人、口無遮蔽、不敬、熱情奔放，而且身材嬌小。卡洛發展出一種特瓦坎服飾的變體，而米蘭達則借鑒並誇張了巴伊亞水果小販的服飾。卡洛的繪畫語言源自於民間藝術形式；米蘭達則借鏡了薩爾瓦多貧民窟的舞曲。與卡洛一樣，米蘭達在美國也廣受歡迎；1940年，薩克斯百貨公司推出了一系列以她標誌性的厚重珠串和誇張頭飾為靈感的服飾珠寶。與卡洛一樣，米蘭達也創作詩歌和繪畫。與卡洛一樣，她英年早逝，膝下無子，經歷了多年的苦難。與卡洛不同的是，她沒有嫁給一位民族英雄；人們普遍認為，她的白人丈夫虐待了她，而且在她去世前多年，她也像卡洛一樣，嚴重依賴毒品。如今，世界各大藝術機構正在舉辦卡洛的回顧展，以表彰她的藝術成就。在巴西，米蘭達的巴伊亞時尚正在復興，EMI-Odeon巴西公司也重新製作並發行了她六小時的音樂作品。然而，人們卻從未將她們進行比較。這兩位傑出的女性，儘管有許多共同之處，卻始終生活在不同的世界。
奧蘭可能並非弗里達·卡羅的忠實擁躉，但在許多方面，她的藝術實踐是對這位墨西哥藝術家的先例的拓展。從1960年代她開始拍攝自己的身體，如同雕塑一般，奧蘭就一直對自身的形像以及改造形象的能力著迷。她曾以聖母瑪利亞和聖奧蘭的形象示人，用自己嫁妝中的床單製作服裝，最後甚至訴諸手術。卡羅的傳記作者們一直對她頻繁的手術感到困惑，並質疑這些手術是否真的必要。奧蘭的手術表演始於1979年，當時她被診斷出子宮外孕，需要緊急手術。在她進入手術室之前，她已經安排好一台攝影機記錄整個過程，並將錄影帶以最快的速度送往里昂藝術中心，在那裡立即放映，以一種非同尋常的方式重現了卡洛1932年創作的《亨利福特醫院》。卡洛在手術後畫了自己處於截石位、流血的形象；奧蘭則在手術過程中即時讓自己躺在手術台上。
Frida Kahlo
Self-Portrait with Small Monkey 1945
Self-Portrait with Small Monkey 1945
© 2005 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust and INBAL
In Kahlo’s bust-length self-portraits, the pose is almost always the same: shoulders square on to the viewer, parallel to the picture frame; head a quarter turned, usually towards the left shoulder; eyes looking back to the viewer in a direct, unwavering stare. The hairiness of the face is usually exaggerated – the eyebrows meet over the nose in the famous unibrow, and the upper lip is conspicuously furred with dark down. How closely this icon resembled the artist can be easily judged from photographs of Kahlo, of which there are many more than there are works by her hand. When she was aware of the camera she did her best to reproduce the slight head turn and the unsmiling stare of her painted image. She seldom allowed images of her face to express anything beyond her identity, in a version as stylised as a passport photo, showing the obligatory one ear. All the portraits say, in the same tone of voice: ‘I am Frida Kahlo’. This is her achievement – the lifelong performance of Frida Kahlo. In this too she remains part of the tradition of the female artist as outlandish phenomenon: Rosalba Carriera and Angelica Kauffmann are just two of the ‘paintresses’ (as they were called at the time) who were obliged to entertain their patrons by playing musical instruments and singing, as well as making artworks
It is no small praise to say that Kahlo was the first ever true performance artist, that the performance lasted all her life long, and that she was indefatigable in presenting it, year on year, day by day. At least as much creative energy went into dressing the part as in drawing and painting it. Fashioning herself also involved the creation of an appropriate setting with intriguing props – animals, flowers, a plaster skeleton atop her bed, a foetus in a bottle and all the other impedimenta and phantasmagoria that made up the house at Coyoacan. She also generated a text to accompany and eventually to commemorate the performance, the selective and partly mythologised account of Frida Kahlo. One is not surprised to find that Madonna is a fan, or Jean Paul Gaultier. Both are performers and both live by manipulating the same materials as Kahlo. She might be delighted that her family, to whom she left no paintings, has succeeded in registering her name as a trademark, though if she could see the shapeless cheap garments and accessories marketed on the world wide web by fridakahlo.us, she would be outraged.
A seductive parallel with the Frida Kahlo phenomenon is the career of her exact contemporary, the ‘Brazilian bombshell’ Carmen Miranda, born Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha in provincial Portugal in 1909. Like Kahlo, Miranda was vulgar, charming, foul-mouthed, irreverent, exuberant and tiny. While Kahlo developed a variant on Tehuacan costume, Miranda adopted and exaggerated that of the fruit vendors of Bahia. Kahlo’s pictorial language was derived from popular art forms; Miranda adapted the dance music of the favelas of Salvador. Like Kahlo, Miranda found favour in the United States; in 1940 Saks brought out a line of costume jewellery based on the heavy beads and extravagant headgear that she had made her trademark. Like Kahlo, Miranda composed poems and painted. Like Kahlo, she died young and childless after years of bitter suffering. Unlike Kahlo, she was not married to a national hero; it is generally thought that her gringo husband abused her, and that years before she died she was, like Kahlo, heavily drug-dependant. Kahlo is now being honoured by retrospective exhibitions in the world’s great art houses; in Brazil Miranda’s Bahian fashions are being revived, and EMI-Odeon Brazil has remastered and issued six hours of her music. Yet the instructive parallel is never drawn. These two remarkable women, with so much in common, remain in separate worlds.
Orlan is probably not a great fan of Frida Kahlo, yet in many ways her art practice is an elaboration on the Mexican’s precedent. From the beginning of her career in the 1960s when she photographed her body as if it were sculpture, Orlan has remained fascinated by her own image and her power to modify it, portraying herself in the guise of the Madonna and as Sainte Orlan, creating costumes by using the sheets from her own trousseau and, ultimately, by recourse to surgery. Kahlo’s biographers have been puzzled by her frequent operations, and have questioned whether they were really necessary. Orlan’s surgical performances began in 1979 when she was diagnosed as having an ectopic pregnancy necessitating an emergency procedure. By the time the artist was in the operating theatre she had arranged for a video camera to record the event, and for the tapes to be ferried as fast as they were recorded to the arts centre in Lyon, where they were immediately screened in an extraordinary updating of Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital of 1932. Kahlo painted herself in the lithotomy position and bleeding after the event; Orlan had herself portrayed in the stirrups in real time during the event. The difference is no more than one of epoch and available technology. The shock value in the different contexts is the same.
The French artist’s first operation was the precursor of the nine surgical performances that make up La Réincarnation de Sainte Orlan, in which, in much the same spirit as Kahlo exaggerated her unibrow and the dark brown fuzz on her upper lip, Orlan acquired two bumps on her forehead and the chin of the Botticelli Venus. The procedures were all photographed and recorded on video with live commentary by the artist herself, watching completely unmoved as her face was sliced open, turned inside out, scraped and remodelled. In the following days she would pose, immaculately coiffed and made up, for glamour shots of her horribly bruised face. This is very reminiscent of the woman who made a personal appearance at the opening of her one-man show in Mexico City in 1953 in her hospital bed, specially transported to the gallery for the purpose. All Kahlo’s appropriations were stylish; the names she dropped were the names to drop. Just so, when Orlan went under the knife, she had Paco Rabanne and Issey Miyake design clothes for her and the surgical staff, and poets and musicians accompanied the procedure. In Orlan’s carnal art, the events portrayed actually happen, while her predecessor insisted that she was not portraying dreams as a Surrealist might, but showing her reality.
To consider Kahlo as a painter only is to confuse one part of the performance for the whole and, moreover, to find her wanting. As a maker of two-dimensional images she is, despite the vast range of motifs she includes, deliberately unsophisticated. She does not want anyone viewing her work to be sidetracked by the paint quality or seduced by the composition. The paintings function as advertisements; they are the hoardings announcing the stages in the performance. The notion of art that Kahlo acquired along with Diego Rivera was fundamentally didactic, as were the Mexican ex-voto paintings which defined the narrative strategies that she would eventually use. The Kahlo icons are arresting without being interesting from a painterly point of view. The shock effect is not derived from the treatment of the objects depicted, or from any drama or energy compressed within the composition, but is felt simply as a consequence of identifying the motifs, as it were, in a diagram. That these are drawn from a vast range of sources, mythological, anthropological, historical, metaphysical, pyschoanalytical and folkloreistical, is only to be expected. To claim that these vast realms are explored when they are simply sampled, is to go too far.
Within the pièce d’identité formula there are not-so-subtle falsifications; no human neck was ever as long as Frida Kahlo in her self-portraits. We know from photographs that her shoulders were narrow and sloping; those in the painted images are usually square and broad. By such unsubtle shifts, while making herself recognisable by the trademark eyebrows and moustache, Kahlo also makes herself monumental. She may have wanted her public to believe that she painted what came into her head ‘without any other consideration’; in fact, she did as every painter does – she produced what she wanted others to see. The formulaic reduction of her face functions in the same way as any icon: as a mnemonic, rendering it memorable. The fixed immobility of the likeness signifies eternity. Revealing though the strategy may seem, it is anything but intimate. The personal, being represented in impersonal, archetypal terms, becomes universal. This is by no means to say that Frida Kahlo was an ordinary person pretending to be extraordinary. Her devotion to this process was extraordinary. The performance was her reality.
其他女性自畫像畫家，她們大多不得不靠為富人繪製肖像來謀生，因此她們的自戀方式截然不同，因為她們需要說服贊助人，自己既能將他們描繪得光彩照人，又能讓人認出她們本人。維熱·勒布倫（Vigée Le Brun）預示了卡羅（Kahlo）的風格，她不僅在畫布上，也在現實生活中扮演自己的角色。為了將她那些身穿緊身胸衣、精心打理髮型的顧客帶入新古典主義的玫瑰色光暈中，她脫掉了自己的緊身胸衣，穿上了高腰白色薄紗長袍（robe en gaulle），這種長袍後來成為英吉利海峽兩岸新古典主義女性的標配。她沒有撲粉，也沒有捲曲自己的棕色頭髮，而是用絲巾纏繞頭部，而不是用珠寶和羽毛裝飾。兩人最大的區別在於，這位法國藝術家為一代人創造了一種風格，而卡羅的風格則只屬於她自己。維熱·勒布倫也刻意美化自己的形象；在她眾多的自畫像中，她的嘴總是畫得非常小，牙齒也比珍珠還小。更重要的是，她筆下的膚色極具誘惑力，這表明她即便麵對最蒼白的贊助人，也能做到同樣的事情。
弗里達·卡羅對描繪他人毫無興趣，只對自己感興趣。她為他人創作的肖像畫都顯得敷衍了事。格爾曼夫婦是她和里維拉作品的重要收藏家。當裡維拉為格爾曼夫人畫像時，他幾乎到了令人啼笑皆非的地步，將她那修長的身軀斜倚在畫布上，從右上角一直延伸到左下角，身著一件緊身的白色晚禮服。而卡羅則畫了一幅滑稽可笑的肖像，畫中一個金髮碧眼、穿著皮草大衣、面無表情、脖子幾乎看不見的女子，顯得有些慌亂。儘管她把自己描繪得令人難忘，卻把格爾曼夫人畫得毫無記憶點。妻子對自己形象的詮釋如此深刻，以至於當裡維拉為她畫像時，只能臨摹一個蒼白的版本。
卡洛生前雖然在紐約和巴黎的時尚圈擁有眾多追隨者，但她最廣為人知的身份是壁畫大師迭戈·裡維拉的異國風情妻子。裡維拉堅信世界正處於社會主義革命的邊緣；事實上，當時正在興起的是個人主義時代。如今看來，裡維拉的社會寫實主義顯得天真，而弗里達的預言卻無比精準。 《宇宙之愛的擁抱，大地（墨西哥）》，迭戈、我和索洛特先生（1949年）這幅畫中，迭戈被描繪成一個皮膚灰白、臃腫的嬰兒，躺在弗里達的膝上，如同聖母瑪利亞懷抱中的基督遺體一般。果不其然，卡羅過世50年後，她已成為名副其實的崇拜對象，既是口紅的代名詞，也是淡紫色女權主義的象徵。這完全是她應得的。
Louise Vigée le Brun
Self-Portrait 1787
Self-Portrait 1787
Other female self-portraitists, most of whom were obliged to earn their living producing portraits of richer people, flattered themselves in a very different way, because they needed to persuade their patrons that they could make them look glamorous and yet recognisable as them-selves. Vigée Le Brun prefigures Kahlo in that she performed the role in which she depicted herself in real life as well as on canvas. Anxious to bring her corsetted and coiffed clientele into the rosy glow of neoclassicism, she removed her own corset and donned the robe en gaulle, the high-waisted white muslin dress that was to become the uniform of the neoclassical female on both sides of the Channel. She wore her own brown hair unpowdered and uncurled, winding scarves about her head instead of decking it with jewels and feathers. The great difference between the two is that the French artist was inventing a style for a generation, whereas Kahlo’s style is reserved unto herself. Vigée Le Brun also falsified aspects of her representation; in her numerous self-portraits she always showed her mouth as tiny, her teeth no bigger than seed pearls. More importantly, the flesh tones are infinitely seductive, a sign that she could do as much for her sallowest patron.
Frida Kahlo was uninterested in portraying anyone but herself. Her portraits of other people are perfunctory. The Gelmans were important collectors of both her and Rivera’s work. When it was Rivera’s turn to paint Mrs Gelman, he permitted himself an almost laughable degree of flattery, draping her impossibly elongated figure in a clinging white evening gown obliquely across the canvas from upper-right corner to lower left. Kahlo produced a kit-cat portrait of a tizzy blonde in a fur coat, blankly full face and virtually neckless. Though she portrayed herself as unforgettable, she made Mrs Gelman entirely forgettable. So powerful was his wife’s version of her own image, that when Rivera painted her he gave himself no option but to reproduce a pallid version of it.
In her lifetime, though she had her following among style gurus in New York and Paris, Kahlo was famous principally as the exotic wife of the heroic muralist Diego Rivera. He believed that the world stood on the brink of socialist revolution; in fact, what was dawning was the age of individualism. Now it is Rivera’s social realism that seems naive, while Frida is right on the money. El Abrazo de Amor del Universo, la Tierra (México), Diego, Yo y el Señor Xolotl 1949 shows Diego as a grey-skinned bloated baby lying in Frida’s lap, like the body of Christ lying in the lap of the Virgin in a votive pietà. Sure enough, 50 years after her death Kahlo is the subject of a veritable cultus, patron saint of both lipstick and lavender feminism. It is no more than she deserved.
