Eduardo Constantini, Malba founder, paid for the second time the Latin American art record for Frida Kahlo, $34.9 million. And it does not hide the seduction exerted by painting that was hidden for years. Malba’s chief curator, Marita García, analyzes Kahlo’s art, alien to the canon of muralists and painters of her time, and rescues a crucial piece of information: “The job of her photographer father allowed Frida to have a profuse archive of images from her childhood and adolescence, an exceptional fact for the time. Before the artist turned on herself in her self-portraits, these photographs of her show her together with her sisters and her friends…”. Evidently, the sight of his own face in numerous photographs brought the self-portrait genre closer to him. Then, the small dimension of the paintings was determined by the prolonged stay in bed after the accident and numerous surgeries. In childhood she had polio and at 18 she was returning from school on a bus that collided with a tram and in that accident she broke two ribs, her leg, her foot and the handrail pierced her “like a sword through a bull” -I would say her- from the spine that was fractured in three parts, to the vagina. Frida would develop “the staging of martyrdom.” In one of the hospitals where she was, she was photographed in the middle of a hemorrhage, and tied with ties to the fractured pelvis that caused her abortions and sentenced her to not have children.
Frida is often seen as the paradigm of Latin American exoticism. Although her painting is related to the small altarpieces of the Mexican tradition, she surprised André Bretón, the mentor of surrealism who, when she arrived in Mexico, described her as a “spontaneous surrealist”. “European surrealism, Breton asserted, achieved similar results, but through a rational process.” Frida, sure of her own values and the sophisticated style of Mexican artists and intellectuals, disdained cataloging. The texts of her works are related to Mexican altarpieces, but also to the avant-garde, and when she exhibited in Paris, she dazzled Miró, Picasso and Kandisky. In New York, Times magazine highlighted her unprejudiced and bloody fantasy. Her work is essentially excessive, passionate, immense.
the theoretical James Oles studied the outfits of Kahlo, long skirts, embroidered blouses, pre-Hispanic jewelry and hair tied back in the traditional way of Tehuantepec. Thus he observed that they are usually attributed to the influence of Diego Rivera (what he wanted her to wear), to her accident (long dresses to hide her leg) or even to her political affiliations, “although her ceremonial and rather luxurious attire had little of a proletariat.” “The outfits were seen as indigenous, but they were actually the result of cultural mixtures and miscegenation, so important to build a Mexican national identity in the post-revolutionary period.” Oles adds: “She mixed elements from different places, including textiles she bought in Mexico City or Paris with embroidered shoes from China, her way and not according to local customs. Kahlo was not the first in the country to adopt what could be called “cultural transvestism” (the use of clothing belonging to people of another culture and social class), in her case for nationalist purposes”.
What can be seen in the exhibition through the curatorial texts is Kahlo’s genuine freedom to deal with taboo subjects such as infertility, sexual pleasure and the complex bond with her husband in her 176 paintings and 82 drawings. “Her refreshing and broad vision of love and sexuality challenged the limitations of gender and female identity, putting the coordinates of social heteronormativity in crisis.” Although he opposed the Catholic religion, he incorporated elements of Christian iconography and spirituality permeated his life and work. The perspective of death is linked to the cyclical conception of time and the perpetual continuity between life and death. “Egyptian culture, Hinduism, Buddhism and occult doctrines also populate his worldview, from which he took the representation of the third eye (which appears in Diego y yo). Dualism appears frequently in his work, as do universal dialectics such as masculine and feminine, life and death, sun and moon, body and mind”.
In her work, she blends in with nature. The vegetation that surrounds her has the same sensuality as her face, where her thick eyebrows and her hair on her upper lip stand out. The animals that surround her, parrots and monkeys, are the children that she could never have. The new assembly of the collection deserves a new chapter. “The third eye” is the name of the exhibition that opened Malba with 110 works from the collection that dialogue with another 110 key pieces from Eduardo Costantini’s private collection.