D.he recognition value of Frida Kahlo’s paintings is unmatched in art history. Her self-portraits have found circulation all over the world, in innumerable reproductions; in all conceivable forms they have gone into commercial exploitation. That made her probably the most famous artist ever. This Kahlo overdose has its downside where there is a risk of fatigue, a satiated look at the most famous pictures such as “The little deer”, with her face and the arrows in the animal’s body like the martyr Sebastian, or “The broken pillar”, which her from nails pierced open body supports.
This is regrettable because it obscures the view of the unique oeuvre of this exceptional artist, which goes far beyond seemingly incessant self-observation. It is all the more meritorious that the band “Frida Kahlo. All paintings ”also illuminates the little-known facets of her work. What has been conjured up as the world of Frida Kahlo for decades is experiencing a long-overdue, great broadening of horizons.
An uncompromisingly idiosyncratic imagery
The editor Luis-Martín Lozano and the authors Andrea Kettenmann and Marina Vázquez Ramos are far from the kind of interpretation that ineradicably treats the content of the pictures as simply congruent with the person of the artist. Instead, they undertake a revision of their role models in knowledgeable and very well-written texts. They show that their father Guillermo Kahlo, who was a photographer and himself a painter, is one of them. You identify the influence of German verism, for example. The Mexican artist Diego Rivera didn’t have to come first to provide her, the self-taught artist, with templates. The authors classify their work in the avant-garde of the time and show the neglected modernity of some of their pictures.
The straightforward classification of Kahlo into Surrealism under the aegis of André Breton does not work either. What exoticism may have meant to Breton and his westernized worldview was a living reality for them. In Kahlos, surrealistly inspired art for a while, Mexican religious ex-voto painting finds its echo, stronger than dream or myth. Her uncompromisingly idiosyncratic imagery creates an independent female iconography in which fantasy and reality merge.
The proud distance of untouchability
Frida Kahlo, baptized “Frieda” by the way, was born in Mexico City in 1907 as the daughter of a father of German origin and a Mexican mother. She died in 1954, exhausted to death, and tried to paint until the very end. Her early suspected polio in her right leg, her accident on a bus when she was eighteen years old with injuries that put life in pain; her emotional relationship with Diego Rivera; her lovers, men and women, her increasing addiction to alcohol and drugs: it’s true, all of this is in her art. But there is also an irrepressible force there, an enormous sensitivity for other people, mostly close friends and friends, whose images she creates; the will to improve the world. She burned for the Mexican Revolution and for communism all of her life.
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