A touring exhibition devoted to the art of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from February 20 through May 18, 2008. Organized in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Kahlo’s birth, it will present approximately fifty paintings from the beginning of her career in 1926 to the year of her death in 1954. Frida Kahlo is the first major presentation of the Mexican artist’s works in the United States in nearly fifteen years.
The exhibition will feature a selection of Kahlo’s self-portraits, still lifes, and portraits. Painted in vivid colors and rendered in great detail, her figurative and fantastical paintings are filled with complex symbolism, which usually relates to her life. In her remarkably varied, often iconic self-portraits Kahlo continually reinvented herself, depicting herself in various guises, as in a painting from 1948 in which she wears a Tehuano headdress. Paintings like The Two Fridas (1939) demonstrate Kahlo’s penchant for self-examination, and Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and The Broken Column (1944), among others, express her struggles with illness throughout her life.
One of the most distinctive aspects of the exhibition is that it will feature a selection of photographs of Kahlo and her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, by preeminent international photographers of the period, namely Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti, and Nickolas Muray. Personal snapshots of the artist with family and friends, including such cultural and political luminaries as André Breton and Leon Trotsky, will also be on view. These photographs—several of which Kahlo inscribed with dedications, effaced with self-deprecating marks, or kissed, leaving a lipstick trace—pose fascinating questions about an artist who was both the consummate manufacturer of her own image and a captivating and willing photographic subject. On loan from the collection of designer and photographer Vicente Wolf, many of these photographs have never been published or exhibited.
Frida Kahlo includes loans from over thirty private and institutional collections in the United States, Mexico, France, and Japan, several of which have never been on public view in the United States. Two of the most important and extensive collections of Kahlo’s work – the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño Collection, Mexico City, and the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art (currently housed in the Centro Cultural Muros, Cuernavac) – have agreed to loan many of their most treasured Kahlo paintings, making this exhibition a landmark presentation of her paintings.
Organized by the Walker Art Center in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Frida Kahlo is curated by Kahlo scholar and biographer Hayden Herrera, and the Walker’s associate curator, Elizabeth Carpenter. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it will be co-curated by Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, and Emily Hage, the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department.
The national tour of Frida Kahlo is sponsored by Bank of America and Televisa. Major support for the national tour is provided by Margaret and Angus Wurtele. Additional support is provided by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA) and the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA), Mexico. -- www.philamuseum.org
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