Painting Pain: Frida Kahlo at SFMOMA

Frida Kahlo retrospective in celebration of the centennial of her birthday opened at SFMOMA today, offering an unprecedented array of her smaller scale artwork and personal photographs, most never before seen by the public. Known and revered as a pioneering female modernist for her fiercely unapologetic, gender-conscious art, Kahlo focused her attention on her “own reality,” preferring self-portrait to any other genre, and expressing her inner tempest in her signature still, yet tense compositions, reminiscent of primitive and folk art. Her paintings often contain images of traditional elements of Mexican folklore—heart, death, and blood—the latter spilling out of her painting onto a frame too realistically for comfort. However, her casual depictions of spots on the sun, and dividing embryonic cells in child bearing-related works point to her science-oriented mindset. A wife of a famous muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo was born in 1907, and died at a relatively young age in 1954, becoming a globally recognizable icon a quarter century later. Although she lived through revolutionary times, tragic and turbulent on a world-wide scale, and was politically involved until her last days, her own tragic existence overpowered her artistic imagination and dictated her subject matter. Kahlo's art is progressively appreciated by new generations of artists and viewers as time passes, placing her oeuvre in an art historical perspective. The more accepted and officially admired she becomes, the more obscure is the fact that this small-framed, ailment-ridden, and relentlessly pursued by ill fate woman had to be enormously, biblically strong just to carry on, not to mention creating art of such resonance and significance as hers. Immobile more often than not, painting in bed, attending her exhibit openings in bed (being carried there), and making life-long friends with doctors, Kahlo remained as alive as life itself. Despite her endless surgeries and miscarriages, she painted universal embraces, and was loved by the international alpha-males of her generation (not to mention females). She sustained her loving marital relationships with a philandering genius (who asked for divorce every so often, but inevitably returned to her) and maintained her public persona of a flamboyant, bejeweled, adorned by red blooms and adored by her red friends goddess of all things revolutionary. She lived her life the hard way, and learned everything there was to learn about it when she wrote in her diary before dying: "I hope never to come back." The current show (co-curated by Hayden Herrera and Elizabeth Carpenter) as one of the multiple comebacks of Kahlo's artistic soul, helps to affirm the understanding of a great person behind the great art. Frida Kahlo show is on display through September 28 at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. 415-357-4000, http://www.sfmoma.org/. Group tours 415-357-4197.