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Still-lifes, self-portraits, photographs – all collaboratively tell the story of artist, icon and revolutionary Frida Kahlo.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s presentation of its Frida Kahlo exhibit this summer allowed the Bay Area to get up close and very personal to this remarkable artist. The Evelyn D. Haas Exhibition Fund and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund were local lead funders with gifts totaling more than $700,000.
Organized by renowned Frida Kahlo biographer and art historian Hayden Herrera, the presentation included approximately 50 paintings from the beginning of Kahlo’s career in 1926 to her death in 1954, as well as 70 photographs that once belonged to Kahlo and her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. Some were taken by famed photographers of that era (Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti, Nickolas Muray), and others are personal snapshots of the couple and their families and friends – including political lightning rods like Leon Trotsky.
During her short, 47-year lifetime, Kahlo created 66 self-portraits and around 80 paintings of other subjects – mostly still lifes and portraits of friends. “I paint my own reality,” she said. “The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.”
She might have painted her own reality, but given the numbers of people who turn out for Kahlo exhibits, it is a reality shared by many.
The SFMOMA exhibition included works such as Henry Ford Hospital (1932), depicting the artist’s miscarriage in Detroit (a first in terms of the iconography of Western art history), and The Broken Column (1944), painted after she underwent spinal surgery. It also included self-portraits such as Me and My Doll (1937) and Self-Portrait with Monkeys (1943), both of which explore the theme of childlessness. The artist’s suffering over Rivera’s betrayals is reflected in paintings like her masterful double-portrait The Two Fridas (1939) created during her separation and divorce from Rivera. Collectively, these images suggest the extent to which, for Kahlo, painting served as catharsis, as well as an opportunity to redefine and critique modern bourgeois society.
The paintings in the exhibition came from some 30 private and institutional collections in France, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. Several paintings were on public view for the first time in the United States. Two of the most important and extensive collections of Kahlo’s work—the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño Collection in Mexico City and the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art, currently housed in the Centro Cultural Muros in Cuernavaca—loaned some of their most treasured Kahlo paintings to the exhibition.
The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and was co-curated by Hayden Herrera and Walker Art Center Associate Curator Elizabeth Carpenter.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street (between Mission and Howard Streets)
San Francisco, CA 94103
Telephone: 415.357.4000
Fax: 415.357.4037
In anticipation of the popularity of this exhibition, museum officials have implement a timed ticketing system for the first time to help mitigate long waits in line. Regular admission is $12.50 for adults plus $5 for the Kahlo exhibition. For museum hours and more information on the exhibition visit www.sfmoma.org
