03 Apr 2019
Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving
Brooklyn Museum
Reviewed by Jan Castro
Frida Kahlo crafted a unique cultural identity. It's all on display at the Brooklyn Museum: her psychically intense art, her politics, her lovers, even her prosthetic leg in a worn boot with a wedge heel. The must-see paintings include The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (1949), in which Kahlo cradles Diego as a baby in a hybrid Mexican, Hindu, and Christian universe. Kahlo's art, as well as her Tehuana clothing and pre-Colonial jewelry, carry forward her Mexican mother's heritage, and her German father's career documenting it.
Kahlo's art and life contain a passion and a specificity missing from "Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern" at this museum in 2017, in which the photos, clothing, and art seemed stylized and superficial. This exhibition features possessions sealed in La Casa Azul, the Kahlo-Rivera domicile turned study center, until 2004. They show how Kahlo shaped her own persona. To mask her severe spinal injury and polio deformity, she turned herself into art. Having done so, she painted her wounded body among objects of intimate importance to her.
| Exhibition | Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving link |
| Start date | 08 Feb 2019 |
| End date | 12 May 2019 |
| Presenter | Brooklyn Museum link |
| Venue | 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY, USA map |
| Image | Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954). <em>Self-Portrait with Braid</em>, 1941. Oil on hardboard, 20 x 15<sup>1</sup>/<sub>4 </sub>in. (51 x 38.5 cm). The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation. © 2019 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |
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