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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&ndash;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. &copy; 2019 Banco de M&eacute;xico Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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