Frida Kahlo ‘stares’ out
of Philadelphia billboard

PHILADELPHIA—Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait stares out of seemingly every billboard and bus shelter in central Philadelphia, inviting the public to witness the suffering of one of Mexico’s most famous artists.

It’s the iconic image from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new Frida Kahlo exhibition, the first major US show of the artist for 15 years, which runs until May 18.

In the painting, she wears a jagged wooden necklace whose thorns are digging into her neck and drawing blood. A cat and a monkey – pets that were surrogates for the children she never had – seem powerless to stop the pain; a dead humming bird, normally a symbol of hope, hangs from the necklace.

And yet a pair of butterflies around her head hint at redemption and her steady gaze and strong upright posture suggest an ability to endure a life that was filled with physical and emotional suffering.

It is one of 42 paintings – three of which have never been on show in the United States before – and around 100 photographs in the exhibition which opened in Minneapolis and has its only East Coast appearance in Philadelphia.

Kahlo had polio as a child, and broke her spine in three places in a bus accident when she was 18. The horrors of the accident and her long convalescence resulted in raw, visceral depictions of her physical breakdown that form one of the major themes of the show.

In "Without Hope" (1945), she is laying in bed being force-fed a cornucopia of revolting foods in a reference to the high-protein diet prescribed by her doctor as a way of regaining strength after many surgeries.

Emotional pain, too, fills her canvasses, a reflection of her tormented relationship with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, a serial philanderer whom Kahlo married in 1929, divorced, and then remarried. She died in 1954 at the age of 47.

In some paintings, the subject spills off the canvas and on to the frame, emphasizing that art is also life, and that Kahlo insists on our participation in it.

In "A Few Small Nips" (1935), a naked woman lies on a bed, covered in stab wounds that have been inflicted by a murderer who stands over her. The red paint of the stab wounds covers the woman’s body and the bed, and spills over on to the frame of the painting.

But Kahlo’s loneliness is epitomized in "The Two Fridas" (1939), the largest and perhaps the most moving painting in the show, in which she paints herself twice: first as the woman loved by Rivera, and then again as the woman that he no longer loved.

The two are joined by a long blood vessel that comes out of a tiny portrait of Rivera as a child. The vessel passes through the exposed hearts of both women and is then gripped by surgical pincers which are unable to stem the flow of blood on to her dress. The two figures hold hands, a sign that in her abandonment, Kahlo has only herself for comfort.

Still, Kahlo’s ability to endure may explain her appeal, said associate curator Elizabeth Carpenter. "For many people, her life story is a story of inspiration, that she was strong and brave in the face of these horrors." – Reuters