The first surprising thing about Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution, the new exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, is how long it takes to see a work by Frida Kahlo. While Rivera was the bigger celebrity during their lifetimes, now it is Kahlo’s paintings – and her face – that you will find on tote bags, fridge magnets and candles.
The first room contains beautiful historic footage of Mexico City, where the couple lived, as well as photographs from Kahlo’s father, Guillermo Kahlo, and print reproductions of Diego Rivera’s frescoes. In the next, there are two paintings that are unmistakably Rivera’s: Landscape with cacti (1931) and Calla lily vendor (1943). Nearby, there are works by Kahlo and Rivera’s contemporaries: Juan Soriano, Carlos Mérida, María Izquierdo. It’s an expansive reading of Mexican modernism, placing Kahlo’s and Rivera’s careers in context.
It is only once you walk behind a column that you meet the first work by Kahlo. The show is billed as “Frida & Diego”, but it is Kahlo’s image that dominates the marketing. It is strange how hidden she feels in the beginning – but still, there is something nice in the gentle way we finally come across her: not as the global superstar she has become in her death, but as a working artist among her peers.
This first work is not one of her striking self-portraits, though she does appear in it: The love embrace the universe, the earth (Mexico) Diego, me and Señor Xolotl (1949), Kahlo embracing Rivera who is both fully grown man and baby at once. She, in turn, is embraced by the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl, and around her extends the arms of the universe.
The western tradition would call this image surrealism, but Kahlo rejected the term, saying she was, “painting her own reality”. It is a deliciously complex painting, with more details and depth the more you look at it. While it was one of her later paintings, there is a gentleness, a youth and naivety, to Kahlo’s face which doesn’t align with the classic portraits we know.
The first glance of one of Kahlo’s recognisable images only comes when you turn towards the next room, where Self-portrait with monkeys (1943) sits at the end of a long, blue corridor. There is much more art to see before you reach it – but her gaze beckons.
It is, of course, her gaze (and her ever-present unibrow) which helped elevate Kahlo into an icon. And it is in coming face to face with the first of these paintings that you begin to fully understand her genius. There is a particular intensity to her eyes that is absent in the endless reproductions; a glimmer of light among the multiple tones of brown I’ve never noticed before. There is a depth to the curve of her neck and subtle contours of her chin. Each brushstroke of hair – eyebrows, a sparse moustache, the hairs of the monkeys which gently embrace her – shimmer with movement.
Most people who own a Kahlo print, whether it is on their wall or on their phone case, would not have seen one of her paintings in person. “Fridamania” and the commercialisation of her image has taken on a persona far beyond the painter. But seeing her portraits in person, you are able to truly appreciate their beauty, the subtlety of the brushstrokes, and the power in her stance.
This is the same collection of Kahlo and Rivera paintings that showed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2016, but here the pair are bolstered by the paintings of their contemporaries. There are the abstract images of Gunther Gerzso, the paintings of young indigenous girls by Juan Soriano, illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias. Drawn exclusively from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, these paintings place the celebrity pair within the post-revolutionary Mexican modernism, a period of art history underexplored in Australian art galleries.
The exhibition is supported by dozens of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera, from staged portraits by fellow artists to everyday shots by friends. In many of these images dotting the walls, Kahlo is sitting at an easel; walk behind the wall and you come across the picture she was painting at the time.
Of course, the star of the exhibition is Kahlo: her unwavering stare captures attention. But there is a significant quirk to the collection in what it lacks. Kahlo’s self-portraits might be what she is ubiquitously known for, but she also produced a darker thread of work that explored her chronic pain and disability. But the Gelmans weren’t interested in collecting these paintings: they wanted the more beautiful ones.
With AGSA working within the Gelman’s collection, there is a keen sense of something missing. There is a deep artistic complexity to Kahlo’s work on display here, and even in the most simple paintings there is a sense of both beauty and power. But Kahlo’s story is incomplete without this sorrow: she only became an artist while confined to her bed at 18 after a catastrophic bus accident. The Gelman’s collection tells only part of the story – and with this the first time Kahlo’s work has been displayed in Adelaide since 1990, it feels as though local audiences will be getting a strangely stifled curation of her story.
The exhibition does reflect on Kahlo’s pain. Towards the end of the exhibition there is a room shrouded in black. A small single white bed stands in the centre. A self-portrait from 1941 cooly stares down the room otherwise filled with photographs: Juan Guzmán’s images of Kahlo in hospital in 1950; her bed, photographed in 2012; her crutches and corset in her bathroom, photographed in 2005.
There is one work which hints at some of the tragedy of Kahlo’s life: her small 1932 lithograph, Frida and the miscarriage. Half of Kahlo’s body is black and bruised. Tears fall from her eyes and her vagina. A child sits simultaneously in her womb and outside it.
This is not a work which appears on souvenirs at the gift shop. But it’s this piece in this exhibition which adds context to the classic self-portraits. In the quietness of this pain, you finally see the woman who stares back at you from these walls time and time again: the shoulders up, staring straight towards the viewer, stoic and unwavering. A woman who has confronted her life, and now wants to confront us.
Frida & Diego: Love and Revolution is on at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 17 September
