2018.06.21 真实的弗里达-卡洛

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The real Frida Kahlo
A virtual tour of an exhibition which displays her personal possessions alongside her paintings

Jun 21st 2018 (Updated Jun 22nd 2018)

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By Julian Beecroft

Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico City in 1907, though after becoming a socialist she would claim that it was really 1910, when the Mexican revolution began. Her mother had mixed European and native-American heritage, while her father was a German immigrant who became an architectural photographer for the pre-revolutionary government.


Fiery character The leather boot on Khalo’s prosthetic leg has an embroidered dragon on appliquéd silk
At the age of six Kahlo contracted polio, which left her with a permanently enfeebled right leg, for which she had to wear a prosthesis (right). When she was 18 she was nearly killed in a bus crash in Mexico City when an iron handrail went right through her, breaking her pelvis, collarbone, ribs and spinal column. Over the rest of her life, she would have more than 30 operations in a vain attempt to rebuild her shattered frame.

Before the accident she had hoped to become a doctor, but now she turned to painting, encouraged by her father who gave her paints, a specially adapted easel and a mirror fixed to the underside of the canopy of her four-poster bed. As she convalesced, she studied the portraits of Renaissance masters and she also began a lifelong study of herself. Over the next 20 years she would paint dozens of autobiographical scenes and self-portraits.


In 1928 Frida fell in love with Diego Rivera, a famous Mexican muralist who was twice her age. She married him a year later. Her art grew in daring and confidence, the more so as she faced adversities of one kind or another: the ongoing health problems, a series of miscarriages and her husband’s compulsive infidelity. By the late 1930s she had become a celebrity, with solo exhibitions in Paris and New York City and accolades from Vogue magazine. But during the 1940s Kahlo and her paintings slipped from the public eye. She died in 1954, and was not rediscovered until the 1980s.

An exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London traces the links between her life, her style and her work. Along with 13 of her paintings, it includes some of the thousands of documents, items of clothing and personal possessions which lay sealed in a bathroom in her house in Mexico City for 50 years after she died – the first time these artefacts have been seen outside Mexico.


Frida Kahlo c.1926

This photo, taken by her father the year after the bus crash, shows Kahlo as a young and vulnerable woman. After several operations and the months she had spent in bed, her first boyfriend was on the point of forgetting her and her university friends had all moved on. Frida stayed behind, uncertain both physically and in every other aspect of her life, forced to rebuild both the crumbled architecture of her body and the future to which she had once looked forward. The former would prove to be a hopeless task; the latter she would find in painting.

© DIEGO RIVERA AND FRIDA KAHLO ARCHIVES, BANCO DE MÉXICO, FIDUCIARY OF THE TRUST OF THE DIEGO RIVERA AND FRIDA KAHLO MUSEUMS


Cotton huipil with machine-embroidered chain stitch; printed cotton skirt with embroidery and holán

Kahlo began wearing styles such as the huipil, the traditional dress of the Tehuana women of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico, at the time of her marriage to Diego Rivera. Rivera’s socialist endorsement of indigenous culture confirmed Kahlo’s own political and cultural instincts, which she expressed in part through the way she dressed. Dressing as a traditional Mexican woman was a way of confidently asserting who she was and where she was from.

© Museo Frida Kahlo. Ensemble from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Photograph: Javier Hinojosa


Frida Kahlo, “Me and My Doll” (1937)

This tiny painting on tin is an example of one of Kahlo’s great innovations. Retablo or ex-voto paintings are a Mexican tradition dating from the late 19th century, and Kahlo herself collected them. These miniatures were painted by folk artists for private clients, to give thanks for deliverance from some brush with death that the client had survived. Kahlo subverted the genre to convey a “message of pain” which she later said was the key to her work. “Henry Ford Hospital” (1932) depicted the trauma of a terrible miscarriage from which she had nearly bled to death. “Me and My Doll” was painted shortly after another miscarriage. The doll on the bed next to her could be a reference to the child she wanted but knew she would never have.

© The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel Foundation


Nickolas Muray, “Frida on a bench” (1939)

Rivera was frequently unfaithful, even having an affair with Frida’s own sister, Cristina, but Kahlo herself was no angel. In 1937 she had a brief dalliance with Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, and as early as 1931, she had written a love letter to Nickolas Muray, a Hungarian fashion photographer with whom she had a long on-off affair. Muray’s images of Kahlo, like this regal portrait for a cover for American Vogue in 1939, are familiar even to people who know little about her painting. They helped cement her status as an icon of 20th-century fashion.

© The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Verge, Nickolas Muray Photo Archives


Frida Kahlo, “Self-portrait as a Tehuana” (1943)

In her self-portraits Kahlo’s love of dressing up becomes a vehicle for self-expression on a much deeper level. For obvious reasons, this painting – in which she is wearing a resplandor, the festive headdress of the Tehuanas – is sometimes given the alternative title “Diego on My Mind”. After divorcing in 1939, the couple remarried the following year, but this time in a strictly celibate union, at Kahlo’s insistence, to protect her financial independence and to keep at arm’s length the pain of infidelity which had doomed the marriage the first time around. Through the 1940s, as Kahlo’s body began to disintegrate, her spiritual need for Rivera increased.

© The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel Foundation


Frida Kahlo, “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Me, Diego, Señor Xolotl” (1949)

This was Kahlo’s last major work before she became too ill to paint anything more ambitious than the occasional still life. The painting, which affirms Kahlo’s own highly personal system of beliefs, contains elements of Mexican, Christian and Hindu religion. Xolotl is the Aztec god of fire and lightning and appears here in the form of the dog curled up on the flounce of her skirt. Kahlo casts herself in the role of the Madonna, cradling her naked husband, like the Christ child, in her lap, his divine wisdom marked by the third eye which appears in the centre of his forehead. Even in the late 1940s, in constant pain and with her body falling apart, she continued to defy her fate. In this image Kahlo is attempting to unify the complex mix of forces which had shaped her remarkable life.

© The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel Collection

Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up Victoria and Albert Museum until November 4th

main image: frida kahlo with olmec figurine, 1939. photograph nickolas muray. © nickolas muray photo archives. prosthetic leg © diego rivera and frida kahlo archive



真实的弗里达-卡洛
一个将她的个人物品与画作一起展示的展览的虚拟之旅

2018年6月21日（2018年6月22日更新）。

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作者：Julian Beecroft

弗里达-卡洛于1907年出生于墨西哥城，不过在成为社会主义者之后，她会声称真正的1910年才是墨西哥革命开始的时候。她的母亲有欧洲和美国本土的混合血统，而她的父亲是一个德国移民，成为革命前政府的建筑摄影师。


火热的性格 卡洛假肢上的皮靴上有一条贴花丝绸的刺绣龙
卡洛六岁时感染了小儿麻痹症，这使她的右腿永远失去了功能，为此她不得不戴上假肢（右）。18岁时，她在墨西哥城的一次公共汽车事故中几乎丧命，一根铁扶手直接穿过了她，打断了她的骨盆、锁骨、肋骨和脊柱。在她的余生中，她将接受30多次手术，徒劳地试图重建她破碎的框架。

事故发生前，她曾希望成为一名医生，但现在她转向了绘画，她的父亲给了她颜料、一个特别改装的画架和一面固定在她的四柱床顶棚下面的镜子。在养病期间，她研究了文艺复兴时期大师的肖像画，同时也开始了对自己的终生研究。在接下来的20年里，她将画出几十幅自传式场景和自画像。


1928年，弗里达爱上了迭戈-里维拉，一个比她大一倍的著名墨西哥壁画家。一年后她嫁给了他。她的艺术越来越大胆和自信，在她面临这样或那样的逆境时更是如此：持续的健康问题、一系列流产和她丈夫的强迫性不忠。到20世纪30年代末，她已经成为一个名人，在巴黎和纽约举办个人画展，并获得《时尚》杂志的赞誉。但在20世纪40年代，卡洛和她的画作从公众视野中滑落。她于1954年去世，直到1980年代才被重新发现。

在伦敦维多利亚和阿尔伯特博物馆举办的展览追溯了她的生活、她的风格和她的作品之间的联系。除了她的13幅画作外，展览还包括她死后50年封存在墨西哥城的房子里的数千份文件、衣物和个人物品--这是在墨西哥以外首次看到这些文物。


弗里达-卡洛 约1926年

这张照片是她的父亲在巴士失事后一年拍摄的，显示了卡洛年轻而脆弱的一面。经过几次手术和在床上度过的几个月，她的第一个男朋友已经快要忘记她了，她的大学朋友也都搬走了。弗里达留了下来，她的身体和生活的其他方面都不确定，被迫重建她身体的破碎结构和她曾经期待过的未来。前者被证明是一项无望的任务；后者她将在绘画中找到。

© 迪戈-里韦拉和弗里达-卡洛档案馆，墨西哥银行，迪戈-里韦拉和弗里达-卡洛博物馆的信托人


机刺链缝的棉质huipil；刺绣和holán的印花棉质裙子

卡洛在与迭戈-里维拉结婚时开始穿诸如huipil这样的款式，这是墨西哥南部特万特佩克的特华纳妇女的传统服装。里维拉对本土文化的社会主义认可证实了卡洛自己的政治和文化本能，她通过自己的穿着方式部分地表达了这一点。穿成一个传统的墨西哥妇女是一种自信地宣称她是谁以及她来自哪里的方式。

© 弗里达-卡洛博物馆。来自特万特佩克地峡的合奏。照片。Javier Hinojosa


弗里达-卡洛，《我和我的娃娃》（1937年）

这幅在锡上的小画是卡洛伟大创新之一的例子。Retablo或ex-voto画是墨西哥的一项传统，可以追溯到19世纪末，卡洛本人也收集了这些画。这些微型画是由民间艺术家为私人客户绘制的，以感谢客户从与死亡的擦肩而过中解脱出来。卡洛颠覆了这种类型，以传达一种 "痛苦的信息"，她后来说这是她作品的关键。"亨利-福特医院》（1932年）描绘了一次可怕的流产给她带来的创伤，她几乎因流产而流血致死。"我和我的娃娃》是在另一次流产后不久画的。她身旁床上的娃娃可能是指她想要的孩子，但她知道自己永远不会有。

© 雅克和娜塔莎-盖尔曼20世纪墨西哥艺术收藏馆和维尔盖尔基金会


尼古拉斯-穆雷，《长椅上的弗里达》（1939年）

里维拉经常不忠，甚至与弗里达的亲妹妹克里斯蒂娜有染，但卡洛本人也不是天使。1937年，她曾与俄罗斯革命家列昂-托洛茨基有过短暂的交往，早在1931年，她就给匈牙利时尚摄影师尼古拉斯-穆雷写过一封情书，与他有过长期的断续交往。穆雷为卡洛拍摄的照片，如1939年为美国《时尚》杂志拍摄的这张高贵的肖像，即使是对她的绘画知之甚少的人也会感到熟悉。他们帮助巩固了她作为20世纪时尚偶像的地位。

© 雅克和娜塔莎-盖尔曼20世纪墨西哥艺术收藏和The Verge，尼古拉斯-穆雷照片档案馆


弗里达-卡洛，"作为Tehuana的自画像" (1943年)

在她的自画像中，卡洛对装扮的热爱成为更深层次的自我表达的载体。由于显而易见的原因，这幅画--其中她戴着resplandor，即特瓦那人的节日头饰--有时被赋予另一个标题 "Diego on My Mind"。1939年离婚后，这对夫妇于次年再婚，但这次是严格的独身婚姻，在卡洛的坚持下，为了保护她的经济独立，并与第一次婚姻失败的不忠之痛保持距离。在1940年代，随着卡洛的身体开始解体，她对里维拉的精神需求也在增加。

© 雅克和娜塔莎-盖尔曼20世纪墨西哥艺术收藏和维尔格尔基金会


弗里达-卡洛，《宇宙、地球（墨西哥）、我、迭戈、Xolotl先生的爱的怀抱》（1949年）。

这是卡洛的最后一件重要作品，在此之前她已经病入膏肓，除了偶尔的静物画之外，无法再画更多的东西。这幅画肯定了卡洛自己高度个人化的信仰体系，包含了墨西哥、基督教和印度教的元素。Xolotl是阿兹特克人的火和闪电之神，在这里以狗的形式出现，蜷缩在她裙子的褶边上。卡洛将自己塑造成圣母的角色，将她赤裸的丈夫搂在膝上，就像基督的孩子一样，他神圣的智慧被出现在他额头中央的第三只眼睛所标记。即使在20世纪40年代末，在不断的痛苦中，在身体崩溃的情况下，她仍然继续蔑视她的命运。在这幅画中，卡洛试图将塑造她非凡人生的各种复杂的力量统一起来。

© 雅克和娜塔莎-盖尔曼20世纪墨西哥艺术收藏馆和维尔格尔收藏馆

弗里达-卡洛。维多利亚和阿尔伯特博物馆将于11月4日举行她的自我塑造。

主图：弗里达-卡洛与奥尔梅克小雕像，1939年。摄影：尼古拉斯-穆雷。© Nickolas Muray photo archives. 义肢 © diego rivera and frida kahlo archive