Frida Kahlo Exhibition Brisbane 2016 – A piece from MSU Broad’s “Kahlo Without Borders” exhibit shows Kahlo resting with a cigarette in her hand at ABC Hospital in Mexico City after her right leg was amputated in 1953.
Frida Kahlo painted this self-portrait on July 9, 1932, five days after her miscarriage, at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
Frida Kahlo Exhibition Brisbane 2016
© 2021 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Frida Kahlo often expressed her affection and gratitude for her doctors in letters, such as this postcard from New York dated November 2, 1940, sent to her by “Querido Doctorcito” (“Dear Little Doctor”), Leo Eloser.
Light boxes glow like rows of candles at the far end of the first-floor gallery at MSU’s Broad Museum of Art. The vibrating lines on each screen follow the heart rhythm, body heat and breathing of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, one of the most famous figures of the 20th century.
Cristina Kahlo, Kahlo’s granddaughter, artist and photographer, recalls what it was like to see these clinical records buried in a microfilm cabinet in a Mexican hospital for decades. Engraved with light on the wide walls, they blur the border between art and life, as Frida Kahlo did.
“I wanted the audience to experience the feeling of looking at these old documents like a dark room,” said Christina Carlo.
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“Carlo Without Borders” is not an art exhibit, although it includes five original paintings, one of which is a self-portrait painted in 1932 after the artist miscarried at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital.
Much of the exhibit consists of clinical reports, letters and photographs documenting Carlo’s 32 surgeries and numerous hospital visits. Clinical reports have not been seen publicly so far. The exhibition is co-curated by Broad Museum Director Monica Ramirez-Montagut, Cristina Kahlo and Visiting Curator Javier Roque Vázquez Juarez.
This is not the Frida Kahlo you see on pillows, mugs and handbags, framed with life lessons of flowers, lace and bats.
“We’ve joined the best images of Frida at her best,” Ramirez-Montagut said. “I think it’s time to balance that narrative because we’re all human and we all have our ups and downs.”
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If that sounds like a miserable afternoon at a museum, you’re underestimating Frida Kahlo’s unparalleled vitality. In or out of the hospital, Frida is always Frida. In the photographs and letters displayed in the extensive exhibition, we see him kissing his doctors, turning a hospital room into a studio, smoking with nurses, drawing especially easily in bed, planning and rocking the fight against fascism in Spain. The famous red lipstick and hair band and generally the fact that Frida faced a life of terrible medical hands.
“Frida has become a kind of Hollywood icon, a product image,” Ramirez-Montagut said. “The idea behind this exhibition was to look at him more as a person and see why his work still speaks to us so deeply.”
One of the most arresting photographs in the exhibit is a photograph of Christina Kahlo in a prosthetic leg, which Frida Kahlo wore when her right leg was amputated in 1953. A pair of knee-high, wedge-heeled, kick-ass crimson boots. The prosthesis makes your heart sink and beat at the same time.
“His control and the way he presented himself resonated with a lot of us,” Ramirez-Montagut said. “He’s unapologetic about who he is. He really wanted to milk life for all it was worth until he had the chance.”
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Why put patient data in the art museum? If ever there was an artist whose medical history provided a skeleton key to her art, it was Frida Kahlo.
When Christina Kahlo was a young girl, her father showed her a book of her great-aunt’s sketches.
“I was afraid of them,” Cristina Kahlo recalled. “It was a shock to me. They were strong images, I didn’t like them.
Shock and trauma are the roots of Kahlo’s art. In “The Accident,” shown at the Broad in 1926, 18-year-old Frida lies on her back covered in bandages. In 1925, he was seriously injured in a collision between a tram and a bus. In the painting, like a lingering nightmare, haunted vehicles and mutilated corpses hover over his prone figure.
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Kahlo had only taken a few painting lessons before the accident. While recuperating at the Red Cross Hospital, he began to paint with passion.
Throughout his life, he portrayed his pain and suffering on canvas using his characteristic partly realistic, partly descriptive language.
The more Cristina Kahlo learned about her great-aunt’s life, the more she learned to interpret the “scary” images that once haunted her.
Kahlo’s famous 1944 painting “The Broken Column” depicts the artist’s exposed spine as a cracked architectural column. You can see through his body, which is barely held together by metal braces. Christina Carlo’s photo from The Broad shows the painful corset Kahlo had to wear between surgeries.
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“He has done something as an artist as a person that I can’t find in any other artist,” Kahlo said. “He was a pioneer in the use of his personal image, his body and his art.”
The 1932 painting “Henry Ford Hospital,” also known as “The Flying Bed,” shows the artist lying naked on a blood-stained hospital bed after a miscarriage. The bed floats in front of the industrial Detroit skyline. Six symbolic objects, including a fetus and a snail, are tied to her navel.
“Henry Ford Hospital” is one of 25 works by Kahlo housed in the Dolores Olmedo Museum in Mexico City, where Monica Ramirez-Montagut first encountered Frida Kahlo’s art as a young girl. Growing up in Mexico City, Ramirez-Montagut spent long days enjoying the city’s ancient and modern wonders.
“That’s what we always did on the weekends – we went to museums,” he said. “That’s why I work in museums these days.”
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At the Olmedo Museum, Ramirez-Montagut adopted Kahlo’s boldly direct yet mysterious visual language. The museum has more than 140 works by Kahlo’s famous husband, muralist Diego Rivera.
“I saw these beautiful self-portraits of Frida,” Ramirez-Montagut recalled. “I especially remember Frida, thinking of Diego, painting Diego on her forehead. I remember spending a while with that painting. You can see him looking inward, and I was fascinated by how you could show that in a painting.
The seeds for the Broad exhibition were planted a few years ago in Mexico City, when Christina Kahlo met Mary Carmen Amigo, a doctor at the Centro Médico ABC, where Frida Kahlo had lived many times.
To Kahlo’s surprise, Dr. Amigo said that his clinical files on Frida are still on file at the hospital. They set a date for Carlo to visit the hospital and photograph the files.
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“It was an amazing day,” Kahlo said. “The people who worked there were really moved. They wanted to see what they had kept for years. They hugged me and the woman cried because she was a Frida fan.
He returned a few days later with a professional camera and tripod to capture the images Broad had seen at the show.
“Seeing these reports was really emotional for me because they brought her life to life through the writings of the doctors and nurses,” she said.
A few months later, Kahlo told Ramirez-Montagut that she was looking for a way to make the files public.
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As she became an architect, curator and museum director, Ramirez-Montagut’s early encounters with Kahlo’s art were not far from her mind.
But that’s a tall order, even for the MSU Broad Museum’s third director in its 10-year history. Frida Kahlo’s works are considered national treasures in Mexico. They are in constant demand in museums around the world, and their loan payments make them prohibitive for all but the largest institutions.
“The level of security we had to go through to get the five original works is remarkable,” Ramirez-Montagut said. The courier had to monitor the art at all times, and the gallery’s temperature and humidity were strictly controlled. Broad even had to get approval from the Mexican government for City Pulse to copy Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital self-portrait on these pages.
Juan Coronel Rivera, the grandson of Diego Rivera, the owner of the paintings in the extensive exhibition, and Cristina Carlo have been friends since elementary school. They even ran a gallery together.
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“It’s funny because at one point Frida’s family and Diego’s family don’t get along, but Cristina and Juan are close friends,” Ramirez-Montagut said.
The Broad was a conspiracy to lend art but not to exhibit. They exist for a purpose.
“While we may not be able to complete a survey of Frida’s work, at least for now, we can certainly go deeper into one area and continue Frida’s scholarship,” Ramírez-Montagut said.
The presentation goes beyond the compilation of dry clinical reports
