Frida Kahlo at the de Young: So-So Painter, Master at Self-Invention

Plus a Calder/Picasso show that’s much ado about not much

E arlier this week, I wrote about the de Young Museum in San Francisco. It’s one of my favorite museums for its American collection and its handsome, storied building. I focused last time on the de Young as an institution, but I did see three exhibitions while I was there.

Frida Kahlo: Looks Can Be Deceiving and Calder/Picasso are the two anchor exhibitions running at the de Young now, though Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI is by far the most challenging, original, and relevant. Kahlo and Calder/Picasso are crowd-pleasers and income-producers, but Uncanny Valley, free of charge and bracing, is the one to see. It’ll stay with you. I’ll write today about the Kahlo show mostly but a bit about Calder/Picasso. In a couple of weeks, I’ll do a story on the artificial-intelligence exhibition.

Kahlo (1907–1954) is an icon of style, therapy culture, and the 1980s and 1990s feminist movement, a celebrity when the Soviet Union was in vogue among American intellectuals in the 1930s, and a middling, at best, painter. She’s a Regionalist artist like Grant Wood and Grandma Moses, with whom she shares a zeitgeist. With a little Marlene Dietrich thrown in. Her chic is a prelude to Fidel’s, Che’s, and Evita’s, the Eva Perón of the musical. In her lifetime, Perón herself had no Americans slobbering over her.

That doesn’t mean Looks Can Be Deceiving is a bad show. I learned a lot from the exhibition and the catalogue. It’s a three-dimensional documentary about an unusual woman. Kahlo is unusual for her fashion sense, relationships, and courage and dash in the face of terrible disabilities. Taking biography out of the equation, though, we’re left with an aesthetic repast that’s hardly gourmet.

Looks Can Be Deceiving mines Kahlo’s bathrooms, closets, and cellar. That doesn’t mean we’re offered dreg art and dreg ideas surrounding a famous artist who’s already had a million exhibitions. When Kahlo died in 1954, the home she shared with her husband, Diego Rivera, was packed with her dresses and medical equipment as well as photographs, drawings, and documents. When he died in 1957, his will decreed that these personal items would remain sealed for 15 years. I don’t think Rivera knew what was there.

Their home, Casa Azul, in which Kahlo was born, eventually became a house museum. Fifteen years became 50. It’s not a story of discovery like King Tut’s, but, in 2004, the curators there got around to seeing what was in her closets and in all those trunks lying around the place.

“!Eureka¡” After conservation and research, a star wasn’t born, but we know what shade of lipstick she liked. And a show was born. Looks Can Be Deceiving isn’t new. It originated at the Frida Kahlo Museum, once the Casa Azul, in 2012 before it went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There are lots of family photographs, a group of her long, folk-inspired dresses, which she designed, her pill bottles, makeup cases, jewelry, some drawings and paintings, Nickolas Muray’s famous portrait photographs of Kahlo, and her artificial leg, leg and back braces, and medically prescribed plaster corsets.

Two traumas bookend Kahlo’s youth. At six, she contracted polio, isolating her for months while she recovered. At 18, she was in a near fatal bus accident. Her injuries were awful. She was impaled by an iron handrail, her back and leg broken, and her foot crushed. That she lived is a miracle, but she did, through intense pain and many surgeries. Some of her treatments seem grotesque today. “I lived dying,” she said.

She defied stereotypes of invalidism. Months after the accident, she started developing a look that concealed the serious injuries that shortened her leg and affected her posture. She soon married Rivera, already a famous artist. Later, she became, in part via Muray’s magazine photographs, an international celebrity herself. She had many flings with famous men as well as abortions and miscarriages. She was both an art celebrity and a celebrity artist, her work selling from time to time, but it mesmerized no one until long after her death. André Breton called her a folk Surrealist and engineered a trip to Paris for her. She was fêted for a short time, got a story in Vogue, met Picasso, and wrote that a lot of the people she saw were “koo koo.”

Kahlo’s estimated to have done around 200 paintings, probably fewer.

She traveled a lot. In 1952, she famously attended, while bedridden, an opening of a show in New York. There she was, in the middle of the gallery, in bed, dressed to the nines, soldiering on as cameras clicked. “Damn it,” she thought. “I’m not missing a photo op.” I’m not mean. I admire her fortitude. Her best art, then and now, is herself.

Photographs of Kahlo as a child and young adult and of her family are the first quarter of the show. Her father was German, her mother half-indigenous and half-Spanish, and her upbringing bourgeois and not uncomfortable. There’s a good overview of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Dumping an old, crypto-feudal oligarchy and kleptocracy, the revolution empowered a new, quasi-socialist oligarchy and kleptocracy.

The revolution spurred a movement among city elites called “Mexicanidad.” Part political, part aesthetic, it reflected a new interest in Aztec history and style and a back-to-the-country chic, though no one from Mexico City’s chattering classes actually did the Green Acres lifestyle journey.

In keeping with the new vogue, Kahlo adopted the Tehuana style from a region in southern Mexico she never visited. Kahlo lived in Mexico City all her life, except when she was traveling or visiting in the United States or Europe. The Casa Azul is in Mexico City. Kahlo started wearing billowy dresses, first for comfort. Soon, she decorated them with embroidered flowers and birds, patterned aprons, and Aztec-inspired geometric shapes to create a bourgeois take on a peasant look.

Later, Kahlo adopted 1910 as the year of her birth, in solidarity with the Mexican Revolution and conveniently making her three years younger. She was a committed Communist until she died and part of Mexico City’s radical chic. One of her last works of art was a self-portrait drawing from 1954 showing her with Stalin, who died in 1953. Kahlo wore a hideous plaster corset for back support. On the corset in the show, she painted the flag of the Soviet Union. Suffice to say she was committed to the cause, rich as she and Rivera were and long after the deal with the Nazis and the show trials and the Gulag turned many away.

Among her many flings was Leon Trotsky, who lived at Casa Azul for a time before he met the sharp end of an ice axe in 1940. When Rivera learned about the relationship, he insisted that Trotsky vamoose. Kahlo and Rivera were Trotskyites for most of the 1930s, though they converted to Stalinism, partly because of the illicit romance, but, by the late 30s, Trotsky’s political allure was fizzling. Kahlo was questioned by the police for complicity in his murder, though it was Rivera who, most likely, was involved.

Why was Kahlo famous in her lifetime? She was Rivera’s wife, first of all, meeting him at a Communist confab in 1927 and marrying him in 1929. She was 20 years younger and his third wife, but since they divorced in 1939 and remarried in 1940, she’s his fourth wife, too. Kahlo’s mother described the marriage as one “between an elephant and a dove,” and she didn’t mean to flatter her new son-in-law.

Rivera was already an accomplished muralist in Mexico City, working on big public-building commissions along with Rufino Tamayo, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros. Rivera’s first big American splash was in San Francisco. Kahlo lived there with him while he worked and became a hothouse flower in residence. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I know, but Kahlo was exotic. This became her calling card.

Her black eyes and unibrow set against pale skin, her lips full and colored red, and her short, combed black hair parted in the middle, often decorated with flowers — she upstaged the numberless blue-eyed blondes in San Francisco society, monied or intellectual. An intense look, certainly, but one softened by a distinctive, unusual fashion sense based on indigenous Mexican peasant dress. She had a mustache that some found fetching.

She met Muray in San Francisco. They had a ten-year, off-and-on affair but, more to the point, Muray’s saturated color portrait photographs of Kahlo made the icon, since they appeared in so many magazines. Kahlo’s looks, her Mexican heritage, and a sphinx-like reticence drew to her a range of people collectors including André Breton, Clare Boothe Luce, Anson Conger Goodyear, and Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp, I think, is significant. The founder of Dada saw the piece of work in her.

Heavy hitters like The Two Fridas, Portrait of Luther Burbank, The Love Embrace of the Universe, and What the Water Gave Me, aren’t there. But three very good self-portraits are as well as The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, which is her best painting and also the picture that best situates her as a celebrity artist.

Hale (1905–1938) was an actress socialite who started her career in New York in the Ziegfeld Follies. She married a rich stockbroker, divorced, and then married Gardner Hale, a society artist who died in a car wreck. She had a part in one of Clare Boothe Luce’s plays — not The Women — and became friends with the Vanity Fair editor and publishing magnate’s wife. She had flings with Isamu Noguchi, Harry Hopkins (FDR’s horse whisperer), and Bernard Baruch, among others. Though a beauty, a decent actress, and a lively conversationalist, failure stuck to her with Super Glue.

On the evening of her death, Hale threw what she called a farewell party, saying she was planning a long trip. That evening, she jumped from her apartment window, wearing a slinky black dress and a corsage that Noguchi gave her at the party. Luce asked Kahlo to paint Hale’s portrait as a memento. Instead, Kahlo painted a graphic retablo conflating time to show Hale looking from the window, then falling, and then schmatzed on the sidewalk. It’s startling, creepy, voyeuristic, and well done. Luce didn’t expect a narrative picture — she hated it, never displayed it, never looked at it again, and eventually gave it to the Phoenix Art Museum.

It’s the most visceral painting Kahlo did. She must have known that Luce wouldn’t like it. It’s the most original thing she painted as well. Her “koo koo” comment about Surrealists is telling, too. Kahlo is a survivor extraordinaire. She careened from crisis to crisis, from her accident, her husband’s infidelities, her own affairs, lots of travel, and, of course, her disability and pain. She milked socialites like Luce and enthusiasts like Breton, played their games, and sometimes poked them in the eye. While she lived, her constituency was bons vivants and faddists.

The medical equipment in Looks Can Be Deceiving isn’t off-putting, though it’s sad to see how grueling her life could be, how daunting it was for Kahlo to be Kahlo. This and her dresses, makeup, and jewelry are part of her infrastructure. Getting herself together was one way she dealt with pain and, probably, a way for her to find routine and quiet time in the midst of a chaotic life.

Kahlo and Rivera were arguably the most important collectors of pre-Hispanic Mexican ceramics, owning 40,000 objects by their deaths. She collected small, Roman Catholic votive paintings, too, drawing many passages from them for her own work. Looking at some of the art she collected, it’s easy to see how derivative her painting style is. She directly borrowed lots of motifs, plunked her flat, folksy likeness in the middle of them, and some called that visionary. This is still the case.

Earlier, I threw the gauntlets called Grant Wood and Grandma Moses into the fray. Both emerged in the 1930s as part of a new taste for art of what I call the provinces. The subjects were local, in their case Iowa and Vermont, and the style was faux-naïve. Both were adept at publicizing themselves as off-the-beaten-track artists who oozed authenticity. Neither was a fake. Both reflected frustrations with the American avant-garde’s flirtations with European abstraction in the 1920s. In the middle of the stock market crash and the Depression, rural values, while not embraced, had a new place in the sun. To the degree that Kahlo fits in canonical art history, it’s here.

Today, or at least at the de Young, Kahlo is a beacon light of gender-bending, voguing, self-invention, and justice to artists whose genius was ignored because they were women. I suppose, on the first three points, this is a reasonable way to understand her.

On genius overlooked or dismissed, that sound you hear from my writing desk in Vermont is called a yowl.

I don’t often see shows as handsomely designed as Looks Can Be Deceiving.

The graphics are in Mesoamerica-meets–Art Deco style, with plays on pyramids and inspired wall colors, among them Ashley Gray, which I’ve used, and Grape Juice, which I never had the audacity to use. Tangerine Dream and Antique Lace are used as accents. There are passages where the art is densely installed, like Kahlo’s votives, but that’s fine. They’re not that good, and we get the point with a glance. The labels for her dresses, placed in a low-lit gallery at the base of the mannequins, are hard to read because of insufficient contrast between the label color and the lettering.

The catalogue is great. There are lots of Muray’s portrait photographs illustrated there. He has the Hollywood touch. They’re gaudy enough to seize our attention and too good for fan magazines, though not by much. The essays are short, well written, and sound. I know there have been many Kahlo shows interpreting her paintings as far more trenchant than they are. Looks Can Be Deceiving, though it might not want to do so, makes the case that, for Kahlo, looks disguise her terrible handicaps but divulge what her best art really is. That’s herself.

On Calder/Picasso, I won’t write much. I don’t like shows comparing two big-name artists, and names bigger than these are hard to find. I think these shows are headline grabbers and opportunistic, which is why we see so many of them. They’re often forced, like the show I saw in January on Homer and Remington. They don’t have much shared space, and their differences are so many that it’s hard to have a dialogue that’s not both forced and labored. And in these duets, one of the two always sinks by comparison, as does Remington in Homer’s company, or Diebenkorn in a much-touted show a few years ago pairing him with Matisse.

In Picasso’s case, he created tens of thousands of works of art, over 70 years, in all media. He’s complicit in a dozen movements, at least, and pioneered two or three. He’s Spanish and French, omnivorous, and can reach from Giotto to the atom bomb for inspiration. Picasso is a massive proposition. A cherry picker can make any points he wants, but that doesn’t mean they make sense or are worth the time or eyes of art lovers.

Calder is far more limited, so limited that he seems light and airy. What saves him in the de Young show is his narrow triumph as a maker of mobiles, an art of light and air. Otherwise, Picasso would leave him for roadkill. Calder is a good artist, but he and Picasso really have little in common. They met a few times. Picasso is a generation older.

The best way to approach Calder, and this has happened many times, starts with his training as a mechanical engineer and, in the 1920s, his close study of American circus performers. As French artists go, Jean (Hans) Arp and Fernand Léger seem far more important, and I’ll add the Spaniard Julio González. Other than bits of foreign engagement, Calder’s art is very American. From the 1930s through the 1950s, he’s aiming at the Space Age. Picasso never goes there.

Still, there are some nice Calder stabiles in the exhibition. They’re mostly in the middle of the exhibition, on their own with Picasso’s few and scattered. In the last gallery, Picasso’s 1967 Reclining Nude and Couple, from 1970, are shocking, carnal, and senseless insofar as they relate to Calder, though great to see. His Still Life with Skulls (1945), which the de Young owns, is one of his best post-war paintings. In the 1960s and 1970s, Calder did his big outdoor sculptures, a genre Picasso never touched. Modellos of Calder’s public behemoths don’t do them justice. They seem quaint compared with Picasso’s sculptures of bathers from the 1950s. A gallery on Calder’s and Picasso’s respective studios belongs in a decorating magazine.

Most of the art comes from the Picasso Museum in Paris and the Calder Foundation in New York. The curators are the artists’ grandsons, working with the distinguished scholar Ann Dumas. The catalogue has much more substance than the show, and I wonder why some of its rigor and depth on, for instance, the importance of acrobats to both artists, got so diluted in the wall labels. An essay on different and similar ways the two looked at abstraction as a concept and style is great. In the exhibition, those ideas go from a stiff, peaty scotch to weak tea.