Frida

I've never given much thought to Frida Kahlo and I'm really not sure why this is, exactly. It isn't that I don't care for her work; after all, she's no Georgia O'Keefe or Mary Cassatt (and we all know how I feel about them). I'm guessing it may be because I haven't had a tremendous amount of exposure to her in my lifetime. I know well her story: an intellectual who was crippled at just 19 in a horrible accident, she would begin to paint during her convalescence and create some of the most amazing images of the 20th century. Though her body was sick, her works were all humming with life, and it was the writer Carlos Fuentes who said that she wore all that gaudy jewelry and the enormous, colorful hair adornments so that she always gave the appearance of being nothing less than vibrantly alive. And in doing so, the line between the real-life Frida and the Frida of her art was very much blurred.

A truly Mexican artist whose works were heavily influenced by indigenous Mexican culture as well as European Surrealism, she painted beautifully her physical and emotional pain in self portraits and paintings that resembled icons of saints. I have never seen a Kahlo in person and the MFA hasn't a single Kahlo in its collections, though it does have a dozen or so Diego Riveras, an artist whose work doesn't interest me in the least.

I just rented a 90 minute documentary on Frida Kahlo called The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo and I'm looking forward to learning so much more about her as a woman, her relatively brief life and her extraordinary body of work.

Self Portrait, 1926