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Not saints, not victims – just artists (By Trisha Vargas, December 16, 2005) Next time you’re in a group of people, ask them to name: a) a woman painter, b) a Mexican painter, or c) a Mexican woman painter. If you’re lucky you might get a different answer to b) but it’s just as likely only one name will come up for all three. [PIX KAHLO] Frida Kahlo’s celebrity may be entirely posthumous, but it’s no less potent for that. Her face is as easily recognizable as that of any supermodel or movie star on the cover of the latest magazine. Fridaphilia [I may have copyrighted that phrase, so be warned!] is everywhere, not least here in San Miguel. You can’t walk anywhere in Centro without meeting that level gaze on shopping bags (Frida with monkeys, Frida with sequins), on key-rings, notebooks, coasters—on pot-holders, for all I know. Lord help us, you can even buy a version of her famous corset in a shop on Mesones, if you’re in need of a serious Frida moment. She seems to have become the patron saint of everything from Post-It-Notes to tweezer manufacturers. And the Kahlo self-portrait is just another marketing tool, like Leonardo’s universal man or Warhol’s soup can. It’s a horrible fate for an artist, isn’t it?—to have their life’s work reduced to so much product. I’ve even seen that little face on earrings made from bottle caps—ouch! Perhaps they’re intended to give the wearer a slight taste of her lifelong pain. And here we may have a key to her new-found success: She’s not just a brilliant artist, she’s “Frida, the One who Suffered,” a perfect subject for the revisionist feminist studies of the 1980s. Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Kahlo; beautiful, talented women who died early and unhappily—and had a rough time with men. Martyrs for the modern age, tormented not for religious purposes, but because all men are bastards, when it comes down to it. Well I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it—especially in Frida’s case. Of course, there’s no denying her life was blighted by the terrible accident in the trolley car, but casting Diego Rivera as “that dreadful man” who caused her so much suffering only reduces this magnificent, spunky woman to just another little victim. She was an artist, for goodness’ sake! And one who, as a precocious schoolgirl, deliberately set out to meet Rivera; then seduced, married, divorced and remarried him, while simultaneously having lovers (of both sexes) on the side. Where’s the victim in that? Oh, the pictures... well, we’ll come to them, but first, the villain of the piece. Rivera was a great, truly great, artist and we all know they’re hell to live with. Put two of them together and stand back for the fireworks—huge, glittering explosions of passion and pain that the rest of us can barely witness, let alone comprehend. So, yes: Those drawn to the world of the artist, be they peer or muse, may indeed suffer—but they do so of their own free will. A trade-off, if you like, for whatever it is they’re getting in return. We’ve established that artists can be “difficult” and it’s obvious they can’t be saints, so what of an artist who’s bedridden a lot of the time and in constant pain? You can’t “forget” pain, it’s always there. Try slipping a stone into your shoe, walking around on it all day, and then examining your face in the mirror—along with your current attitude to your fellow man. Given her shattered spinal column and mangled foot, together with more than thirty unsuccessful operations (which resulted in an amputation anyway), it’s easy to conclude that Frida—our brilliant, beautiful, magnificent Frida—was probably a nightmare to live with. And we do her no favors by turning a blind eye, nor by taking her work out of context. She was undeniably a brilliant painter and one of the 20th century’s finest artists. She began painting shortly after the accident, when her mother rigged up a small canvas over her bed. She said that she painted self-portraits because she knew herself best. And the catalog of her operations, miscarriages and turbulent life with Rivera are best seen in the light of a cruelly restricted lifestyle, coupled with a fertile imagination. Personal experience and the inner life have long been the subject of women’s art—not exclusively of course, but arguably more so than men’s. From the domestic scenes of Grandma Moses to Tracey Emin’s installation piece “Everyone I’ve ever slept with” (lost along with so much else in the London MOMA’s scandalous fire), women have used their art to depict their world. Plus, it’s a given that under intense emotional pressure, women tend to internalize their hurt while men externalize it. It’s worth noting that, after yet another little upset with Dora Maar, Picasso painted “Weeping Woman” rather than, for example, “Weeping, Sulking or Generally Pissed Off Man.” That said, I don’t mean to imply that women’s art is just a public rehashing of “My Own Private Guernica.” (Although frankly, I’d take any amount of agonized navel-gazing over “I’ve just come across an interesting image in another medium, so I’ll repaint it and pass it off as my idea” which seems to be a current San Miguel trend. I’ll say no more, you know who you are.) Back to real art: The external influences on Kahlo’s work shouldn’t go unnoticed. She and Rivera not only collected, but actively championed, Mexican folk-art, which for so long had been dismissed as worthless, and in particular retablos, those small renderings of very private experience which are so charming, and so personal. The outbreak of the second world war in Europe turned neutral Mexico into a mecca for exiled artists and intellectuals. Kahlo moved in a sophisticated milieu, peopled by some of the brightest stars in the firmament, and when she couldn’t get out to see them, they came to see her. Instead of placing her in a bubble, we should acknowledge her exalted position in this world by examining it more closely. Here, with thanks to David Torres, is a brief overview of Kahlo’s peers and successors: The lionizing of Frida hasn’t quite managed to eclipse that great lioness of Surrealism, [PIX CARRINGTON] Leonora Carrington. Not to be confused with her earlier, unrelated namesake Dora (who never strayed far from England and Lytton Strachey), this Carrington was born in Lancashire in 1917, to devoutly Catholic, upper middle-class parents whom she was soon to frustrate and bewilder. Wild and headstrong from the start, she saw her convent education only as the means to becoming a saint, complete with powers of levitation. Of course, she was a ’natch for Surrealism and, having finally convinced her parents to let her study art, she soon met Max Ernst and ran away with him to Paris. Here she flourished as an artist for a couple of years before Ernst was interned as an enemy alien and she escaped the encroaching Germans by fleeing to Spain (meanwhile, Ernst had managed to get to Portugal, on the arm of Peggy Guggenheim). Eventually, she got to Mexico, where she became an integral part of the blossoming art scene, was taken up by Edward James, and has been a force majeure ever since. Our own Katie Walsh can supply more detail, and some fascinating personal insight. [PIX VARO] Though never particularly close to Frida, Carrington became a great friend of Remedios Varo, one of Surrealism’s most underrated artists despite having studied with the granddaddy of them all, Salvador Dali. Born in Spain in 1908, Varo was the first woman to be accepted into the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. A prominent member of the avant-garde. She then moved back and forth between Madrid, Paris and Barcelona—first escaping the Spanish civil war and then, with her move to Mexico, the Nazi invasion of France. Varo died, at 55, of a heart attack in Mexico City, but her distinctive, witty and delightfully enigmatic style has only lately become acknowledged. [PIX RAHON] Alice Rahon was yet another casualty of war—Europe’s loss once more becoming Mexico’s gain. She was born in Brittany, France, in 1904 and began her career as a Surrealist poet. On a visit to the US, she accepted Frida Kahlo’s invitation to come to Mexico and, with the outbreak of war, stayed on to become a painter. She developed a gentle, dreamy form of painting, sometimes combining oils with sand. She died in Mexico in 1987. [PIX COSTA] Olga Costa, another foreigner who found her spiritual home in Mexico, was born in Germany in 1913, the daughter of the Russian composer Jakob Kostakovsky. Arriving in Mexico in 1925, she studied piano, dance and lithography, then worked in the studio of Jose Chavez Moreno, whom she later married. A painter, scenographer and muralist, she is perhaps best known in the Bajio for her work with Chavez Moreno in organizing the Museo de la Alhondiga de Granitas, founding the Museo del Pueblo de Guanajuato and later the Museo Casa Olga Costa-Jose Chavez Moreno. She died in 1993, a Guanatajuense by choice, if not by birth; a sensitive chronicler of Mexican life and a much underrated local treasure. [PIX IZQUIERDO] And so, to some native Mexicans: Maria Izquierdo was born in San Juan de los Lagos, the Jaliscan pilgrimage site, in 1902. She spent her childhood in Torreon, Coahuila, where she was married at fourteen and divorced at 21, and later studied at the Academy of San Carlos. This lasted just a year before she rejected it in favor of Rufino Tamayo, with whom she shared a studio, and married. One of the abiding principles of Izquerdio’s philosophy was the rejection of imperialism in favor of nationalism—using art as a major weapon. As well as teaching art, she painted Mexico: folklore, fiestas, circuses, weeping virgins and, of course, loneliness. She was the first Mexican woman to have an exhibition in the US, and her work was shown as far afield as Tokyo and Bombay. In 1948 she became paralyzed along the right side of her body, so she simply followed her name and began painting with her left hand. She died in Mexico City in 1955. [PIX PALACIOS] Irina Palacios (Iguala, Guerrero, 1943-) rejected the paintbrush altogether. preferring to use her hands, or a spatula. She studied at the famous school, La Esmeralda, and among her awards are first prize in painting at the 1st Biennial Rufino Tamayo, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. Palacios has become famous for her fearless experimentation, mixing the paint directly with her hands to create layers of texture—invoking the elements of water, earth and air. [PIX SANTIAGO] And finally, the baby of our group, Paula Santiago, brings us full circle to the woman artist as barer of her soul. Born in Guadalajara in 1969, Santiago began by studying industrial engineering, but soon decided against that and switched to Paris, where she studied drawing and painting, then literature at the Sorbonne. After a stint in an artist’s’ studio in London, she returned to Mexico to study prehispanic art. At 23, she abandoned painting for a more personal form of expression. As a student at the ArtPace Foundation for Contemporary Art in San Antonio, Texas, she began to incorporate the embroidery of her childhood, and that of of her elderly aunt, in her art works. Next, she added seeds, which over time would impart their own slowly disintegrating character to the piece. Then, she colored her work with her own blood, which again altered its nature as it slowly changed color. Next, she added hair, her own and that of her grandmother and friends. Santiago’s experimentation continues to evolve—she’s part of the great, unstoppable movement of women whose work will be included in the future’s evaluation of who we were and how we lived. As will the work yet to come, from bright and beautiful girls who are busy right now, in art schools and elsewhere, up and down the country. © Trisha Vargas, 2005. |