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Frida Kahlo
at the Walker

One of the classic aesthetic tropes—call it a cliché—of modern times is the Mirror and the Lamp. The phrase refers to differing approaches to art, whereby an artist can either set a mirror to nature, or illuminate it by means of personal self-expression. It has often been pointed out that even the most clinical and detached depiction of natural phenomena carries a personal tone, an “inner” life, while even those artists who express their feelings in deeply hermetic terms do so by means of recognizable images or patterns, and end up telling us not only about themselves, but about forms of experience to which we too can relate.

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo would almost seem to have added a third element to the equation—the Black Hole. Both the Mirror and the Lamp pertain to light, vision, and illumination. Kahlo doesn’t paint what she has seen, nor does she illuminate the life around her by means of personal expression. In the vast majority of her paintings Kahlo depicts herself in the midst of trauma, or jungle animals, or North American capitalism, or something else, and the effect is invariably less one of illuminating the world than of registering the effect the world has had on the darkest recesses of the painter’s own soul. These canvases are spiritual meditations, grave and uncomprehending testaments to suffering and defiance. They draw upon folk traditions but their iconography is peculiar and their thrust has none of the anonymous and slightly suspect charm we associate with bygone days of superstitious religious devotion. This is Freda Kahlo starring at us with unblinking severity, demanding that we look at her and take her in, and we can judge from photographs of her that Frida has rendered herself very accurately.

It may be amusing to note that in her own day Kahlo was sometimes referred to as narcissistic, because she so often painting herself as a very beautiful woman. The British know-it-all Rebecca West (who did know quite a bit) later observed that "the testimony of photographs and of those who knew her testifies that she was in fact very beautiful, and it is difficult to see how a beautiful woman who was also an honest artist could paint herself as other than a beauty."

Nowadays we are less impressed by the beauty--Kahlo had a single uninterrupted eyebrow of impressive dimensions--than by the directness and gravity of her countenance. Far more than the photos (many of which are also included in the show, and also also well worth a look) the paintings give us an immediate and compelling visage, simultaneously playful, haughty, and grim. Her painting are unfailingly vivid, yet strangely stylized. They are flattened, yet somehow "deep." This is true not ony of the portraits, but also of the still-lifes. Everything we love about antique playing cards and milagros has somehow been brought up-to-day. Yet through some sort of preternatural personal dignity, Kahlo has escaped any taint of self-pity, sentimentality, oracular pretension, or sensationalism. It were as if she had looked you in the eye and said, “What do you think of me? What do you think of this? You may not like me. You may not understand me. But I defy you to ignore me.”

In fact, looking at the paintings in the new show mounted by the Walker Art Center, we feel that Frida was not really thinking much about her audience when she painted these pictures. She was simply processing her own emotions. The associations with earth and motherhood and the ooze of life and ancient Mexican beliefs and images and rituals may sound corny when you describe them, but they don’t come across that way on canvas. The images are unique and marvelous, the connections between them do not require a set of headphones and a recorded text to unravel. It is not often that you get so close to someone in the course of a forty-five minute visit to an exhibition.

This is a strange sort of beauty, however, which is all but overwhelmed by the dark places it’s coming from.