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Frida Kahlo wears a cow-print jacket, holding a large bottle of Cinzano vermouth. Her hair is cropped short, a la pixie. She is looking straight at you. This is a Frida outside of time, a figure we know made her mark on the early twentieth century, but in the lens of Lucienne Bloch, feels less like an elusive giant of art history and more like a friend of today, who is stylish and biting and when told to bring whatever to the party, brought the vermouth. Frida with Cinzano Bottle (1935) is not a contrived intimacy; it is a portrait of Frida by her friend Lucienne, who knew Frida in her home and her marriage and in correspondence that lasted decades. The photography in PDNB’s Portraits of Frida by Lucienne Bloch and Nickolas Muray challenges our perception of an artist who we have come to know through the insularity of her self-portraits and the infamy of her public persona. At PDNB, we are offered a new quiet closeness to Frida Kahlo through the lens of a friend and the lens of a lover, who offer us images of Frida in hotel rooms and border crossings and among the makings of her own life (her work, her studio, her beloved pet deer).
The show opens with three photos that encapsulate Frida’s evolving life in the 1930s. In Frida Winking (1933, Bloch), a black-and-white of Frida at age 26, playfully throwing a wink to the camera; a bell extends before her, another layer in the crowded frame. In a portrait from a few years earlier, she sits casually, her posture assured, a cigarette suspended from her fingertips (Frida at the Barbizon, Plaza Hotel, 1931, Bloch). Behind her hangs one of her early portraits, which she matches in a white shirt and beaded necklace, seemingly in a cosplay of self. Her expression rests on the precipice of a smile. Between these two works is Muray’s Frida with Picasso Earrings (1939) a color study of hands: one lightly clutching her neck, and two dangling from her ears, a gift from Pablo Picasso.
PDNB disregards chronology in its arrangement, or even a delineation between Muray and Bloch by section. Rather, Frida’s life is presented to us with time and observers folding in on itself. At twenty-six, thirty-three, twenty-four; Bloch, Muray, friend, lover; youth and the storied Barbizon; a moment of play following years of personal loss; closing the decade following exhibitions in New York and Paris: the juxtaposition of Muray’s work against Bloch’s two photos of the early thirties provides clues as to Frida’s personal and professional evolution in those eight years. When Kahlo first moved to the United States in 1930, her identity as an artist was obscured by the status of her new husband, renowned muralist Diego Rivera. As the decade unfolded, Frida’s stake in the art world became more solidified as she put to canvas the turbulence of her health and her relationship with Rivera.
We have been given many representations of Frida during these years, often from Frida herself in her paintings depicting anguish from miscarriage (Henry Ford Hospital, 1932), infertility (Frida and the Abortion, 1932), chronic pain (The Broken Column, 1944), her divorce from Diego (The Two Fridas, 1939). Diego also slips Frida into his work but obscured as a representation of the masses, disguised as an activist in his Ministry of Education Mural (1928) and his History of Mexico mural at the National Palace. While Portraits of Frida does anchor the show with some of Muray’s iconic Frida portraits – Frida on White Bench, New York (1939), Frida Kahlo with Magenta Rebozo, New York (1939), Frida with Granizo (1939) – the exhibition is more interested in Frida’s unexamined moments.
Portraits of Frida is revelatory in its tenderness. Frida’s youth and her playfulness are almost unnerving, as if we have been given unfettered access to the in-betweens of her life. Bloch and Muray have their own approaches to framing Frida. Bloch catches Frida in the midst of her life: in an embrace with Diego, chewing on her necklace, sitting on a radiator at the New Workers School. Bloch’s photos feel palpably uncontrived, evoking the sometimes-gentle sometimes-harsh rhythms of one’s twenties, of Frida’s twenties, which were filled with many moves across North America and romantic betrayals and dalliances and work and politics and loss. Muray’s portraits are stylized and saturated and see Frida centered in a well-postured confidence. There is a mature sensuality and a disinterested gaze that seems almost a challenge to the viewer. In Muray’s portraits, Frida is often holding herself.
What is the crux of these intimacies? The persona of Frida Kahlo is entrenched in many histories, both from her decades alive during the Mexican Revolution and WWII, as a wife of an artistic great and then as a great artist herself, and in the many years following her death in which her visage and work have become an inspiration and an emblem upon which to project feminist ideals. What PDNB provides in Portraits is a new witnessing of Frida, apart from her torrid relationship with Diego, apart from her own paintings which employ surrealist modes to unpack pain and pleasure and self, apart from tomes by art historians which attempt to condense a lifetime into a few hundred pages. Bloch and Muray give us Frida as friend: a smaller but perhaps deeper moniker than icon.
We have many witnesses to our lives: the most documented is often the witnessing by our partners and ourselves. One of Frida’s most moving accomplishments as an artist was the sharpness with which she witnessed herself. She did not flinch at depicting the emotional and physical scars she accrued and did not shy away from the grotesque realities of her life, of all life. Frida saw herself inside-out, her organs outside the body, her veins connecting her to the earth. She saw herself cracked open by pain and sitting alongside gods and idols and surrounded by innocents and not-so-innocents. So much of our understanding of Frida is from her lifelong commitment to self-examination through portraiture. Her surrealist style, her dark humor, and her uninhibited range of subject matter have lingered.
To be portrayed by oneself with a sense of intentionality, and then to have the act of portraiture enacted by another, by the flash of a lens could perhaps feel reductive. But Bloch and Muray’s portraits are not flippant flashes of Frida, as they were not just photographers but witnesses to Frida’s life. Bloch listened to Frida’s wails from the next room as she miscarried in Detroit. They watched an eclipse together (Frida voicing what so many of us are afraid to say when it comes to the fanfare of eclipses: this is it?). She accompanied Frida on a cross-continent journey from Detroit to Mexico City at the news of Frida’s mother’s impending death. At one point, the two were stuck at the border waiting for a connecting bus that would take them into Mexico. The sentiment of feeling suspended on one of history’s most contentious borders is depicted in Frida’s Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932), detailing the anthropological and industrial histories of the two nations with Frida in the center, in a pink ruffled dress, long fingerless gloves, and a cigarette. Bloch also captures Frida at the Border (1932), and here the concerns of the border are less entrenched and more immediate: a daughter waits impatiently for her connection to her dying mother. Bloch bore witness to the fraught realities of Frida’s young adulthood, as her roommate and confidant. At PDNB, Bloch’s portraits ground a fabled woman in reality, in something contemporary; this friend in a toxic relationship, who is the life of the party, who is politically passionate and stirs the pot and is trying to build something for herself and who cradles vermouth. For Lucienne Bloch, this friend was Frida Kahlo.
Of Frida’s many affairs, Muray was perhaps her most meaningful, one that lasted on and off for ten years, one which left heartbreak and art in its wake. Between romance, there was friendship, letters, and loans; they maintained a friendship despite their romantic entanglements, a friendship that was no doubt colored by those entanglements. As Frida’s marriage to Diego unraveled and re-raveled, correspondence with Muray is transparent and vulnerable and perhaps a tinge manipulative (“Don’t go to Coney Island, specially to the Half Moon, with her”). In 1939, Muray captured Frida in what would become one of the most iconic photos of her of all time: Frida on White Bench. In it, she is enveloped by all things soft, draped in fabrics and backgrounded, foregrounded, adorned with florals. The next year, Frida sent Muray a portrait of herself wearing a necklace of thorns – Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940); she is flanked by a monkey and a crouching black cat. Frida never lost sight of her edges. More than Bloch’s black-and-whites, Muray’s portraits resemble Frida’s paintings in their framing and color composition. But where Frida’s works engage with the psychological resonances of nature, her trinkets, and her pets, Muray’s lens provides a more sentimental filter to these interests. In her lover’s lens, Frida is bemused, impatient, and precious. Muray’s view of Frida as an entrancing figure is palpable in his portraits; even in Frida Painting “Me and My Parrots” (1941), Muray can’t take his eyes off of her.
How are we seen, no, how are we revealed? Who does the revealing? Much of Kahlo’s legacy has deep roots in pain, but in the portraits by Bloch and Muray, we are given the privilege of sides of Frida’s identity aside from her pain (or perhaps co-habitants of her pain). A Frida with humor, with vices (beyond Diego) – a casual Frida is found within the portraits of PDNB.
Recent exhibitions of Frida lean into the spectacle of her work and personal expression, and this certainly has its place. Frida was extremely intentional about the aesthetic modes she imbued into her home, her wardrobe, and her work. But PDNB offers a pared-down experience of Frida: something subtle and no less alive. Here we see a Frida less defined by her pain, or her relationship with Diego and her demons, and what flourishes is the part of her that pulses within her work: her wit, her frankness, and the endless examination of the individual.
Portraits of Frida by Lucienne Bloch and Nickolas Muray is on view at PDNB through November 9.