All posts tagged: Frida

Frida Kahlo’s Living Death | Alma Guillermoprieto

Frida Kahlo’s Living Death | Alma Guillermoprieto

Published by Jenni Sidey

Just when you thought that everything Frida had been Frida-ed—a hundred books, a million fashion moments, a jillion selfie homages, and a veritable continent of accumulated Frida tchotchkes, from mugs to oven mitts to compression socks to Christmas tree ornaments in the form of a gold-trimmed frame with an image of a dog dressed up as Frida, not to mention a movie or two1—this spring High Art Frida returned. There was an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City of works from the Gelman Collection, among them a large number by Frida and Diego Rivera.2 There was an exhibition of the work of Frida and her followers that started at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and is currently at Tate Modern, and El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego at the Metropolitan Opera, together with a small installation at the Museum of Modern Art of works related to it. To counter the socks and dog-faced Fridas, the culture seems to have felt the need to reestablish a connection with the flesh-and-blood artist, …

Fridamania hits London! Tate Modern curator on the new Frida Kahlo show and famous fans Madonna and Tracy Emin – exclusive

Fridamania hits London! Tate Modern curator on the new Frida Kahlo show and famous fans Madonna and Tracy Emin – exclusive

Published by Daniella Wilson

“Fridamania” has landed in London, with an exhibition celebrating the inspirational life of Frida Kahlo. Frida: The Making of an Icon at Tate Modern is the first major exhibition to explore how the Mexican artist (1907-54) achieved worldwide renown. © Tate ModernFrida Kahlo’s Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird It’s also the first Frida Kahlo show in the UK since 2005, featuring more than 30 famous works that introduce her many selves – the modern artist, the political activist, the intellectual and the dedicated wife. There are also rarely seen self-portraits, photographs and personal artefacts. According to the exhibition’s curator, Beatriz García-Velasco, the show is “the first to investigate how Frida has been transformed into one of the most influential artists of our time and a global brand – an icon – who has been venerated by many across generations”. © Photo © Tate (Larina Fernandes)Frida: The Making of an Icon Exhibition at Tate Modern The exhibition charts the artist’s journey “from a relatively unknown local painter to the global phenomenon that we now know as ‘Fridamania’”, …

Why the Mexican Artist Frida Kahlo Is Still A Pop Culture Icon Today

Why the Mexican Artist Frida Kahlo Is Still A Pop Culture Icon Today

Published by Jenni Sidey

When Kahlo returned from France to Mexico after many months abroad, she found Rivera was romantically involved with another woman, and she left their home in Mexico City’s San Ángel neighborhood for Casa Azul. By late 1939 they agreed to divorce, prompting one of her largest canvases—The Two Fridas, a double self-portrait with a European Frida and a Mexican Frida whose exposed hearts are connected by an artery as they hold hands. When Kahlo’s health suffered after the divorce, Rivera reached out to Kahlo’s physician, Eloesser, for advice, and he suggested they reconcile as companions. The pair remarried in San Francisco in December 1940. Kahlo remained mostly in Mexico City after that. Her work was shown in group exhibitions in Mexico and the United States in the 1940s, including “Twentieth Century Portraits” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942 and “Exhibition by 31 Women”at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1943. In 1943 she took a teaching position at Mexico City’s School of Painting and Sculpture (commonly known as “La Esmeralda”), moving …

We’re always trying to save Frida Kahlo from commodification – just ask Salma Hayek

We’re always trying to save Frida Kahlo from commodification – just ask Salma Hayek

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Harvey Weinstein wanted a particular kind of Frida Kahlo. He’d storm onto the set of a biopic he was financing about the Mexican artist, and lambast his star, the actor Salma Hayek. “Harvey complained about Frida’s ‘unibrow’,” Hayek recalled in 2017. “He insisted that I eliminate [Frida’s] limp and berated my performance.” He demanded Frida Kahlo be hot, essentially. That, he insisted, would help her sell. In the 72 years since her death, Kahlo has indeed become something you can buy – she’s been loudly, if inelegantly, turned into a symbol of feminist, bisexual and disabled progressiveness, and become the go-to face for what could be considered elevated tat: venture onto Etsy today and you’ll find Frida-themed drink flasks, makeup cases, oven mitts, vases and hot water bottle covers. Theresa May once wore pictures of her face – her Marxist, anti-capitalist, …

Frida Kahlo: The reason why Tate’s blockbuster show has so few works by the Mexican artist

Frida Kahlo: The reason why Tate’s blockbuster show has so few works by the Mexican artist

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter A major Frida Kahlo exhibition unpacking the Mexican artist’s extraordinary legacy will draw tens of thousands of visitors to London’s Tate Modern in the coming months. The blockbuster show, which opens this week, has attracted unprecedented levels of interest, shifting more than 41,000 tickets to become the Tate’s highest-pre-selling exhibition ever, breaking a record previously set by a 2017 David Hockney show. The demand is unsurprising. Decades on from her death in 1954, and following a feminist reappraisal of the artist in the 1980s, the world is still in the grip of Frida Fever. She is the most googled female artist of all time, the second most overall after Leonard da Vinci. Today Kahlo’s impenetrable mien – that prodigious monobrow and braided updo – adorns everything from fuzzy socks to cake toppers. And so, the chance to get up close and …

Tate Modern’s Frida Kahlo Show Has Pre-Sold a Record 41,000 Tickets

Tate Modern’s Frida Kahlo Show Has Pre-Sold a Record 41,000 Tickets

Published by Jenni Sidey

Madonna collects her. Her work sets auction records for women artists. Netflix is developing a series about her. She’s the subject of an opera. Now, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has another claim to fame. “Frida: The Making of an Icon,” opening this month at London’s Tate Modern, has pre-sold 41,000 tickets, a record for the institution, reports the Guardian. That beats the 32,000 advance sales for the museum’s 2017 David Hockney exhibition. “We’re pretty blown away by it,” Catherine Wood, Tate Modern’s interim director, told the publication. Related Articles The museum is billing the show as the first major exhibition to explore how Kahlo became a “global icon” and a major influence on a generation of artists. Co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the show will include more than 30 works by the artist alongside documentary photographs, personal effects, and works by a host of artists reflecting her profound influence.  Frida Kahlo, Untitled (Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird), 1940. Courtesy Tate Modern. Highlights will include a selection of Kahlo’s most iconic self-portraits, including 1926’s …

Frida: The Making of an Icon review – forget her iconic status, just show us more of her art | Frida Kahlo

Frida: The Making of an Icon review – forget her iconic status, just show us more of her art | Frida Kahlo

Published by Sam Flores

Charisma is something you can’t fake and Frida Kahlo had it before she became an artist, let alone a modern hero. In photographs, the teenaged Frida appears both in a silk dress staring boldly from beneath her already colliding black eyebrows, and posing as a man in suit and tie. In a home movie her husband, the Marxist mural painter Diego Rivera, woos her and they cuddle. Those were the good times. Rivera is so fat and ugly next to his wife, you’d think he would have appreciated his luck more. Every image of Kahlo is interesting but nobody could portray her like she portrayed herself. She took self-portraiture to new levels of interior revelation, psychological and physical. Inspired partly by the surrealists and partly by Catholic traditions of depicting pain, Kahlo took herself apart and put herself back together in images of suffering, survival and triumph. In her 1937 painting The Heart, she stands neat and calm while a sword pierces her chest and her disembodied arms reappear in two floating, otherwise empty outfits. …

Met Music Director Says New ‘Frida y Diego’ Show Is Proof Timothée Chalamet Was Wrong About Opera

Met Music Director Says New ‘Frida y Diego’ Show Is Proof Timothée Chalamet Was Wrong About Opera

Published by Sam Flores

Our conversation was briefly interrupted when a Met staffer opened the boardroom door, saw us, and swiftly closed it as Nézet-Séguin whipped around to investigate the breach. “Oh, that was Timothée Chalamet,” I wisecracked. “He was just coming in to say he’s sorry about everything.” “Oh my God, what a fantasy,” Nézet-Séguin said of the opera-eulogizing star with a laugh, before he debunked Chalamet’s claim that “no one cares about [opera] anymore.” The situation is the opposite, he said, with an audience that’s growing and diversifying, not shrinking. “I see a different kind of audience, an audience that, of course, is different through the way they look, but also the way they dress and the way they come…There’s something incredible that now the average age is in the 40s of the operagoer, as it was in the 60s not so long ago.” The Met Opera’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, said the audience is “growing and diversifying, not shrinking.” Marty Sohl/Met Opera His words might as well apply to conductors—at least, a conductor like him. Nézet-Séguin, …

Met Opera’s El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego Imagines Feminist Revenge

Met Opera’s El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego Imagines Feminist Revenge

Published by Jenni Sidey

She is the subject of a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and an upcoming one at the Tate Modern. Netflix is planning an adaptation of her life. Her unibrowed face stares out from tote bags, murals, notebooks, enamel pins, refrigerator magnets, and dorm-room posters across the globe. A recent auction of The Dream (The Bed), 1940, helped send her market value into yet a higher strata. I speak, of course, of Frida Kahlo. Add to the list a new opera. El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, which recently opened at the Met, stages an oneiric reckoning with two famed painters. The premise is deceptively simple: on a November day in 1957, Frida returns from the underworld during Día de los Muertos for a brief reunion with her husband, who is himself not long for the world of the living. Related Articles Carlos Álvarez as Diego and Isabel Leonard as Frida in a scene from Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego.” Photo Marty Sohl. Courtesy Met Opera The …

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Reunite on Day of the Dead in New Met Opera Production

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Reunite on Day of the Dead in New Met Opera Production

Published by Sam Flores

Racked by unrelenting pain, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo wrote in her diary shortly before she died: “I joyfully await the exit — and hope never to return.” Yet return she does — if only briefly — on the Day of the Dead in “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), a Spanish-language opera receiving its Metropolitan Opera premiere this week. The opera, with libretto by playwright Nilo Cruz and music by Gabriela Lena Frank, imagines Kahlo’s spectral reunion three years after her death with Diego Rivera, the great Mexican muralist with whom she had a tempestuous romantic relationship. In a twist on the Orpheus legend, Rivera has grown weary of life without Kahlo and — on the holiday that honors the dead and welcomes the return of their spirits — he summons her from the underworld in the hope they may be eternally reunited. For mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, who stars as Kahlo, the opera is “a journey of emotions that every human can possess, told through the lens …