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My daughter and our niece and might-as-well-be-nephew-in-law were all visiting this past weekend, so we went to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It’s the red brick building with the cool center atrium/tower. Not sure what the old skyscraper behind it might be. Click the photo at right for bigger; there’s lots of detail.
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The Frida exhibit was fantastic. One of the interesting things to me was seeing the evidence of her technique. She’s known for the primitive aspects of her paintings, but it becomes clear viewing them up close that she was quite capable of detailed, realistic depictions, whether of animals, plants, or humans. She just deliberately chose to do otherwise . My brother the fine-arts-major (who became a dermatologist to my parents’ utter relief) always approaches art with the phrase, “what is the artist trying to say here?” Frida’s primitivism was absolutely intentional for a variety of interesting reasons, and imbued with more meaning because of it.
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There were a large number of photographs of Frida at the exhibit as well, and a fascinating short color home movie of her and Diego Rivera. What was striking about it was the contrast between her obvious physical beauty and her own relentless depictions of herself in her paintings as much less attractive than was actually the case. Contrast the Nickolas Murray photo at left with a representative painting, right. A fascinating interactive analysis of one of her paintings may be found by clicking here.