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Defiant Women
John Haberin New York City
Frida Kahlo and Art of Defiance
Only a few feet from the exit at the Brooklyn Museum, Frida Kahlo takes an enormous leap into the present. She is still seated, of course, for a photograph, but a full-color print seems ever so far from her prewar modern art. And its setting, on a recognizably New York rooftop, seems even further from her celebration of Mexico's left-wing politics and native culture.
Is it even her? As she inscribed in a painting, "Appearances Can Be Deceiving"—and the museum borrows just that for the exhibition's title. It also just happens to honor an artist obsessed with appearances. Less a retrospective than an illustrated biography and fashion show, it places Kahlo smack at the center of attention, exactly as she did in her art. That stance has made her an icon, but did it come at the expense of her work? Maybe, but then appearances are not always deceiving—and she earned no end of heirs in defiant women and the "Art of Defiance." 
Frida worship
All this Frida worship has got way out of hand—or so I thought as I exited a bathroom lined with her quotes. So I thought, too, as I handed over my coat and presented my e-ticket to staffers wearing Frida Kahlo t-shirts. And surely that photo fits right in. It has to show yet another worshipper, I kept thinking, posing as her in today's mid-Manhattan. True, the woman appears in full Frida regalia, from her flouncy skirt to oversized pendant earrings, but one can probably buy them both in the museum gift shop.
Yet I was dead wrong about a provocative painter, for this was Kahlo herself, on a return to the city in 1936. As always, she both demands and defies attention, right down to the more than half smoked cigarette in her hand. The photo is in color, well before such pioneers as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Vivian Maier. And Nikolas Murray, the photographer and a long-time lover, knew what he was doing. There and elsewhere, he revels in the blue ribbons in her hair against a blue sky and in strong, contrasting colors in her dress like blue, yellow, and red. He also places Kahlo just off-center, as a celebrated figure in a larger modern world.
If it also looks like a selfie, one might say the same about her art. In self-portraits, she rarely departs from dead center. She cannot—not even when she shares the scene with the sun and moon, desert fauna, a huge clay statue with a crack in its bare breast, the statue's enclosing arms, and a third set of hands grasping them all. She leaves no doubt that they are all her doubles, in The Love Embrace of the Universe. So in a sense is the naked man in her arms, Diego Rivera, at once a dependent child, her husband, and always on her mind. So, too, are the skull, furry creatures, and ripe fruit in her still life.
She encompasses multitudes, even if they are all herself. Self-consciously stern but sexy, she allows monkeys to clamber all over her. She appears again with her cigarette, but next to a doll—as a girl, a plaything, and the master of a puppet show. She appears in peasant blouses and abundant skirts, but also in a man's suit. She accentuates her eyebrows, but her shading gives her a mustache as well. She may boast, in today's lingo, of gender fluidity, but also of a still startling combination of femininity and self-assertion.
Are the monkeys playful, curious, worshipful, or threatening? Maybe all four, and so is she. (She and Rivera kept quite a menagerie at home at that.) And that mix made for a short but breakneck career. Tina Modotti, arrived from Italy, urged her to join the Communist party in Mexico and introduced her to Rivera—already a noted activist, painter, and teacher. He, in turn, took her on her first trips to San Francisco and New York, which she found both magical and offensive. After he cheated on her and they split for the second time, she kept going with little felt need for personal or artistic development. André Breton and Marcel Duchamp sought to exhibit her in Paris, but she had more in common with Leonora Carrington and Surrealism in Mexico.
It was a painful career as well. Born in 1907, Kahlo survived polio, only to suffer a traffic accident at age eighteen while riding the bus. Polio crippled her spine, and the accident fractured her ribs, collarbone, and both legs. It made her dependent on corsets and prosthetics for the rest of her life, without doing much to relieve the pain. It cost her one leg entirely in 1953, in hopes of saving her life, but she died the very next year. The damage to her body may have made her that much more concerned for her image, and the pain may have focused her and her art all the more on herself.
To all appearances
Do I have to admire her? Do I have to like her self-image? For Kahlo, style is substance and ego is everything, and neither sounds to me like a complement. Her admirers, though, can identify with her feminism as self-assertion, along with her taste in clothing. And the museum knows that it has a cash cow, between her popularity and that of fashion shows at the Met. Normally "pay what you will" in service to the community, it sells timed tickets for full admission price, plus a service fee. It sells some untimed tickets, too, but one must chose a day regardless and pay almost double for the convenience.
It displays more of her dresses than her paintings. It displays her corsets, her perfume, her make-up, and her jewelry. For a retrospective, the artist herself seems curiously absent. Yet she is everywhere—in her possessions, on film, and in countless photographs by others. It will reward her worshippers and reinforce her doubters, but not only so. Was she obsessed with herself, and was she obsessed, too, with fashioning appearances? Absolutely, but so were those around her.
The show makes a case for her paintings through its small selection. The monkeys come just halfway through, as if the focus of it all. Kahlo gets to play at once with the associations of male crudeness with apes and women with nature, while subordinating both to her art. The show makes a case for her all the more in its work by others. They, too, it turns out, shared her obsessions from the very first. What seems all about her might not be all about her ego and fashion sense after all.
The exhibition's first half lays out a context, starting with her father—a commercial photographer who taught her about art but also about how to pose. A German with Hungarian ancestry who married a woman with Spanish and indigenous blood, he offers clues to her signature look as well. From there, the museum turns to politics. Kahlo grew up against a backdrop of the Mexican revolution, and she joined the Communist party well before Rivera inserted Lenin into a mural in New York. Leon Trotsky found exile in Mexico, and as noted a photographer as Edward Weston came to watch.
Next comes Kahlo's interest in tradition. She derives her dresses from the Tejuana peoples in Southern Mexico, borrows a lace pattern from a halo for the Virgin Mary without believing in religion, and draws the stiffness of her portraits from Baroque and nineteenth-century Mexican art. She and Rivera collected precolonial and recent ceramics for their home, the Blue House, or Casa Azul. Kahlo inherited it from her father, and they indeed painted it blue. Next up comes her illness and her corsets, which she painted as well. So what if the decoration hardly extends beyond a hammer and sickle?
Clearly her concern for appearances extended beyond what others could see, and she dressed up even when painting and alone. The show ends with a series of themes, including "disability and creativity," "art and dress," and "fashioning gender." It is no coincidence that these are all contemporary concerns. Modernism in the hands of others was skeptical of everything she believed, but her art was both modern and contemporary. Do I still have to like it? Not really, to all appearances, but her obsessions were never hers alone.
Fine points of feminism
In The Odyssey, the most fearsome of monsters uses a club as his walking stick. In the hands of the wiliest of men, it proves his undoing. Trapped in the cave of the Cyclops, who crushes men's skulls and eats them whole, Odysseus and his crew hone the club to a fine point, harden the green olive wood in fire, and drive it home into the monster's single eye. And then Odysseus taunts his blind victim while making his narrow escape. Something like it appears three times over, point up, in an assemblage by Mary Bauermeister, No More Bosoms. Try to count the ways in which, in her hands, it belongs in a show of eight women and their "Art of Defiance."
Maybe I just had Homer on my mind, halfway through a wonderful new translation by (yes) a woman, Emily Wilson. Bauermeister could have meant her wood as just abstract forms or oversized pencils. They could refer to means of introspection or close inspection—much like her glass lenses and small stones. She uses her varied materials in loose, layered compositions, another hallmark of the show. Wood turns up again in slim boxes by Hannelore Baron, bearing incisions and monoprints like cryptic messages. It turns up, too, in larger boxes and small frames for Betye Saar.
They reflect the gallery's commitments to women and racial diversity. The show does not include, in the company of Saar and Barbara Chase-Riboud, another African American woman in its roster, Alma Thomas. Thomas, after all, stuck to painterly abstraction. Group shows often run to monotony or incoherence, but here the focus on layering, materials, and defiance pays off. Black shelves, dowels, chambers by Louise Nevelson hold the wall only steps away from curtains of black metal and wool by Chase-Riboud. Both deal in confined spaces and unconfined dreams.
Defiance can take many forms, much like the group's materials. It becomes more overt for Nancy Grossman, with her leather masks, which blindfold their unseen men while gearing them up for a fight. It does so less predictably for Lee Bontecou, better known for chambered canvas. She, too, embeds spikes like bared teeth into coarse black objects. Grossman can seem single-minded to the point of blindness—oblivious to the thought that her biker gear could be instruments of S&M as well as torture and violence. Here gender ambiguity fits right in, whether she will or no.
Chase-Riboud has two works forty years apart, for a longstanding defiance. Otherwise the show runs mostly from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, a time of "Sinister Pop." Sometimes works on paper and assemblage by a given artist face off. Baron's fabric, ink, and watercolor take her signs into two dimensions, much as her boxes remain closed. Saar has framed ink and etchings as The Astrologer's Window—a window onto forms of life or stars. Here, too, shallow spaces suggest interiority and dedication.
For all that, gender is only implicit. No more bosoms. It peeps out for Saar as serpents approach a small black man in a top hat, like Abraham Lincoln in black face. It peeps out, too, in dark associations of women with nature for Claire Falkenstein, who wraps burnt roots in steel wire. Still, she leaves open who is threatening whom. When she also assembles bamboo tubes and fabric, I thought again of Odysseus—this time on Calypso's island, constructing by hand his last doomed ship and its sails.
Frida Kahlo ran at The Brooklyn Museum through May 12, 2019, "Art of Defiance" at Michael Rosenfeld through March 30.