This summer, a major new exhibition at the V&A brings to London a collection of more than 200 pieces of clothing, jewellery and other possessions that belonged to Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. On her death in 1954, her husband and fellow-artist Diego Rivera ordered that these belongings be sealed in a bathroom in their home, the Casa Azul (Blue House) on the outskirts of Mexico City. The room was only opened in 2004 and this is the first time the objects will be displayed outside of the artist’s native country.
When she died, Frida Kahlo was best known as Señora Rivera but over the years, her name became far more famous than her husband’s, her works avidly collected by celebrities such as Madonna, her life story turned into an Oscar-winning movie starring Salma Hayek. More recently, she appears in the afterlife in Pixar’s movie Coco. It is not surprising that her work is so popular now as she was a very modern woman who was an outsider on many levels but celebrated her difference in self portraits. Indeed, there are so many of these that she has been described as "the original selfie queen".
So, how was she an outsider? She was disabled, having suffered from polio as a child and then nearly dying in a bus crash at the age of 18. Discovering that her husband was cheating on her with, amongst others, her sister, she too had affairs, with both men and women. She embraced her Mexican heritage, dressing much of the time in traditional dress but also wearing men’s clothes. As the V&A’s director Tristram Hunt writes "her rejection of gender orthodoxy and conventional fashion — as an artist who also transcended disability — allowed her to forge a unique identity which spans age, gender and geography in its global appeal.’
For many years, it was considered that Frida Kahlo was an outsider in another sense as she claimed that her German-born father Guillermo Kahlo was from a Hungarian-Jewish background, stressing that her paternal grandparents were Jews from the city of Arad. This was so commonly accepted that the Jewish Museum, New York staged an exhibition which explored her Jewish identity and one of her paintings can be found on the cover of Rabbi and art historian Edward van Voolen’s book about Jewish art and culture. However, in 2006, a pair of German historians traced Kahlo’s lineage back to the 16th century and found that Guillermo Kahlo came from a long line of German Lutheran Protestants. The title of the V&A exhibition Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up seems particular apposite. But why did she claim to be of Jewish heritage?
Israeli art historian Gannit Ankori is an expert on the work of Kahlo and consultant advisor for this exhibition. She was the curator of the Jewish Museum exhibition and it was her research that showed the similarity between the composition of Kahlo’s painting My Grandparents, My Parents and I of 1936 in which she shows her family tree and the genealogical tables used by the Nazis when passing the Nuremberg laws that banned interracial marriage. The painting celebrates Kahlo’s mixed heritage. Once the new research was published, Ankori discovered that Kahlo mentioned her father’s Jewish background most frequently from 1936 onwards. Kahlo was a fervent Communist and it has been suggested that she might have invented a Hungarian-Jewish background to detract attention from her German antecedents as being German at that time would have been a source of shame and embarrassment.
However, looking at Kahlo’s biography, I was struck by how many of those she associated with were Jewish and I wonder whether this too aroused an interest in Judaism. The exhibition includes photographs taken by her lover Nickolas Muray who was a Hungarian Jew. Born Miklos Mandl, he had come to the US in 1913, aged 21, changing his name at Ellis Island. He met Kahlo in 1931, their affair lasted a decade and they remained close friends until her death. His brightly coloured photographs of Kahlo in native dress, often with flowers in her hair are well-known but this exhibition also includes one showing her before she underwent a spinal fusion operation in 1946. This was one of the discoveries made in 2004 in the Casa Azul, found among Kahlo’s private papers.
Kahlo also had a brief affair with another very famous Jew, Leon Trotsky who lived at the Casa Azul with his wife after receiving asylum in Mexico due to Rivera’s intervention. Kahlo painted a self portrait dedicated to Trotsky in which she holds a piece of paper bearing the dedication which is signed ‘with all my love’.
Many other Jews were important in Kahlo’s life. In 1930, Rivera and Kahlo were living in San Francisco where she met Dr Leo Eloesser, her most trusted doctor and someone in whom she could confide. It was Eloesser who in 1940 persuaded Rivera and Kahlo to remarry after their divorce a year earlier. Kahlo painted a portrait of the doctor and a self portrait dedicated to him in which she depicts herself wearing a necklace of thorns which pierces her flesh suggesting the pain from which he relieved her.
Kahlo’s first and only solo exhibition in New York was at a gallery with a Jewish owner, Julien Levy in 1938. The exhibition includes photos taken of Kahlo by Levy, with whom he admitted he was totally infatuated,including some showing Kahlo unbraiding her hair whilst topless. Kahlo also exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, giving the famous collector some earrings. Amongst her close friends was Jacques Gelman, a Russian-born Jewish film producer who had settled in Mexico and who, with his wife Natasha, built up a major collection of art including works by Kahlo, some of which are in the exhibition.
The exhibition also includes photographs of Kahlo by two Jewish women photographers who became close friends. Lucienne Bloch, who had been born in Switzerland but came to the US in 1917, worked with Diego Rivera as a muralist in New York. Bloch accompanied Kahlo back to Mexico when her mother was ill and also was with Kahlo in Detroit when the artist had a miscarriage that Kahlo later commemorated in one of her most moving paintings, The Flying Bed. German-born Gisèle Freund was a celebrated photographer who had fled war-torn Europe for Buenos Aires as late as 1942. In 1950, she went to Mexico to give a talk and having met Kahlo and Rivera, ended up staying two years. Her photos of Kahlo reveal something of the difficulties the artist faced in her final years when she had to use a wheelchair. The exhibition includes the decorated prosthetic leg Kahlo used after her right leg was amputated below the knee.
Finally, the exhibition reveals another Jewish connection as it includes some of the make-up that Kahlo used. Helena Rubinstein was obviously a fan as she bought a painting from Kahlo during a visit to Mexico in 1941 and then sent her some powder compacts. But Kahlo preferred the products of another cosmetics giant, Revlon, founded by the Jewish Charles Revson. Kahlo’s signature black mono brow was probably given some help from Revlon’s ‘Ebony’ eyebrow pencils, an example of which is on display still in its original packaging. Her favourite lipstick ‘Everything’s Rosy’ which gave her the bright red lips that can be seen in Muray’s photos was also from Revlon as was her blusher and nail varnish. So even if we cannot claim Kahlo herself as being of Jewish heritage anymore, there is still plenty of Jewish interest in this exhibition.
Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up, 16 June – 14 November 2018. Sponsored by Grosvenor Britain & Ireland.
