The title of this post is a quote from this review.
https://nyti.ms/2UMoIod
Am I incorrect in thinking it should be "more profound reasons"?
https://nyti.ms/2UMoIod
Am I incorrect in thinking it should be "more profound reasons"?
from the NYT website
He sorta reviews this show, but mostly, he wants you to know that Mrs Rivera is not his idea of an artist, nor is this a show he thinks matters.
"Love for her style has inflated the standing of her art all out of proportion, and in recent decades it’s become an article of faith that Kahlo was a more important painter than her acclaimed husband, indeed one of the indisputable greats. This is — well, not true, sorry! In Brooklyn you’ll find some engrossing self-portraits, including MoMA’s severe “Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair,” but Kahlo also painted half-competent still lifes, gross Stalinist agitprop, and ghastly New Age kitsch — including this show’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe ...,” a world-spiritualist tableau featuring a lactating Mother Earth that would make Deepak Chopra blanch. I’d name many other Mexicans, men and women, who drew more productively on surrealist, folk and indigenous vocabularies to force a new art after the revolution, including Rivera, the wily modernist Dr. Atl, the Mexico-based Englishwoman Leonora Carrington and the ripe-for-rediscovery Alice Rahon."
You can choose to agree or disagree with that assessment, but I'm not sure it needed to be said about the contents of the famously sealed and recently opened closet of the Casa Azul.
https://www.museofridakahlo.org.mx/en/the-blue-house/
Certainly, it is incorrect to tag an artist with a slag term from 40 years after their passing. The reviewer is called to review the contents of the show in front of them, not the one they would like to review.
Sadly, our boy is stuck reviewing this show. The one with clothes.
"Do her outfits have the weight of art, or are they just so much biographical flimflam? My mileage varied from gallery to gallery, but it's worth considering, given her admirers' intense love for her persona, how much can be displaced onto skirts and shawls.
"Countless visitors, perhaps already following her on an Instagram account with nearly a million subscribers, will come to this show because of self-portraits like this one. I hope they also spend time with the even more powerful artworks in the same room: a dozen retablos, or votive paintings on metal by anonymous Mexicans, similar to hundreds of paintings Kahlo lived with in the Casa Azul. These artists knew, and Kahlo and Rivera knew when they collected them, that art has a much higher vocation than myth or merchandise."
Go look at the link at the top. Lotsa photos. Great photos.
I sometimes find mens reviews of women's art or practice can just miss the point altogether - and to start trying to 'rate' her art is a bit precious (like we are all back at school and this is the big art prize)
ReplyDeleteHer appeal is multifaceted - from her lifestyle and choices, her art and fearlessness.
I think the fascinating thing about Kahlo for any home sewer is how clear she was about what she was going to wear and went for it. So often we can get duped into this fashion and that and the way she used clothing as self expression endures
Exactly so. Thank you so much for your clearheaded thinking. What I love about this exhibit is it shows how much she LITERALLY drew on everything (they include the corset), how much she surrounded herself with the world view she preferred. I included her xray drawing, as it shows the pain under the facade. Art doesn't stop at a canvas.
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