Exhibit Review: Frida Kahlo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art - Page 4

Kahlo's Mexicanity would grow and progress over the years, and she embraced the traditions of Mexican folk art and the colonial religious paintings known as "ex-voto" with a ferocity that is a perfect example of why the post-modernist war cry of "it's been done before" fails immediately, no matter how often repeated. "So what?" would have answered Frida Kahlo as she used the ex-votos as guides for some of her most successful works.

In "The Suicide of Dorothy Hale," we get to see what no one else got to see at the Walker or will see in SF: an opportunity to see, side-by-side, how Kahlo embraced an older tradition and brought it forward to her own painting dialogue. Commissioned by Clare Booth Luce in 1939 (while Kahlo was living in New York) to commemorate the suicide of her friend Dorothy Hale, I was told by Hayden Herrera that it "horrified" Luce when she saw it. It is a painting executed in the direct style of the ex-votos, and somehow the PMA has found in its own collection an ex-voto that almost matches the storyline of the Kahlo painting.

An ex-voto is a votive painting commissioned by someone to celebrate or record an event where someone has survived a dangerous event. In Mexico, it was generally painted on tin sheets. Often the ex-voto has a narrative style that shows the progression of the event, in a timeline, in the actual work.

In the Kahlo painting, we see Dorothy Hale jumping to her suicide, first as a small figure jumping off her apartment building, surrounded by clouds echoing El Greco. We then see Hale's body in a close up of her fall, and finally the broken and bloodied woman on the ground. A banner at the bottom of the painting tells the story in Spanish, and Kahlo has bloodied her signature and even the frame.

In the PMA's ex-voto titled "Fall from a Balcony," we see a Nanny and child falling through the floor of a balcony, which has given way under their weight. We also see them on the ground, having fallen and then having miraculously survived the fall. The banner at the bottom relates the story of the fall. It's a brilliant juxtaposition of two unrelated works that cement the powerful influence of ex-voto upon Kahlo's own work as no words can describe.

Brilliant artists borrow from all sources around. The Beatles' "A Day in the Life," borrowed from the morning newspaper headlines that Sir Paul was reading over his beans on toast:

I read the news today oh boy / Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire / And though the holes were rather small / They had to count them all / Now they know how many holes it takes / to fill the Albert Hall

Article Author: Lenny Campello

F. Lennox Campello is a widely published Washington, DC and Philadelphia based art critic, as well as an award winning artist and curator. He is also often heard on NPR and the Voice of America discussing visual art issues. …

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