Herself with a mustache – Newspaper Kommersant No. 174 (7375) of 09/21/2022

The exhibition “Frida Kahlo. Beyond appearance.” About an amazing artist and an incredible woman who made herself and her thirty-three misfortunes an object of art, says a Kommersant correspondent in France Alexey Tarkhanov.

In 1954, Frida Kahlo was found dead in the bed of her Blue House in Mexico City. She was only 47 years old, there is still a dispute about who killed her – the disease or herself. Her husband, the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera, put all her things in the bathroom and locked it.

No one has entered there for 50 years. Only in 1957, shortly before his death, Rivera gave the keys to trusted persons. In 2004, Kahlo’s biographers were able to get into this burial chamber, as if into the tomb of a pharaoh. For several years they disassembled and described the treasures found there: not counting the paintings, 300 dresses and costumes, 22 thousand documents and 6.5 thousand photos.

History came out from under the castle, followed by one exhibition after another. And now Frida has reached Paris, for the second time after 1939. Then she traveled to France and to America as the wife of Diego Rivera and “also an artist.” Now, her life story has turned the Mexican into a self-worthy global icon of every conceivable left movement, feminism and Trotskyism, anti-colonialism and queer culture.

Next to the overweight Rivera, like a balloon inflated with contentment, she always looked like a petite, slender beauty, but she was both a beauty and a beast at the same time. She swore like a Mexican cab driver and smoked like a stoker (which is also noticeable at the exhibition, which, fortunately, did not get to the censorship). Her sister was tequila, she took drugs both at her own request and at the insistence of doctors.

She had an extraordinary face, wild by the standards of her contemporaries, chic in the current fashion – with an open forehead over shaggy unibrows, with bright, unsmiling lips under a noticeable mustache.

“I have a mustache and, in general, a face of the opposite sex,” she wrote with pride. Other women would struggle with this, Frida has made looks her trademark. She carried herself proudly like a queen. Strictly speaking, she could not stoop – with her spine broken into three parts, pulled into a medical corset. She had an unusual walk: from the age of six, after childhood polio, one leg was shorter than the other, and in the 1950s, after an amputation, she had to wear a prosthesis.

Her contemporaries underestimated her in part because her true history was hidden. The paintings became only a faint reflection of her. The truth was hidden, along with her mangled body, under radiant flowers and sequins, and then locked up in a bathroom in Mexico City for half a century. The very name of the current exhibition comes from her drawing “Appearances can be deceiving”, where she depicted herself as a broken doll under beautiful folds of fabric.

At the same time, she was so attractive that absolutely all the other characters that we meet around her at the exhibition, whether men or women, were in love with her. Moreover, as every time it is written in the annotations to the photo or letter, “short”.

It was not in vain that Frida and Diego collected ex-voto thanksgiving paintings, tin plaques that were presented to temples and on which anonymous artists depicted gratitude: to the Holy Trinity after a car accident, Our Lady after the release from the burden, to the three wise men after the recovery of the child. Many of Kahlo’s paintings resembled these picturesque evidence of a miracle, however, she had nothing and no one to thank for.

At her 18 years old, the bus she was on collided with a tram. Frida survived, but with a broken spine, pelvis, ribs, and bones of her right leg. An iron rod pierced her stomach and went out between her legs. She found the strength to joke about it: “So I lost my virginity” or “There were two disasters in my life: once I was run over by a tram, the other by Diego.”

One of the most emotional moments of the exhibition is the wall on which Frida’s medical corsets are hung in a line: plaster, leather, steel, similar both to instruments of torture and to the exhibits of the anthropological museum. Some of them are painted by the artist herself: patterns, flowers, hammer and sickle. Orthopedic shoes and artificial limbs are embroidered with beads and silk. As if this is not a reminder of pain, but cool fashion accessories. On the other wall of the hall is a glass shelf lined with perfume bottles and bottles of pills, lipstick and injection syringes. Through this display window you can see a beautiful dress created in her memory by Jean Paul Gaultier.

Frida adored bright fabrics, capes and shawls, garlands-decorations made of stones the size of a fist. She portrayed herself as Mexican with such fury, as if her body were the image of her native country, torn to pieces by the colonialists, although she could well, according to the metric, appear German, Hungarian or Jewish.

The exhibition begins with her harrowing story and ends with her brilliant posthumous glory. The bright and sick fashion she created turned into a fashion for Frida with such easily reproducible features: barbaric colors, mustaches, eyebrows. From a cripple, she turned into a “style icon”, and such an icon that is rewritten by anyone who is not lazy.

Galliera is a fashion museum, and therefore all the homages of “freedomania” are shown here, to which Richard Quinn, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Yohji Yamamoto paid tribute. In the image of Frida, Karl Lagerfeld shot Claudia Schiffer for Vogue in a Chanel campaign. Alexander McQueen made a series of high-tech corsets for Givenchy, displayed here in the same line.

This exhibition provides the key to understanding the painting of Frida Kahlo, which always stands out in any exhibition and often baffled me. She herself, along with her painting and graphics, her illnesses and addictions, became a work of art, literally collecting pieces of her body, gradually replacing failing members, turning into a doll or android, a character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – leaving to others an image, a drawing, cleansed of pain and grief. Appearances are still deceiving.