Supporting structures of the image – Weekend – Kommersant

The exhibition “Frida Kahlo, au-dela des apparences” has opened at the Paris Fashion Museum. This name can be translated as “Frida Kahlo: Beyond Appearance” or even “Frida Kahlo: Beyond Appearance”. And we are really being shown something that we have not seen before and which refers to the intimate part of the image of one of the most famous women of the 20th century – an image that has long become part of mass culture.

Text: Elena Stafieva

The very name of Frida Kahlo has acquired so many clichés and has been so actively exploited by this mass culture – in Russia alone in recent years there have been several of her large exhibitions – which already causes some prejudice. You see it on the poster and you think: again there will be a self-portrait with a monkey, Mexican outfits and a story of passion and suffering. With such a prejudice, I went to see the exhibition at the Palais Galliera – but everything turned out to be the way it was.

There are self-portraits, and outfits, and suffering – but the curatorial team works with these clichés, and does not reproduce them. They try to deal with each of these points, starting from the mass cultural halo around them. Another thing is that Frida Kahlo herself sometimes actively resists this.

There are very few paintings in the exhibition at the Fashion Museum – only a few paintings by Kahlo and a few of her own drawings, and not from those that are often reproduced. For example, “Le Cadre” in 1938, bought by the French state at the “Mexique” exhibition, where Parisians first saw 18 of Frida’s works, or a self-portrait in 1948, which Kahlo painted for her dentist (she generally tried to build friendly relations with her doctors), depicting wearing the resplandor headdress, typical of the women of Tehuantepec, whose image she turned into her signature style. Or another 1938 self-portrait, oval, set in a metal butterfly frame, which she painted for the artist Jacqueline Lamba, then wife of Andre Breton, after their visit to Mexico, depicting herself with an unnaturally stretched neck, entangled in a net of red threads. All of them are small in size, accurately placed in the exhibition space and look very intimate and expressive.

There are also Frida’s Mexican outfits – four showcases of her personal wardrobe, which consisted of a tunic, a skirt with frills sewn to the hem and a shawl. All this is presented in different variations – from rayon, machine-made lace and shop tapes to hand-woven and hand-embroidered ones. Some of them are immediately recognizable in the famous color photographs of Frida taken at the very end of the 1930s in New York by Nicholas Muray. All of them, of course, amaze the European eye with their color combinations – even the modern one, already, it would seem, already accustomed to everything – and one can only imagine what impression they all made on people then. Frida calculated this impression and managed it – and deliberately chose this Mexican half as her identity, leaving the second, European (her father was German), hidden. In all the wardrobe presented at the exhibition, only a deaf black velvet cape, probably originating from France, stands out from the general Mexican row – in it Frida Kahlo is depicted next to Diego Rivera in a 1933 photograph from a New York dinner dedicated to the opening of an exhibition of Jewish portraits ( Frida, as part of her anti-fascism and, more broadly, life-creation, even composed a German Jewish grandmother for herself). In all other respects, Frida Kahlo carefully built her image of belle Tehuana, based on how the women of Tehuantepec dressed. And at the exhibition you can see several videos demonstrating this, including a small piece of documentary Mexican material filmed by Eisenstein and Alexandrov.

But the strongest impression among all these outfits – magnificently gathered skirts, embroidered tunics, long-sleeved blouses, shawls, heavy gold and silver jewelry, combs, etc. – is made by a simple white tunic made of hand-woven dense linen with a single decoration on the chest in the form fringes; in a similar Frida lay on her deathbed.

The theme of suffering is the most interesting and most original part of the exposition. In a separate room, everything that immediately after the death of Frida and until 2004 was locked up by order of Diego Rivera in the famous Blue House, Casa Azul, where Frida grew up and lived all her life, where she died and where her ashes are still kept, is collected. . The exhibition “Frida Kahlo, au-dela des apparences” shows the public for the first time her personal belongings – from perfume bottles and medicine bottles to orthopedic shoes for a leg injured by polio and a wooden prosthesis with a magnificent high red leather shoe embroidered with Chinese dragons, made when this leg, a year before his death, nevertheless had to be amputated.

The most powerful, frightening – and, of course, extremely erotic in combination with other things – is the various corsets that supported her spine fractured in a car accident. Made from dense, beautifully aged brown leather stretched over a metal frame and fastened with straps in front, or from thick textile straps on a metal base, or with a special design of curved metal rods with leather pads at the ends, turning the shoulders and fixing the broken one in that clavicle disaster. There are others – from gypsum, which were made directly on Frida’s body, wrapping her torso with bandages soaked in gypsum, and which she, standing still for several hours until they dry, painted directly on herself, looking in the mirror. Now these are no longer instruments of her torture, but evidence of her strength and talent. On one of them, she painted a sickle and a hammer – and, of course, all visitors take pictures of it. She was well aware of the erotic power of the objects that caused her suffering – right there we see a photograph where she lifts up her embroidered tunic, demonstrating a painted plaster corset.

Of course, fashion could not pass by all this, given the popularity of Frida’s figure in popular culture. The exposition of the original Frida Kahlo wardrobe, exhibited below, in the underground space of the museum, ends with a dizzying black outfit by Jean Paul Gaultier from the summer collection of 1998, repeating the straps of her corset. And upstairs there is a mini-exhibition of bows from modern collections – and the way they are selected and assembled shows the class of the Gallier Museum. There are all sorts of names here: Rei Kawakubo and her collection Comme des Garcons SS 2012 “White Drama”, Alexander McQueen and his series of corsets molded to the shape of the body, Erdem dresses, whose picturesqueness, it would seem, of a completely different nature, the Yoji Yamamoto ensemble, on at first glance, it resembles the armor of a samurai, but those who have already looked at the exhibition will see in its wooden components the rhyme of a wooden leg.

Everything that in the life of Frida is dramatized and sentimentalized by popular culture, this exhibition desentimentalizes and dedramatizes. There is no special attention given to her tumultuous marriage to Rivera; all her novels – with gallery owners, photographers, journalists – are mentioned in passing. Also, completely without heartbreaking details, the story is told about the impossibility of enduring and giving birth to a child. All this makes the exhibition about the pop figure, as Frida Kahlo has become, completely non-pop and quite modern.

In places, however, this modernity obviously argues with historical material. In an explication next to a photo of a young Frida in a male costume, we are told that Frida has always resisted the cisgender binary and embodied gender fluidity and queer. Meanwhile, all her paintings with unborn fetuses, uterine bleeding and other purely feminine paraphernalia, her hyper-feminine outfits, etc. absolutely clearly indicate that, despite her bisexuality, we have a person who was completely dominated by the cisgender binary. But this gap between modern gender theory and the historical practice of the exhibition character does not spoil it in any way – it remains very expressive and convincing. You’ve definitely never seen a Frida Kahlo like this.

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