At the MFA: The passions of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo

BOSTON - The life and art of Frida Kahlo comes brilliantly alive at the Museum of Fine Arts through an new exhibit that explores how Mexico's traditional folk art – arte popular - inspired her work and singular paintings.

Featuring eight of her now-iconic works, “Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular” carries visitors into the real and aesthetic worlds of one of Mexico's most admired artists through her own work and an eclectic selection of folk art that influenced her.

“This exceptional exhibit conveys Frida Kahlo's lived experience," said MFA Director Matthew Teitlbaum, opening the show last week.

Through her work and impact, Kahlo (1907-1954) emerges as a painter and portraitist, political activist and creative innovator who became a multifaceted prism that transformed Mexico's rich traditions into ever more complex art.

At a time construction of a controversial border wall further divides neighboring countries, this exhibit – the MFA's first devoted to Kahlo - shares enduring elements of Mexico's national culture through her art and the artisans who shaped her.

Organized by Layla Bermeo, MFA assistant curator of American paintings, the show combines stunning works with original scholarship by presenting Kahlo's own art along with scores of papier-mache sculptures, toys, masks, ceramics, textiles, photographs and more.

While many exhibits have examined Kahlo's work largely through the events of her life or her stormy marriage to muralist Diego Rivera, Bermeo said she aimed to cast light on the impact of arte popular on her art.

“Over time, her painting improved,” said Bermeo. “Arte popular inspired and taught Kahlo.”

Bermeo observed that “politics informed Kahlo's art” from the earliest painting she sold, “Two Women,” in 1928 that reveals her dignified treatment of a pair of mixed-race domestic workers.

“Our exhibition brings fresh attention to Kahlo as an ever-evolving and ambitious painter, who actively responded to arte popular, (and one that) opens broader discussions about the influence of anonymous folk artists on famed modern painters,” she said.

Many visitors will be familiar with Kahlo's struggle to overcome childhood polio and the effects of a terrible bus accident that left her in lifelong pain.

Despite the lingering discomfort, she seems the artistic equivalent of a volcano, fed by the molten fires of ancient forces, erupting into the modern world.

The exhibition is organized into five sections that explore Kahlo's artistic progress and the impact of arte popular on her work. They are: "Art of the People"; "Aesthetics of Childhood"; "Painted Miracles"; "Living Still Lifes"; and "Invented Traditions."

Visitors will see Kahlo's bold, recognizable paintings that merge the visceral power of folk art with surreal features that she turns into her own variety of magical realism.

Transcending familiar conventions, Kahlo's “striking “Self-portrait with Hummingbird and Thorn Necklace” from 1940 fuses elements of European portraiture and photography by setting her composed expression against a background of verdant foliage, a monkey and a cat, melding notions of a Stoic martyr and Aztec goddess.

“Two Women” reveals Kahlo's maturing strengths as a portraitist with her evocative rendering of her subjects' dignified expressions despite their modest social status.

One of Kahlo's most enigmatic paintings, “Girl with a Death Mask (She Plays Alone)” from 1938 reveals her mature ability to fuse folk and surreal art in the haunting oil painting of a child in a pink dress – Kahlo? - wearing a skeleton mask and carrying flowers associated with Mexico's Day of the Dead festival and standing next to a ferocious jaguar mask.

Viewers must decide whether the artist is invoking traditional figures of supernatural power, commenting on her childhood battle with polio or some deeply personal fusion of the real and symbolic.

For visitors, one of the many pleasures of the exhibit will be to view about 40 examples of arte popular by unknown artisans whose work fuses earthy realism and fantasy in ways later reflected in Kahlo's own art.

One of the most striking, a 19th century wooden jaguar mask uses boar bristles, real animal teeth and light-catching mirrors for its eyes to suggest the creature's primal powers which were brought to life when worn during ceremonial dances.

A 19th century earthenware water jar bearing a painted image of an eagle atop a cactus symbolizing the founding of Tenochtitlan uses a familiar household object to celebrate a historical event.

Throughout the exhibit, wall text and English and Spanish explains how such objects, which Kahlo collected, influenced her maturing art.

The most recent work on display, Leonardo Linares' strange “Judas” figure from 2018, set near the beginning of the exhibit, features a tall white figure with a skull for a head inspired by one Kahlo painted and kept by her bed.

Bermeo explained that Judas effigies, representing the betrayer of Jesus, were blown up in popular festivals “as an act of cleansing.”

At a talk during the opening reception, a man in the audience compared the Judas figure on display to President Trump.

Whatever it represents, Kahlo's life and work and the arte popular that inspired her have crossed the contested border in a fabulous act of creative cleansing.

The MFA is also currently hosting two exhibits of photos by Graciela Iturbide that cast light on Kahlo's life and contemporary Mexico.

“El bano de Frida/Frida's Bathroom” features 15 black-and-white images by Iturbide of medical devices, braces and other objects Kahlo used to deal with the lingering effects of her polio and bus accident.

A previously-opened exhibit, “Graciela Iturbide's Mexico,” features nearly 140 black-and-white photographs that document Mexican life over the last 40 years.

'Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular'

WHERE: Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston

WHEN: Through June 16

ADMISSION: Free with museum admission. $25 for adults with a repeat visit within 10 days; $23 for seniors and students age 18 and older; free for university students and youth 17 and younger

INFO: 617-267-9300; mfa.org