100 Year Homage to Frida Kahlo at Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes

MEXICO CITY - The Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes opened last night the largest Frida Kahlo exhibition titled Frida Kahlo 1907 ~2007. National Homage, on view through August 19, 2007. This exhibition is part of the celebration for the centennial of Frida Kahlo’s birth in 1907. In January 1940, for example, she was a participant (with Rivera) in the International Exhibition of Surrealism held in Mexico City. Later, she was to be vehement in her denials that she had ever been a true Surrealist. 'They thought I was a Surrealist,' she said, 'but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.' She is one of the greatest representatives of Mexican culture. The exhibition is a recognition of the importance of Frida’s work and what she gave to art.

According to Roxana Velásquez, director of the MPBA, the exhibition includes a total of 354 works: 65 oil paintings, 45 drawings, 11 water colors, and 5 etchings. There are also around 50 letters, more than 100 personal photographs that reflect the social-political context that the artist lived in.

A curatorial committee was formed for this exhibition with Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, Roxana Velásquez, Salomón Grinberg, Cristina Kahlo, Américo Sánchez and Roxana Velásquez.

“A great effort was made to gather these works and to present the most complete Frida Kahlo exhibition that has ever been on view in Mexico or anywhere in the world. We had the collaboration of 69 institutions, national and international collections,” said Roxana Velásquez. To her Frida is a fascinating character who had “one of the most interesting lives for the different areas in which she worked in: artist, intellectual, social activist and politics, great writer and revolutionary,” she added.

Velásquez states, “Frida the artist and the character is inseparable. What makes this exhibition unique is that it shows both of these aspects. Efforts were focused on bringing the greatest amount of work that is difficult to access for the Mexican public.”

In 1953, when Frida Kahlo had her first solo exhibition in Mexico (the only one held in her native country during her lifetime), a local critic wrote: 'It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography.' This observation serves to explain both why her work is so different from that of her contemporaries, the Mexican Muralists, and why she has since become a feminist icon.

Kahlo was born in Mexico City in 1907, the third daughter of Guillermo and Matilda Kahlo. Her father was a photographer of Hungarian Jewish descent, who had been born in Germany; her mother was Spanish and Native American.

In July 1954, she made her last public appearance, when she participated in a Communist demonstration against the overthrow of the left-wing Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. Soon afterwards, she died in her sleep, apparently as the result of an embolism, though there was a suspicion among those close to her that she had found a way to commit suicide. Her last diary entry read: 'I hope the end is joyful - and I hope never to come back - Frida.'"

The Museum of the Palace of Beautiful Arts considers like a reflection space on the modern and contemporary art, with exhibitions that contribute to the cuestionamiento of traditional concepts and generate contributions critics, agreed to the integral concept of a museum of our days. The main intention of the Museum of the Palace of Beautiful Arts is to approach the public to a variety of modern and contemporary visual speeches of national and international relevance, that they integrate from the photography, the painting, the art object, the graph and the sculpture to the architecture and urbanism.

This museum, that traditionally has been avocado to the consecration of the national plastic values - and has been also host of artistic current outstanding exhibition or collections of the foreigner now set out to confront and to question their own artistic and musicological task, redimensionando its educative and diffusing function, with the purpose of generating a greater knowledge and a greater conscience in its public. Without leaving of side the recognitions to Mexican artists of unquestionable trajectory, the direction of the museum will be more reflective and critical, agreed to the redefinition of its vocation.

Visit The Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes at : www.museobellasartes.artte.com/

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