Rebecca Kleinman

<h1>NEW YORK — Frida Kahlo’s exhaustively documented crossover from artist to pop culture icon isn’t happenstance. The painter meticulously crafted her own image on a par with Cleopatra. If she were alive today, she’d probably be teaching a branding class at Harvard. Now it’s America’s turn to see how, and, more important, why she did it.</h1>

Some of the contents of the home she shared with her husband, muralist Diego Rivera — known as La Casa Azul (Blue House) in Mexico City — will be accessible for the first time in the United States in “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, from Feb. 8 to May 12. Their belongings were to be locked away until 15 years after Rivera’s death, according to his instructions, but the task of unsealing and inventorying them didn’t happen until much later, in 2004. This is the biggest stateside show devoted to Kahlo and a considerably expanded iteration of last year’s exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The sweeping survey adds greater insight into Kahlo’s collecting habits through works culled from the museum’s vault as well as the New York chapter of her timeline, and includes works lent by local institutions and galleries. The supplementary mix of Mesoamerican objects, one of the many types of art the couple favored, with her paintings and photographs divulge her yearning for Mexico’s indigenous and agrarian culture and her conflicts with capitalism, especially in the income inequality she witnessed during her travels in the United States.

Visitors will better understand Kahlo’s skill in searing her likeness into the public imagination, even if it meant dangling monkeys around her head and cultivating her most recognizable physical traits — a statement ‘stache and unibrow. Neither her disabilities from polio and a bus accident, nor her frequent relapses of pain deterred Kahlo. By the time she died at 47 in 1954, she left behind a public persona that is still being mined well into the 21st century; today she has more than 800,000 Instagram followers.

“People have an insatiable curiosity with her, and this presentation is a rare opportunity to see how she built her identity,” said Catherine Morris, a senior curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, who organized the Brooklyn Museum’s version of the show with Lisa Small, senior curator of European Art. Here, they share some of their insights.

Viewing Kahlo’s beauty products brings to mind a child’s sense of wonder with a mother’s dressing table. “There’s an aura in the presence of her actual things that you just can’t experience through media and Instagram,” Morris said of Kahlo’s eyebrow pencil, Pond’s Dry Face Cream, and red lipstick and vibrant nail polishes from Revlon, a favorite brand. “If you look at her images, she always had a perfect manicure.” Small pointed out that Kahlo “carefully groomed her unibrow,” a defiant choice at a time when “many depilatory methods existed. That brow was meaningful because it didn’t conform to Hollywood beauty standards.”

Tehuana Transformation

A mastermind at using fashion to her advantage, Kahlo delivered red-carpet moments wherever she went. “She even dressed that way to work in her studio,” Small said. Her ethnic ensembles, famously inspired by Oaxaca’s Tehuana, a matriarchal society, dismissed de rigueur looks dictated by Parisian designers and the soulless mass production of clothing. Vogue magazine took notice. Kahlo championed her homeland’s indigenous customs in wearing huipiles (woven tunics), rebozos (shawls) and flouncy, long skirts. They also drew attention away from her polio-ravaged right leg and body casts from several operations after her near-fatal bus accident. She frequently referred to herself as the great concealer.

The Body As Canvas

Besides its feminine allure, jewelry struck a more personal chord for Kahlo. Like her intricate updos embellished with hair ornaments and blossoms, chandelier earrings and bold necklaces drew onlookers’ focus to her face. They were also another vehicle for her to express her passion for Mexican crafts, including contemporary silver jewelry and native materials like jade, favored by the ancient Maya. “She most commonly wore gold rope necklaces and Mesoamerican jade stones, which she’d string into extraordinarily chunky necklaces,” Small said.

A Microcosm of Mexico

In one gallery, the curators set out to re-create the vibe of Kahlo and Rivera’s home. Azure-painted walls and a case of Mesoamerican ceramic and stone sculptures and vessels, from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection, evoke its spirit. The ancient objects convey the couple’s eclectic taste and deep appreciation for Mexican art and archaeology. “They’d have a colonial portrait next to a pre-Columbian piece next to a gas mask from the 1940s,” said Small, who located a Colima dog sculpture in the museum’s collection similar to those at La Casa Azul.

Mother of a Mini-Menagerie

Animals graced her work, and she had a mini-menagerie at La Casa Azul. There was a chaotic array of dogs — she adored the hairless variety of Xoloitzcuintli, an ancient breed — as well as monkeys, exotic birds and a deer named Granizo roaming about (which must have been a wild trip for guests).

Kahlo and Rivera traveled through the United States from 1930 through 1934, spending time in San Francisco, Detroit and New York City, where Rivera received major mural commissions. As a tourist and communist, Kahlo was both dazzled and disgusted by New York City. “She loved going to the movies in New York, but its great disparities of wealth were eye-opening,” Small said. Kahlo owed a bump in her career and stardom to her New York connections. Gallerist Julien Levy granted Kahlo her first and only New York show during her lifetime in 1938, while photographer Nickolas Muray captured the juxtaposition of her ethnic dress and the modern metropolis in 1946. A Vogue spread promoted her from the wife of an artist to Rivera’s rival.

Comfort with cross-dressing came early on. In a family portrait, by her father, photographer Guillermo Kahlo, a teenage Kahlo wears a suit and parts and tucks her hair like a natty chap. Emmy Lou Packard’s 1941 photograph shows Kahlo in cuffed dungarees, smoking a cigarette. For “Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair,” in 1940, with scissors and musical notes, she returns to menswear with a baggy suit like those worn by her ex-husband. (They had recently divorced.) Shorn in spite, her cropped cut re-establishes her independence. “People are very interested in the fact that she had relationships with women, but there’s only one known reference where she actually spoke about it,” Morris said.

Transforming Pain into Art

Kahlo suffered extensively for much of her life, and the most moving section of the show is devoted to her ecosystem of medical devices. But Kahlo did not conceal her pain, revealing her casts and leather braces with metal buckles in her work and turning her plaster corsets into art with elaborate designs of flowers, even a hammer and sickle. “She treated these second skins as canvases,” Small said.

Kahlo’s right leg was amputated the year before she died in 1954. (The official cause of death was pulmonary embolism.) “She’s often portrayed as a victim, and we’re consciously trying to reframe her,” Morris said. “People have described her as broken and fragile, but she was strong and accomplished a tremendous amount in her lifetime.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="79798430-f8ec-44ff-85ca-c4c8578bf6ee" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/arts/design/frida-kahlo-booklyn-museum.html">The New York Times</a>.

Frida Kahlo was a painter, a brand builder, a survivor, and so much more

Some of the contents of the home she shared with her husband, muralist Diego Rivera — known as La Casa Azul (Blue House) in Mexico City — will be accessible for the first time in the United States in “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,”

Residing most of her life in Oakland, California, she typically arrived to Sacramento by stagecoach and set out on foot without the luxury of the trails and maps hikers have today. The occasional guides who set up her campsites were bewildered by her choice of terrain, barely explored by the nascent Sierra Club.

“Fear is the great chain which binds women and prevents their development, and fear is the one apparently big thing which has no foundation in life,” she told The San Francisco Call in 1913.

In a later article, she said, “I wanted to go and be free.”

The Kardashians and their attention-seeking ilk can’t hold a candle to her moxie. The self-taught Brigman photographed herself nude in her beloved, gnarled landscape — her performance theater, really — beginning in 1905. The act is believed to have birthed one of the first, nude photographic self-portraits by an American woman, and possibly by a woman worldwide. Heightening the sensationalism, she did so after losing a breast in a freak accident at sea.

A childless proto-feminist who strongly supported the suffragist movement, she preferred knickerbockers and tunics for her treks when most Edwardian-age women wore corsets and ground-grazing dresses in the great outdoors. In yet another bold move, Brigman ditched her husband, a much older ship captain whom she latched onto as her ticket to travel the world, in 1910; tending to him in retirement back home wasn’t exactly what she had in mind.

While her artist peers continue to rack up show after show (Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo have been rediscovered as art institutions’ golden geese), Brigman remains relatively unknown even in her own backyard, despite a period of international notoriety as the only fellow west of the River in the Photo-Secession, Alfred Stieglitz’s fine-art photography group. It has taken 68 years after her death in 1950 for her to receive her first major retrospective, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, “Anne Brigman: A Visionary in Modern Photography,” which runs through Jan. 27.

She was “very interested in living in harmony with nature and seeing the female body as interconnected with place and with trees and with all of the elements,” said Ann M. Wolfe, the museum’s senior curator and deputy director, who organized the exhibition.

Wolfe also edited its 400-page catalog, the first comprehensive book about Brigman, which Rizzoli Electra has published along with a reprint of Brigman’s breathtaking book of poetry, “Songs of a Pagan” (1949). “I felt it was important not to have just a book of beautiful plates but to really start to lay out an archival research resource,” Wolfe said. She said she hoped it would spur an understanding of the significance of Brigman’s work.

The multimedia presentation begins with her childhood in Hawaii, a mango-sweetened swirl of exotic experiences at odds with her daughterly duties as the eldest child in a large missionary family. Photographs by her mentors and contemporaries as well as block prints and a drawing add context to her oeuvre. Many viewers are surprised to learn she was also a gifted poet, whose verses are as moving and relatable as lyrics by Bob Dylan and Neil Young. The majority of the exhibit’s correspondence focuses on her long-term relationship with Stieglitz, her biggest champion.

“Laid Bare in the Landscape,” the Nevada Museum’s concurrent group show, examines her undeniable legacy through 16 female contemporary artists, including Ana Mendieta and Judy Chicago, whose works also stage their bodies amid the landscape.

“I was just so moved by the fact that so many of our visitors right here in northern Nevada, not more than 50 miles from where Brigman made some of these photographs, that nobody knew her name,” Wolfe said.

Brigman slipped through the cracks of the art history canon in the perfect storm. Though ahead of her time in practically every facet of her life, from tiny homes to recognition of first nations, she was part of the pictorialist movement, whose romanticized portraits of white-attired women in gardens missed the modernist zeitgeist that propelled artists she influenced to 21st-century relevance. Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and O’Keeffe were just a few fans. Her Bay Area art circle’s stronghold further crumbled from San Francisco’s catastrophic earthquake and fire in 1906.

Not helping matters are her unorganized archives, and the fact she began her photography career late, at 32. Because she tossed out some of her early work, the retrospective makes do with reproductions in archived issues of Camera Craft. Michael Wilson, the James Bond film producer and art collector who lent 80 works for the show, purchased an entire cache from someone’s dumpster-diving score in the 1980s.

“Not many pictorialists would have this kind of show today,” he said, of museums’ shift toward contemporary art. “Contemporary women artists like Judy (Chicago) take you by the neck and shake you. They provoke reaction but not an emotional state. It’s not about aesthetics and beauty like Anne’s photos.”

“Heart of the Storm,” the Brigman photograph he acquired at an auction — and exhibited here — synthesizes her artistic trademarks. It drove photography purists crazy that she manipulated negatives and prints with tools like a stylus or paint as if using Photoshop. They dismissed these multimedia composites within the fledgling medium as an art form. The exhibit demonstrates her step-by-step process with “Heart of the Storm,” an iconic image of two hamadryads, classical mythology’s tree-huggers, from her recurring cast of Pan and his fellow wood nymphs.

“Her hybrids of beautiful women tied to grotesque trees are about pain, suffering and death. Brigman believed that suffering was liberating and the only way to grow,” said Kathleen Pyne, a professor emeritus of art history at the University of Notre Dame and contributor to Wolfe’s catalog, who recently completed the biography “The Photographer of Enchantment: Anne Brigman.” “Stieglitz wanted more hybrids because of their shock value and thought she had created something completely unique and extraordinary.”

No romantic interest has ever been documented, but Brigman, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were definitely involved in an art triangle. O’Keeffe was floored by Brigman’s work; the former’s paintings of dying junipers are inspired by the latter’s themes of suffering in the natural world, according to Pyne. Stieglitz had high hopes for Brigman, hosting her in New York with a solo show in mind at his Gallery 291. But, paradoxically, the seasoned adventuress feared becoming lost in the metropolis and got her bearings by imagining skyscrapers as summits along a trail. Stieglitz eventually grew frustrated with her inferior printing technique and with not having enough stellar images to fashion a proper exhibit. She favored gelatin silver bromide before finally learning platinum printing, the Photo-Secession’s accepted process, during her time in New York.

She never really fit in with Stieglitz’s salon and city, seeking a breath of fresh air in Maine. He bought into the theories of Havelock Ellis, the founder of modern sexology, that linked artists’ work and their sexuality, particularly concerning female artists. But eroticizing nudes wasn’t her thing. Brigman went back to the West Coast for good, and Stieglitz eventually fulfilled his Pygmalion fantasy with the more compliant O’Keeffe.

“Stieglitz is reading into Brigman’s photographs his East Coast brand of modernism, which is very different than her West Coast brand of modernism,” said Wolfe, the curator, pointing to Brigman’s “The Cleft in the Rock,” a photograph whose prominent gash is reminiscent of O’Keeffe’s flower paintings and often compared to vulvas.

Both women artists defended their nonsexual intentions, that sometimes a flower is just a flower, and a tree or rock is also just that. Brigman found other clever ways to thumb her nose at the male establishment. In the exhibit’s photograph “Dawn,” she lounges atop Donner Summit like Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” to revisit the site of Timothy O’Sullivan’s and Carleton Watkins’ hypermasculine photographs. Whereas their references to industrial progress, such as the Transcontinental Railroad, celebrate Manifest Destiny within the age-old conflict of man versus nature, she merely wanted to exist in nature and become one with nature through her body and free spirit.

“She places herself in the very foreground of this very iconic vista in the Sierras, and you can see she has manipulated the image in the darkroom to create this idealized representation of female beauty,” Wolfe said.

Confronting Brigman’s remarkable life and poetry — not to mention her spunk and tenacity — can leave visitors teary-eyed, observers at the museum noted. Her contemporary art descendants in the adjacent galleries don’t come close to instilling the same effect. Considering Strayed’s “Wild” was made into a major motion picture, Wolfe, the curator, and her colleagues wonder if it’s Brigman’s turn. They’re having fun imagining which actresses would play her in different life stages.

“I’m in the movie business, and there just isn’t enough drama,” said Wilson, the producer.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/arts/design/anne-brigman-nevada-sierra-steiglitz-okeeffe.html" id="9b1fa998-bcff-3747-a0f3-9dfe5121b1f9">The New York Times</a>.

RENO, Nev. — The California photographer, poet and mountaineer Anne Brigman broke boundaries by any era’s standards. Nearly a century before memoirist Cheryl Strayed (“Wild”) laced up her hiking boots and took a walk on the wild side in the Sierra Nevada mountain range — a precursor to millennials’ obsession with forest bathing — Brigman was going on expeditions deep into its Desolation Valley and Donner Summit around Lake Tahoe. Never mind these were inhospitable areas ridden with predators ...

A Pioneering Photographer, Bare in the Back Country

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Rebecca Kleinman

Articles written by the author

Frida Kahlo was a painter, a brand builder, a survivor, and so much more

A Pioneering Photographer, Bare in the Back Country