NYT reviews Kahlo show at PMA

"PHILADELPHIA — You really should come down, a friend e-mailed me this summer from Mexico City. She meant, come down for the Frida Kahlo centennial, with a retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and displays of memorabilia at Casa Azul, the Blue House, Kahlo’s home. You should come, she wrote, not just for the art, which looks fabulous, but for the place, the people.

Tens of thousands of Mexicans, young and old, rich and poor, had been standing in line for hours to get a glimpse of Kahlo’s paintings and her personal relics: her snapshots, her brushes, her ashes, the steel orthopedic corsets she wore under her peasant blouses and skirts to hold a wrecked body together.

The celebration, one gathers, was not the usual Fridamaniacal crush. It was more a fiesta, a devotional jubilee, an hommage to a Mexican saint in the city where she was born in 1907 and died in 1954. I couldn’t make the trip, but suspect that the essential Kahlo experience is the same anywhere. Through her art, we travel her life, a shining path of high Modernist adventure and a Via Crucis of physical pain, political passion and amorous torment. Basically, she felt what we all feel, only hugely, terribly. This is what makes her the people’s artist she is. And what makes her, to those who don’t get her extremist vibe, a romantic cliché.

The lines are also long for “Frida Kahlo” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a distillation of the centennial show, with 42 of Kahlo’s small number of surviving paintings and a slew of photographs. As surveys go, it’s modest and compact, but for that reason quickly absorbed. That’s the way Kahlo enters your system, fast, with a jolt, an effect as unnerving, and even repellent, as it is pleasurable.

Organized by the Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera and by Elizabeth Carpenter of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the show opens with a single painting, “Self-Portrait With Monkeys” (1943). Kahlo presents herself in half-length, her now-mythical attributes precisely detailed: the handlebar eyebrows, the faint mustache, the dark hair pulled up in a sculptural pile. She’s coolly self-contained, but she has company: a quartet of puckish monkeys. One hugs her neck; another tugs at her blouse, as if feeling for a breast. She is unperturbed. She is a nature deity, mistress of beasts; these creatures are her subjects and children. They are also her equals, her friends. She is one of them." Read the rest here.