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Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self up Mexico Since the 1950S) and It Is V&A, London, This Material on Offer at Frida Kahlo: 16 June to 4 November 2018 Making Her Self Up

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Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self up Mexico Since the 1950S) and It Is V&A, London, This Material on Offer at Frida Kahlo: 16 June to 4 November 2018 Making Her Self Up Life & Times Exhibition Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up Mexico since the 1950s) and it is V&A, London, this material on offer at Frida Kahlo: 16 June to 4 November 2018 Making Her Self Up. It soon becomes apparent that ENTRY-LEVEL FRIDA the art is good but it is her image Before there was Tracy Emin and her unmade that pervades. That face. Wandering bed, there was Frida Kahlo. through rooms accompanied by My introduction to her work was reading eerie womb-like music, everything is about a painting of hers owned by Madonna. smaller than you expect, such is the The title of this was My Birth (1932) and aura and hype surrounding her. depicts Frida, quite literally, giving birth to Nonetheless, the photographs (an herself, watched over by an agonised Virgin adolescent Frida dressed in male Mary. It’s a disturbing, unforgettable image garb in a family portrait, unsmiling and sums up Frida’s art very aptly: direct, raw, and challenging as ever), shawls painful, and unapologetic. and skirts, jewellery, medicines, and make-up are fascinating to pore Madonna later said in an interview with over. What is obvious is the depth of Vanity Fair that she used this painting to suss her disability and physical suffering people out: ‘If somebody doesn’t like this (her braces and torturous-looking painting then I know they can’t be my friend.’ surgical corsets are on display), but I am sure Madonna and Frida would have got also her great strength and creativity on well. to turn such suffering and misfortune This exhibition is a real feather in the into art. V&A’s cap. A mighty archive of documents, In the poem ‘Kindness’ (1963), photographs, and personal possessions were Sylvia Plath wrote: ‘The blood jet is discovered in 2004 (sealed up in a room in poetry, There is Self-Portrait, Frida Kahlo, 1941 © The Jacques and Natasha Prosthetic leg with leather boot. Appliquéd silk with embroidered Chinese no stopping it’, a Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel motifs. Photograph Javier Hinojosa. Museo Frida Kahlo. © Diego Rivera and sentiment that can Collection. Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up, 16 June to 14 Frida Kahlo Archives, Banco de México, Fiduciary of the Trust of the Diego be readily applied November 2018. Sponsored by Grosvenor Britain & Ireland. Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums. Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up, 16 June to 14 November 2018. Sponsored by Grosvenor Britain & Ireland. to Frida’s art. As a child she contracted polio attention-seeking Instagrammers look like but failed to receive proper cloistered nuns. I would argue she made a treatment. Her right leg better surrealist than Dalí but Frida herself subsequently became did not accept the term as applied to her thinner and shorter, placing work. stress on her pelvis and Always given to theatrics, at her first back. Later, a bus crash in solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Arte 1925 shattered her spine Contemporaneo in April 1953 she received — putting paid to Kahlo’s plaudits and guests while bed bound. Her dreams of becoming a four-poster bed was moved from her home to doctor and leading to pain the gallery, she arrived in an ambulance, and and illness for the rest of was carried on a stretcher to the bed, where her life. she stayed throughout the party. During her recovery, she Her legacy will continue because in her we began to paint. It became a see strength, rebellion, and an alluring yet way for Kahlo to depict her unconventional beauty. She was always ahead life, her marriage problems of her time and there is no one like her now. (with the towering, unfaithful After enduring 30 operations Frida sadly muralist Diego Rivera), died in 1954 aged 47, possibly by her own her miscarriages, her love hand, leaving us her art, her traditional affairs (with both men and Tehuana dresses, and her indefatigable spirit. women), her Communist sympathies, and her identity Moira Davies, Assistant Editor, BJGP, London. beyond (and within) her Email: [email protected] suffering. Her innate self- exposure makes today’s DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp18X698225 386 British Journal of General Practice, August 2018.
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