Arts and Exhibitions

[madupont]

http://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?cart=1267589425228586&isbn=9781568988306#

This suggests that they are temporarily out of stock. Which may have to do with tax time and tax on inventory (although it may be in stock at places like Amazon or Barnes & Noble,  or others in the book trade).

[Lhoffman]

Larger images.   

The first three are what I think of as the broken images, Henry Ford Hospital, 1932;  The Broken Column, 1944; Without Hope, 1945.

http://z.about.com/d/arthistory/1/0/o/b/fk200708_03.jpg

http://www.artinthepicture.com/artists/Frida_Kahlo/broken_column.jpeg

http://rawartint.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/fridakahlowithouthope.jpg

Also interesting, Diego and I, 1949.

http://www.writedesignonline.com/history-culture/Kahlo/works_diegoandi.jpg

Retrospect ranging from 1927 to 1953:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.iupui.edu/~lmena1/kahlo/otros/columna.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.iupui.edu/~lmena1/kahlo.html&usg=__UYZzypBTTLn3ZpA6dpIr6gyejsA=&h=378&w=286&sz=18&hl=en&start=3&itbs=1&tbnid=I6B4zD0NHA97bM:&tbnh=122&tbnw=92&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfrida%2Bkahlo%2Bpaintings%26tbnid%3DNMa4msG17GOgiM:%26tbnh%3D0%26tbnw%3D0%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26gbv%3D2%26imgtype%3Di_similar%26tbs%3Disch:1

I just found now found this site.   Looks like it might be interesting. 

http://www.writedesignonline.com/history-culture/Kahlo/overview.htm

--------------------

I'm not clear on which image reminded you of Baal...although Henry Ford doesn't look all that pleasant in Rivera's rendering.

[madupont]

Here in the first slide of the npr exhibit of Ford investment in Rivera (good thing he did considering the Rockefeller reaction in NYC) at the bottom right next to the arched doorway (which I can not make out whether it is real or part of mural?).

http://www.npr.org/multimedia/2009/04/rivera/gallery/index.html

Immediately left of the door is a huge "armature"(such as sculptors use as the structure to hold the softer materials on the exterior when modeling a piece not sculpted from a  harder stone; although even then they may for preservation cut layers as in columns that are stacked  one above the other to hold a piece intact when moving a work of art).

It looks like a gigantic ogre constructed from heavy metal pipes or other solid piece which stands directly to the right of the smaller separated panels which are "glimpses" of various kinds of work, secretarial, administrative, as well as on the line, done in the automotive industry.  It suggests something both monumental and ominous that towers over the teams of workers physically consumed by the expenditure of energy plus coordination that they  put into this investment in production (that we now know, we have to retool with other sources of energy in mind). 

That is not to say that Diego Rivera did not respect it, both positively and negatively at the same time, in comparison to the use of peasant labor(peonage) that produced everything for the hidalgo class (which had been merely lower nobility in Spain yet chose the military exploration of the New World as a means of betterment and getting ahead while the  older wealthier classes chose to  remain in Spain while financing the exploration and the natural army of the hidalgo who  revered the traditions of knighthood as they had since before the crusades which had been the means  with which their loyalty had been repaid by  a rise in rank); yet this does not mean that Rivera did not see the parallel to the Meso American past(that Mel Gibson so fully redocumented in his production: Apocolypto).

Which is why I say that in his observations of the archaeological past,Diego acutely saw this slave labor done by expendable captives of war; and, by the time of the oncoming Depression which usually manifests as earlier deprivation in societies that had large expenditures at war.  The effects upon industrial workers for instance in the contemporary world is stagnancy where pay grade does not rise but will even  become less pay authorized by  the illusion this will provide job security although when you arrive at ten percent unemployment it is not likely that any labor is secure. It quickly leads to the formation of "gangs" as it did with the North American mafioso who provide protection and organization for their own "armies" based on fealty.

I do not doubt that Rivera was interested in accepting grants for his fresco murals, in the U.S., to see how this manifests in the labor in other spheres of activity.

Must say that Alfred Molina in his characterization was much easier to look at, as he almost always is, than the real Diego Rivera,as you can note in the photograph, which reminds me of the folk saying,"Kiss a toad and you may get stuck with him".

I am going through the paintings one by one, familiar with the miscarriage paintings of Frida, and I consider it somewhat a good thing that she had the chance to go to medical school before the accident occurred. One,it gave her the fortitude to face her physical condition, post-accident, squarely; and, two, it provided her with scientific background experience to just throw her compositions out there, working the concept over and over again to see what she could further discover about how to represent the motif from within her being.

However, I remember the period well, 1980,through '81, into 1982, so many of my friends were women art students just setting forth professional in competition, often deciding to teach after that experience. I hit them at just the right time, returning to their environs following an absence  just short of 25 years, and catching up with each one of them to see what they were working on "now".

They were tending to make more physical comment, on the physical side  of being a woman, including their own individual physical condition. One of these friends was very myopic, as I am; and, while her husband now worked in metal and apprenticed his son as well privately, besides  working with a group of our friends in both glass blowing (which more or less prepared them for the heat that is involved in: art production in metal), the wife went further in her experiment with how impressionist painting arises from "how you see" and how do you paint accurately how you see.

They also formed coops to found galleries; and, inevitably in this internecine situation, women would "borrow" from each other's production although the period was one  mainly of what was known as the "installation".

My point?  That was one thing but, when they elected Frida Kahlo as the Patron Saint of Feminist Art, they were over-reaching.  She was very much an individualist.

I can not think of any other female example in that period of time, in Europe or America who had the guts to do what she was doing (yes, writers were doing that as women)but in the fine arts, it was a men's world of individual psychological materializing following Symbolism in Literature, poetry in particular and, then, painting.

Like the description that was given  here for this style, "Naive" (as in "naif"), as the very word that I was trying to recall rather than "nativism".

But naif  is not naive in the sense of being intelligently unaware or intellectually not making the connection.   It is rather ingenuous, and artless (as in, the Art of being artless).

I did recognize Broken Column, immediately. In Hayek's portrayal, this is the strapped vest,corset that she had to get used to wearing and had to wear to get about.  The fact that she would have actually danced the tango, thus corseted, is a real stretch, as part of the scenario for this movie; but perhaps possible given how she perceived the inspiration to do so.

[madupont]

Notice, how skillfully she does the hair, each strand of it, in the portrait,Diego and I. She works it at the neckline into the pattern of the collar. Just to compare, I took a second look upward at her hair at the top right; and, yes, it is the same meticulous detail, although represented as more compact where the hair tends to have body before it falls aside casually each strand static.

[madupont]

http://cgfa.acropolisinc.com/kahlo/p-kahlo28.htm

A number of these were done as a result of her trips North. They contrast the two civilizations ; so, you may be very correct that Diego's work  "borrows" some of her own insights that she works more rawly, and "naif" compared to his inevitable eventual smoothness of paint application.

It is not that she isn't as skilled with the brush but that her subject matter is raw.

Here, she contrasts the actual temple(there is one like this that has been photographically recorded at about the latitude of Quito, Ecuador, between Columbia and Peru but to the right hand side on a map, if you came up from following the Amazon --like that German film-maker with the boat he is moving over the Andes [Werner Herzog*, I think?]--which a nutty friend of mine did in the pursuit of his more usual profession.  Following the Amazon,not hoisting a boat  over the Andes!),

and Frida depicts it with the Sun to the left and the Moon to the right, but the sun has been consuming blood.

The entire upper left is given to the Meso-American experience, while the upper right is the North American industrial age.  

Beneath is strewn a mixture of artifacts industrially produced, and the hand-produced ceramics of early American that is: Pre-Columbian art, with the occasional plant, the segmental  floral looks familiar but I can't recall what it is named either here or there.

The interesting thing about her choice of "temple" that does not have the high steep upward steps of the Mayan but has a two sided(aka left and right)position of steps in South America, which looks very European, a side for the sun and a side for the moon is that they are a step level above a frontal structure which in North America, actually just across the border a little further into the border states of the Four Corners, would be a kiva, the "underground" or rather "Underworld" chamber of secret societies of Indian priesthood and medicine dancers.

*Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), called Fitzcarraldo by the local natives....
Fitzcarraldo(1982) 

[madupont]

"...with the occasional plant".  Good grief, I overlooked that one of these is a calla lily that I am trying to feed right now in hopes of survival, it is a deep red violet purple color that I am starting over  having lost one to the makeover artists who took out the trees and ruined the planting arrangement that I had patterned over the last five years out of seven.   (the electric bill immediately jumped the following month to additional half as much of double the previous electric bill for heating.)

I lost the original bed of calla lilies in the shade border by not remembering to lift them early enough  and package them. Undoubtedly mice burrowed to harvest them for winter feed. Unless, the honeysuckle sapling just sapped them?

[madupont]

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/pollock/pollock2-22-3.asp

Portrait with short hair.

[madupont]

This is  hysterical ! I found it when trying to identify the Imogen Cunningham who did a portrail of Frida Kahlo during the time that they both lived in San Francisco.

http://www.photographywest.com/pages/cunningham_bio.html

It stands to reason that they would meet, as Imogen was a friend of Edward Weston(photographer) for whom Tina Modotti modeled while emulating his photography much as Imogen found him an "inspiration".

Imogen's work is noticeably more feminine than Modotti's, and from whence those Callas came before Katharine Hepburn pronounced them,callas lilies;"The Calla Lilies are in bloom...."

I suspect that Imogen Cunningham heard about Frida Kahlo from Tina Modotti and Edward Weston who had been traveling Mexico and any desert he could find at the time.

[madupont]

http://www.fbuch.com/lenin.htm

Here is a portrait by Diego Rivera. Scroll below the introductory miniature and you will find a fuller size portrait which reveals in detail what  an advanced painter that Diego was.  I'm not saying that Frida was not. They each chose their own styles. He just had a great deal of control other than his being acknowledged as a mural painter in the art of fresco; although I think his skill is indicated by that great Henry Ford mural in the detailed work obvious in every one of the small panels as well as the larger entire.

[madupont]

What the Water Gave Me.

http://www.artchive.com/viewer/z.html

It is of interest that Kahlo is a woman who paints her toe nails.  Other than her very Indian identity at some point while at other times she is very elegant and she identifies these things in her Portrait of the Two Fridas, toe-nail painting is the result of this duality.  She became very involved in costume and dressing up, wardrobe to befit an artist, by proclivity a Bohemian, but always the wardrobe was decisively Mexican, both Indian and Spanish.

[Lhoffman]

Here in the first slide of the npr exhibit of Ford investment in Rivera (good thing he did considering the Rockefeller reaction in NYC) at the bottom right next to the arched doorway (which I can not make out whether it is real or part of mural?).

http://www.npr.org/multimedia/2009/04/rivera/gallery/index.html

Immediately left of the door is a huge "armature"(such as sculptors use as the structure to hold the softer materials on the exterior when modeling a piece not sculpted from a  harder stone; although even then they may for preservation cut layers as in columns that are stacked  one above the other to hold a piece intact when moving a work of art).

It looks like a gigantic ogre constructed from heavy metal pipes or other solid piece which stands directly to the right of the smaller separated panels which are "glimpses" of various kinds of work, secretarial, administrative, as well as on the line, done in the automotive industry.  It suggests something both monumental and ominous that towers over the teams of workers physically consumed by the expenditure of energy plus coordination that they  put into this investment in production (that we now know, we have to retool with other sources of energy in mind).

That is not to say that Diego Rivera did not respect it, both positively and negatively at the same time, in comparison to the use of peasant labor(peonage) that produced everything for the hidalgo class (which had been merely lower nobility in Spain yet chose the military exploration of the New World as a means of betterment and getting ahead while the  older wealthier classes chose to  remain in Spain while financing the exploration and the natural army of the hidalgo who  revered the traditions of knighthood as they had since before the crusades which had been the means  with which their loyalty had been repaid by  a rise in rank); yet this does not mean that Rivera did not see the parallel to the Meso American past(that Mel Gibson so fully redocumented in his production: Apocolypto).

This is the fender stamping press in use at the finishing process at the Rouge plant at that time.   The doorway is next to this panel.   In the very right hand bottom corner, you see two men.   The one in the grey suit and tie is Edsel Ford, who at that time was president of the Detroit Arts Commission and also the donor ($25,000.   The original price was to be $10,000, but Rivera felt the space allotted was insufficient.  He approached Edsel with a request to use all four walls of the great court...at no additional cost.   Edsel agreed, but then raised the original commission.)  The second man, holding an outline of the project, is Dr. William Valentiner, who was director of the DIA at that time.

The idea of personification is interesting.   I almost want to relate it more to the idea of the Golem than to an ogre.   The Golem has potential to accomplish both good and evil.   Also could be more machine-like in appearance being that it is created out of non-living matter. 

[Lhoffman]

http://cgfa.acropolisinc.com/kahlo/p-kahlo28.htm

A number of these were done as a result of her trips North. They contrast the two civilizations ; so, you may be very correct that Diego's work  "borrows" some of her own insights that she works more rawly, and "naif" compared to his inevitable eventual smoothness of paint application.

It is not that she isn't as skilled with the brush but that her subject matter is raw.

Here, she contrasts the actual temple(there is one like this that has been photographically recorded at about the latitude of Quito, Ecuador, between Columbia and Peru but to the right hand side on a map, if you came up from following the Amazon --like that German film-maker with the boat he is moving over the Andes [Werner Herzog*, I think?]--which a nutty friend of mine did in the pursuit of his more usual profession.  Following the Amazon,not hoisting a boat  over the Andes!),

and Frida depicts it with the Sun to the left and the Moon to the right, but the sun has been consuming blood.

The entire upper left is given to the Meso-American experience, while the upper right is the North American industrial age.  

Beneath is strewn a mixture of artifacts industrially produced, and the hand-produced ceramics of early American that is: Pre-Columbian art, with the occasional plant, the segmental  floral looks familiar but I can't recall what it is named either here or there.

The interesting thing about her choice of "temple" that does not have the high steep upward steps of the Mayan but has a two sided(aka left and right)position of steps in South America, which looks very European, a side for the sun and a side for the moon is that they are a step level above a frontal structure which in North America, actually just across the border a little further into the border states of the Four Corners, would be a kiva, the "underground" or rather "Underworld" chamber of secret societies of Indian priesthood and medicine dancers.

*Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), called Fitzcarraldo by the local natives....
Fitzcarraldo(1982) 

Many of her paintings seems to convey the idea of duality.   Old, new.  Male, female.   Spiritual, earthbound.   Add to that the of oneness/duality in her relationship with Diego.   You see it at play in this work from 1944, Diego and Me:





 

[Lhoffman]

Molina, kiss a toad, etc  and toe-painting.

Two things, one funny, the other quite sad.

Frida Kahlo on Diego in an interview with Gladys March:  "Seeing him in the nude, one is immediately reminded of a young boy-frog standing on his hind legs."

In his autobiography, Diego  (or maybe March...it's a bit iffy) implies that the real cause of Frida's death was not complications related to the amputation of her leg, but that when the doctors amputated her leg, they also amputated her will to live.

[Lhoffman]

Here's a blog that will give a better idea of the scope of the murals.   Scroll down past the two waterfront photos to two images of the Detroit Institute of Art.  Following those are several photos of the Grand Court (Rivera Court).

http://urbantoronto.ca/showthread.php?9201-Darkstar-s-Detroit-%28Part-I%29

[Lhoffman]

I am reading in my exhibit guide that Rivera's Henry Ford is composite of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.