An exhibition entitled “Frida Kahlo‘Beyond Appearances’, opened Thursday at the Gallera Ballet Fashion Museum in Parisand continues until March 2023, to highlight the link between about two hundred pieces of personal belongings of the Mexican artist and her artwork.
“We want to get away from the grotesqueness that surrounds it, and for people to see that it’s more than just a commodity or an image,” exhibition curator Serce Inestrosa told AFP.
Fashion fanatic
This exhibition lands for the first time in Paris, which the artist visited in 1939 at the invitation of her friend, the French writer and poet André Breton. But the event has been held in London, San Francisco and New York, and each time, the curator has adapted its details to suit the host city.
The edition in the “Capital of Fashion” displays clothing by major designers such as Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier and Valentino, directly inspired by Frida’s style.
The exhibition includes, for example, a dress with a headscarf, reminiscent of the “Resplandor”, a ritual-inspired veil worn by the women of the Teuantepec region in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, in addition to skirts, jackets and trousers decorated with flowers, tulle and strass, and even metal corsets.
However, the most prominent pieces displayed during this event are the personal belongings of the late artist, which the French public will be able to see for the first time.
These personal pieces include a large collection of photographs, telegrams and letters, which were displayed a decade ago in the Frida Kahlo Museum, Casa Asul, or Blue House, the artist’s birthplace where her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, kept them for half a century in a large suitcase.
The collection is replete with many items, including a prosthetic leg with shoes decorated with Chinese embroidery, which Kalu wore after her right leg was amputated, an orthopedic corset very similar to that depicted by the artist in her painting “The Broken Column,” and painted corsets, one of which bears the hammer and sickle emblem, as a reminder Her embrace of communism, pre-Columbian necklaces, and even drugs testify to her physical suffering after contracting polio and a serious bus accident.
“We don’t show anything that Frida Kahlo didn’t want to show,” the show’s curator explains, saying she wanted “to break away from the rhetoric of the 1980s that insisted on portraying Kahlo and her body as a victim.”
She adds, “Of course, she suffered a lot from a physical point of view, but we see through this exhibition how she used painting as a means of healing and creative production.”
“The painted corsets symbolize rebellion, and she turned them into a staple in her dress. Why wear an ugly prosthesis? She made beautiful shoes with it, that’s very fashionable,” Inestrosa notes.
Many costumes are on display, especially her famous traditional embroidered skirts and long sleeveless jackets, along with a few paintings, among them The Frame, the first painting by a Mexican artist to be acquired by the French state.
Would Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) have made a cultural “appropriation” of the fashion associated with the Teuantepec region even though she had never set foot in it? “No, it’s her personal heritage on her mother’s side,” replies Inestrosa, a multi-rooted, Hispanic and indigenous woman in Oaxaca, near Teuantepec.
The curator notes that Frida Kahlo was not only proud of it, but chose “Tihuana dresses from a matriarchal society (in Teuantepec), to focus on a strong woman. Whereas fashion in Mexico in the 1930s, it was Parisian fashion.”
(AFP)