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September 23, 2005

Art and Identity

Anthony Daniels reviews two exhibitions in London at the Tate Modern: "Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity," May 26-September 18, 2005, and "Frida Kahlo," June 9-October 9, 2005.

These are a few extracts from Mr. Daniels' review.

[S]oul and character make us uneasy nowadays; it is personality that interests us: particularly our own, of course.

Writing about Frida Kahlo:

No advertising man could have given her a better biographical profile for eliciting a favorable response at the present time. She had polio at the age of six and subsequently walked with a limp; she was severely injured in a crash, aged eighteen, and suffered from the results for the rest of her life (she died aged forty-seven), undergoing twenty-two operations in the meantime. She married a man, Diego Rivera, who was flagrantly unfaithful to her and who even had an affair with her sister; she was probably bisexual and had a couple of lesbian affairs; she had two miscarriages, either of which might have killed her, and was in any case ambivalent about having a child; her father was a German who settled in Mexico and her mother was half-Indian, thus conferring on her the original virtue of hybridity (though in fact she didn’t so much live in non-European cultures as visit them or collect their artifacts, and turn them to her artistic use). Her politics were radical; she was anti-American, though in her case America always returned good for evil. She was Stalinist, at a time when all right-thinking people agreed that the killing of millions was the road to utopia, but she also had a fling with Trotsky and towards the end of her life displayed a less than dialectical-materialist attraction to the wisdom of the East, thus later appealing to the New Age, healing-power-of-crystals end of the dissent market. All in all, a pretty good C.V. for the modern age.

there is something unhealthy, of equal intensity, about the disproportionate adulation that Frida Kahlo has received over the last two or three decades. I think that what has happened is that people with no objective right to do so have equated her suffering with their own, and have appropriated her work as a symbolic representation of their own minor dissatisfactions and frustrations, victimhood being the present equivalent of beatitude.

They say, "I too have known a faithless or a worthless man; I too have suffered from persistent headaches, dymenorrhoea, or sciatica; therefore, Frida Kahlo has understood me, and I have understood Frida Kahlo. After all, I have suffered just like her. Moreover, like me, she was a moral person, which is to say that she had all the right attitudes; she was on the side of the oppressed, at least those who were not in the Gulag; she loved indigenes as a matter of principle; and she took part in the holy work of dissolving boundaries, the boundaries between sexes (or rather, genders) and between cultures."(emphasis added)

"Exhibition notes," by Anthony Daniels, The New Criterion, September, 2005

UPDATE: John Fund has this to say about Frida Kahlo

Take the 2001 decision of the U.S. Postal Service to issue a stamp commemorating Frida Kahlo, an artist and ardent Communist revolutionary who lived in Mexico her entire life. The subject of a film starring Salma Hayek, Ms. Kahlo was slavishly devoted to Marxist ideology and her last unfinished work before her death in 1954 was a portrait of Josef Stalin. Compared to Kahlo, Maudelle Shirek is a piker in the annals of obnoxious leftism.

"Reds: No Longer Just Under the Bed," by John Fund, OpinionJournal's Political Diary, October 3, 2005

Posted at September 23, 2005 06:06 PM | Categories:

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