Frida Kahlo in America; The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist by Celia Stahr

In 2015, I saw the Detroit Institute of Art (DAI) exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit. I knew Diego Rivera from the DIA court murals but I had known little about Frida Kahol. Reading Frida Kahol in America by Celia Stahr, specifically about Kahlo's time in Detroit, I could clearly remember her painting of her miscarriage in Henry Ford Hospital. We listened to the story on headphones and studied the unforgettable painting. 

Although the exhibit included works by Rivera, it was Kahlo's that stuck in my mind. Rivera's painting of a flower seller was more accessible, 'prettier', but Kahlo's self-portraits grabbed my attention--those eyes, so direct and almost challenging, her self-confidence and self-acceptance revealed. 

Stahr shares that many who knew both Rivera and Kahlo said Kahlo was the better artist. She stood in the shadow of her husband's charismatic personality, diminished by the press, struggling to develop her artistic voice. 

Kahlo was in her early twenties when she married the older, famous artist, only twenty-three when they arrived in America. Her life had already been eventful, suffering polio, scoliosis, spina bifida, and the life-threatening bus accident when she was a teenager. Pain accompanied her every day. She was a Communist, she challenged society's prescribed sex roles, and had suffered heartbreak as a spurned lover. 

It was so interesting to see American during the Depression through Kahlo's eyes. The wealthy industrialists were her husband's patrons--they paid the bills. They also represented a privileged class Kahlo who found revolting. 

Kahlo wrote to her mother, "Witnessing the horrible poverty here and the millions of people who have no work, food, or home, who are cold and have no hope in this country of scumbag millionaires, who greedily grab everything, has profoundly shocked [us]."

Of course, I was very interested in the artists' time in Detroit. The city had been one of the hardest hit by the Depression, 50% unemployed. I was shocked to read about the Ford Hunger March. Ford had reduced salaries and laid off workers, and since the workers lived in Ford housing they became homeless as well. Four thousand marched in freezing weather to the gate of the Rouge River plant to be met by bullets and fire hoses, killing four people. River and Kahlo arrived a month after the event.

Stahr addresses each painting created by Kahlo, explaining the work and its symbolism in detail, including the self-portrait made for her estranged lover, the groundbreaking paintings about her abortion and the miscarriage that spurred a traumatic 'rebirth' as had her bus accident when she was eighteen years old.

Stahr addresses the duality "at the root of Frida's sense of self," part of her "search for a unification of opposites, as the Aztecs and alchemists espoused."

Kahlo's deeply personal art defied convention, delving into female experiences never depicted in art before. In comparison, Rivera's masterpiece murals at the Detroit Institute of Art look to the past, glorifying the pre-Depression industrial worker and the scientists and entrepreneurs who created industry.

Memorialized in Rivera's mural, Edsel Ford and William Valentiner
chose Rivera to paint the walls of the DIA courtyard 

These same industrialist millionaires were aiding Hitler, Ford a known anti-semite, and oil companies supplying fuel and poisonous gasses to the Nazis.

After Detroit, they went to New York City where Rivera was to create a mural for the new Rockefeller Center and a battle over a patron's control of an artist's content played itself out. It could have happened in Detroit, but the scandalous murals drew record crowds to the DIA and turned around their finances.

"Love is the basis of all life," Stahr quotes Kahlo. Love of country, for friends and family, sexual love, for home. Her relationship with Rivera was conflicted, their love affairs rending their marriage, resulting in divorce and remarriage.

This is a revealing and deep study of Kahlo that truly educated me while engaging me emotionally with its subject.

I was given a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Frida Kahlo in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist
by Celia Stahr
St. Martin's Press
On Sale: 03/03/2020
ISBN: 9781250113382
hardcover $29.99; $14.99 ebook

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States of America (1932) 

Learn more about the DIA exhibit at
https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2015/03/diego_rivera_and_frida_kahlo_i.html

The Velveteen Daughter: "Genius Touched with Madness"

The Velveteen Rabbit is a well known and well-beloved children's book by Margery Williams Bianco. That Margery's daughter, Pamela, was a child prodigy in art has been forgotten, but a new book by Laurel Davis Huber will soon correct this lapse of collective memory.

Huber's novel is compelling and affecting, the story of a girl who yearns for love. As in her mother's book, she seeks the love that will make her 'real'.

Margery and Pamela both speak in the novel, with chapters skipping back and forth in time in a paced revelation.

Pamela's father pushed her into the art world as a child genius; Margery tried to hold him back so Pamela would have a normal childhood, developing her talent organically. Pamela wanted to please her father. Her art was displayed when she was twelve; she was a sensation.

"This wonderful child," Gabriel D'Annunzio wrote after seeing a sketch she had done, aged eight, "whose name is like the name of a new flower. The drawings of a phenomenal girl artist are like flowers, delicate, fragile, wind-blown, sprung from the enchanted soil of fairy land."

When a girl she developed an attachment to Richard Hughes, a charismatic young poet who became close to the Bianco family. She created a fantasy that they would marry. When the much older Richard became engaged it caused a crisis for the emotionally fragile Pamela and resulted in hospitalization.

Over the next years her fixation on Hughes suffered many ups and downs until it became clear he had no intention of marrying Pamela. Hughes is known for his novel A High Wind in Jamaica.

While pursuing her art in New York City during the 1920s Pamela fell in with a young man and as a lark they married, resulting in a child, although they never lived together.

Pamela struggled with mental illness, causing great lapses in her artistic output. Late in life married and supported by her husband returned to art.

In the background is the story of Margery's sister and her disastrous marriage to Eugene O'Neil. Pamela encounters art world denizens including Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Whitney Vanderbilt.

Huber's meticulous research has resulted in historical fiction that has great emotional appeal.

The Velveteen Daughter
Laura Davis Huber
She Writes Press
Publication Date: July 11, 2017
$16.95 paperback
ISBN: 9781631521928

Venice scenes by Alberto DiVIty, 20th Century Impressionism

Two small paintings of Venice by DiVity hang in my bedroom. Alberto DiVity was born in 1900 in Italy and painted impressionistic scenes from Venice, Paris, and rainy city scenes. He was quite prolific.

The paintings came to me through strange circumstances.

My grandfather Lynne O. Ramer passed in 1971. Grandma was only 52 when my grandfather died. In 1972 I was married and my grandmother was cajoled into joining in to try to catch my bouquet. She caught it! Before a year had passed she had met Milo, who had been a widower for 25 years, and they married a few days before my first anniversary.

Milo had built a home for his wife and daughter, both who died young. Afterwards he kept his home well decorated, calling upon interior decorators from the finest stores.

When my grandparents felt the need to move into a condominium, these paintings left Milo's walls for my family's wall.

I always loved the texture of the thickly applied paint, likely with a palette knife, the deft brush strokes, and the impressionistic style. The colors are wonderful, those hazy blue grays with a hint of green, the warm yellows and reds of the buildings, and the splash of bright red    on the gondolas. The dark buildings on the right side have a nice architectural detail and frame the water 'street' scene nicely. DiVity used pure white paint to highlight the water and ropes and boat outlines.

 

Five years ago my father passed and I inherited my family home. The original frames were dated and ugly: a yellowed cream frame with gold flecks. I did not think they set off the art well. I had them reframed in dark wood with copper highlights, with a scalloped effect that mirrors the building's silhouettes.

 

After reading about Venice in Vivaldi's Virgins, I am noticing these paintings all over again.