Ruth Leon recommends.. Frida Kahlo – A Life of Pain
Ruth Leon recommendsFrida Kahlo – A Life of Pain
On Sunday it will be 70 years since Frida Kahlo died. The ground-breaking Mexican artist was best known for her vivid and explorative self-portraits.
Her life was eventful, full of incident, pain and art. She met and interacted with some of the most significant people of her time – Trotsky, Georgia O’Keeffe, Diego Rivera, many others – and had affairs with most of them. Her art was supremely personal, she painted herself in many guises and didn’t stint on depicting her suffering, mental and physical.
There are many films about Kahlo but I’ve chosen this one by Professor Graeme Yorston, an academic psychiatrist who is an expert in the connections between mental health and the arts. It’s a bit dry and pedagogical, but it’s the only one that simply tells who she was, what she did, and what happened to her, without a lot of editorialising, hagiography, or criticism. “Just the facts, Ma’am”, in other words.
Never understood the attention for this narcissistic woman, whose work is cheap and in advertising style, insisting to proclaim her pain to the world in endless repetition.
Compare with the self portraits of painters of the past.