- Venue
- Pallant House Gallery
- Location
- South East England
A marriage made in politics, art and society that was trampled by affairs, individual career paths and passionate heartbreak would best describe the couple presented in this exhibition.
It is infrequent to find shows that display works by both artists; not to be forgetting exceptional portrait photographs by Nickolas Muray, a colleague of the pair; yet the biggest name known to artists is arguably not the man who was voted one of the greatest mural artists and indeed modern painters in the world but rather his wife, Kahlo, whose influential work captivated and withdrew audiences for its borderline surrealist/outsider genres and its most common, unending subject matter: the artist herself. The Pallant House arguably present a history of Rivera to audiences that are not familiar with his softer, cubist, experimental, Renaissance-inspired studies whilst Kahlo’s work can be agreed stays transposed in style, rarely undergoing alterations in imagery or reality.
Undoubtedly, the minimal space of the gallery seems an obstacle to viewer’s unfamiliar to Kahlo’s deeper ambitions and Rivera’s historical genre-political-blending, yet the small confines of the space do well to present works from a collection that favoured Kahlo and grant her an adequate spotlight she would have adored. Just like any display of Kahlo’s small, portable ‘diary paintings’, the exhibit delivers sumptuous foliage and nature-inspired themes alongside the more mature themed expressions that revealed a tortured soul and talented spirit. In a painting that excellently captures Kahlo’s divided personalities and characters that both desired and rejected her adulterous working husband, Self-Portrait as a Tehuana or (Diego in My Thoughts) 1943, Kahlo is depicted at first as one of her trademarked traditional self-portraits before it becomes apparent she is dressed for a traditional Latin-American Quinceañera (a girl’s coming-of-age ceremony) that suggests the artist’s maturation for life after her life-changing accident at 18 years old whilst the image of Rivera on her forehead suggests Hindu-Buddhist influences.
Both artists appeared on the surface to be match-made, nevertheless seeking solitude from each other to create art that ultimately adapted to world events at the times including trips to America, the rise and fall of Communism and industrial change in a modern world. In a haunting portrait painting, Self-Portrait on Bed or (Me and my Doll) 1937, Kahlo expresses bereavement for a miscarried unborn child with a poorly imitated doll and further dwells her viewers into her uncompromising gaze. This collection from Jacques and Natasha Gelman is small but contain standout works that systematically reveal the collectors’ own affiliation with social hierarchy and the arts as a power struggle, complicated by an undying love that is manifested by entries from Kahlo’s diary and Rivera’s charged murals and representations of Mexican life, politics and Natasha Gelman amongst natural lilies. The image that Kahlo presented to the world was not always herself, with a husband who acted as her first teacher, and somehow she overcame more than most people suffice in a lifetime to become a symbol of feminine, artistic inspiration.
