“Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” at the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, centers on a luxuriant installation in the institution’s grand old Conservatory. A long walkway is flanked by scores of plants that are, or reasonably may be, associated with the artist. Jacaranda, oleander, philodendron, roses, sunflowers, fuchsia, marigolds, palms, ferns, fruit trees, and many varieties of cacti and succulents are among those which grew, and in some cases still grow, in the walled garden of La Casa Azul, Kahlo’s stunning home in Coyoacán, a high-bohemian neighborhood of Mexico City. She wore some of the flowers—gardenias, dahlias, bougainvillea—to accent her flamboyant Tehuana hairdos and dresses. Other plants are depicted in a small exhibition of her paintings, drawings, and prints which the Botanical Garden has assembled. It’s the first Kahlo show in New York in more than a decade—too long, for an artist whose prestige and influence, worldwide, have ballooned in that time.
Kahlo was born in La Casa Azul in 1907, shared it with her husband, Diego Rivera, and died there in 1954. Now a museum, it is effulgent with bold color—unforgettably, the potent indigo of the exterior—and filled with her domestic objects, studio gear, and immense collection of folk art. The garden was itself a kind of collection, which Kahlo curated with botanical sophistication and zeal. Some of its architectural elements have been reproduced for the show by the celebrated stage designer Scott Pask. Among them is an eccentric, seven-foot stepped pyramid that Rivera designed, and painted rose, blue, and yellow. Sections of the wall are also replicated at the Botanical Garden, including one inscribed with the dates of the couple’s marriage, 1929-54. (The span skates over 1939-40, the year of a divorce that ended in remarriage.) Outside the greenhouse stands a fence of tall cacti, which is a copy of one that still surrounds a two-part, sleekly modernist house in the affluent San Angel neighborhood of Mexico City, where Kahlo and Rivera lived from 1934 to 1939.
Kahlo’s gardening was of a piece with her art, in asserting a nationalist mythos that extended even to her menagerie of pets: monkeys, parrots, turkeys, an eagle, and a pack of dogs that included Mexican hairless Xoloitzcuintles. What Rivera did on a monumental public scale, in murals picturing Mexico’s storied past and hoped-for future, Kahlo performed—and lived—privately. Even some of the nonnative plants in her garden told apposite stories. Calla lilies came to Mexico with slaves from Africa, and Chinese chrysanthemums arrived aboard Spanish galleons. By today’s gardening standards, not much of the show’s flora is particularly exotic. Even less is what you could call understated. Like everything else about Kahlo, her horticulture commands attention and rewards it with jolts of vicarious, insatiable ardor, if you open your eyes, mind, and heart to her.
Kahlo today inhabits international culture at variable points on a sliding scale between sainthood and a brand. The Botanical Garden show, besides being beautiful, can seem either reverential or exploitative. It’s really both, to a degree beyond the institution’s previous star-powered exhibitions devoted to the gardens of Charles Darwin, Claude Monet, and Emily Dickinson. Like those shows, this one combines scholarly integrity, aesthetic flair, and a calculated occasion, as if any should be needed, for a visit to the two hundred and fifty acres of Eden in the Bronx. Uniquely, Kahlo’s persona blended profound emotion and defiant vulgarity. The world has taken her up at both extremes. Her spirit vibrates in the greenhouse air. But it can’t make you forget that, for twenty-two bucks at the gift shop, you can become the owner of a Frida oven mitt. Among modern paintings, only Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” rivals Kahlo’s self-portraits as an object of alternating awe and burlesque: a template for kitsch that can’t wear out, because the authenticity of the original will never cease to provoke and disturb.
You know what Kahlo looked like. How she looked—including how she gazed—is the lifelong subject of her art. It is intimate and epic, and prototypically feminist. Kahlo was clear that her sexual piquancy, peculiar facial hair and all, was indispensable to her opportunities in a world ruled by powerful men. (She married one; seduced others, notably Leon Trotsky; and charmed, when not alarming, the rest, among them John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Henry Ford.) The self-portraits display her glamour but also assess it, coolly, and use it as an instrument of her spiritual and political values. She identified with Mexico to the point of falsifying her birth date to match the first year—1910—of the revolution. The self she portrayed is a fictional creation based on her biography, as the daughter of a German-Jewish father and a mestiza mother, and the sufferer of debilitating injuries incurred in a trolley accident when she was eighteen.
The cyclone of Kahlo’s life and legend, not to speak of present-day Fridamania, gives way to dead stillness when you stand face to face with her best paintings. “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” (1940), a masterpiece in the Botanical Garden show, was intended as a farewell gift to a lover, the Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, when she remarried Rivera. It presents Kahlo in a plain white blouse, with a thorned vine twisted around her neck, drawing drops of blood, and a dead hummingbird with outstretched wings, worn like a crucifix. A monkey toys with the vine at one shoulder; a black cat stares from behind the other. A background of ornamental vegetation includes what may be a zinnia and a fuchsia, which appear to be morphing into diaphanous insects like the two silver filigree butterflies in Kahlo’s hair.
A good deal of symbolism from Mexican folklore and Aztec mythology inflects the painting—folk wisdom deemed a dead hummingbird an amulet to induce a lover’s return. But, as always with Kahlo, any referential meaning is as likely humorous as it is portentous, if not both. In the show are two rambunctiously crude fantasy portraits, a drawing and a painting, of one of her heroes, the great horticulturist Luther Burbank—“who grew wonderful fruits and flowers,” she explained in a letter to her mother. He is seen emerging from the trunk of a tree whose roots enwrap a corpse. (She and Rivera visited Burbank’s private garden—also his burial site—in San Francisco.) “Two Nudes in a Forest” (1939) depicts a light-skinned woman resting her head in the lap of a dark-skinned one, watched by a monkey in a landscape of tropical plants, some thriving and some dying. Kahlo painted it for the actress Dolores del Rio, with whom she is said to have had an affair.
In “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird,” the expression in Kahlo’s eyes can seem, in flickering alternation, to challenge the viewer or to lose focus, as if engrossed in thought. The ambiguity gains intensity from Kahlo’s paint handling. Her touch delivers the key drama of her art: living in sensuous and suffering flesh. Her colors, which tend to absorb light rather than to radiate it, reinforce a sense of the painting as a solid presence. It is self-sufficingly, even stonily, proud. Kahlo disdained pathos.
As it happens, New York is host to another show of works by a woman who was half of an artistic power couple. “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,” at the Museum of Modern Art, surveys the activity of the whimsical conceptualist on a scene—of downtown avant-gardist art, music, and dance—that was as self-consciously trailblazing, though in a more rarefied way, as that of Mexico City between the world wars. Of course, Ono is forever labelled as the woman who broke up the Beatles—as if the Beatles had no say in the matter—casting her as something between a brand and a pariah. (I’ve been told by members of Gen X that they grew up deciding to like Ono based largely on how much their boomer parents despised her.) But her union with John Lennon, which began in 1966, when he attended a show of hers in London, was as consuming as Kahlo’s was with Rivera, and proved, also after a period of separation, as enduring.
Ono arose in an international movement called Fluxus—so dubbed by the artist George Maciunas, in 1961—which gloried in viewer-befuddling tactics that were derived, distantly, from Dada and, more nearly, from the works of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. To think was to do, for the Fluxus group; and to do as little as possible, yet to have an effect, motivated Ono. For her most famous work, “Cut Piece” (1964), shown on looped projected film at moma, she sat impassively on a stage as volunteers from the audience scissored off bits of her clothing. “Yoko Ono” is long on twee conceits (“Send the smell of the moon,” a text piece instructs) and on sentimentality of the everyone-is-an-artist ilk.
moma’s anointing of an artist who, the catalogue reports, has close to five million Twitter followers coincides, rather unfortunately, with another celebrity-mongering affair at the museum, the all but universally panned “Björk.” But “Yoko Ono” differs, in documenting a career that, while minor, sheds light on a generally overshadowed epoch of art history. ♦
