BOOK REVIEW: FRIDA KAHLO - The Still Lifes

study of the still lifes of the famed Mexican woman artist

FRIDA KAHLO - The Still Lifes by Salomon Grimberg, Foreword by Hayden Herrera. Merrell Publishers, London and New York; merrellpublishers.com; Rob.Moore@60cyclemedia.com. 2008. 176 pages. $45.00 hardcover, 9" x 10", ISBN 978-1-8589-4437-1. color illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index.

Frida Kahlo painted some 40 still lifes, compared to the some 80 portraits for which she is known. Despite the difference in subject matter, her still lifes are as recognizable as her portraits. The still lifes display the same bright colors, which almost seem to shock they are so bright and unexpected. And with the still lifes, there is the rough collage compositional style, often including expressionistic forms and a seemingly careless mix of images. The still lifes, too, have Kahlo's surrealist aspects. Her paintings are recognizable for their mix of influences, imagery, and stark, though ambiguous statement.

Still lifes were not a way for Kahlo to distance herself from her artistic subject by the challenge of somewhat idiosyncratic, but nonetheless basically realistic reproduction or a tone of contemplation as with the still lifes of many painters. She put herself into her paintings of watermelons, bananas, grapefruit, flowers, corn, and other such subjects as much as she did in her self-portraits and portraits of others. There are the colors, the almost inventive colors; the unnatural arrangement, the mix of shapes often seeming riotous or incongruous, and the stray surrealistic touches. In Kahlo's still lifes, coconuts have tears coming from eye-like parts of their husks; a Mexican flag in planted in a watermelon, tropical birds are present.

Kahlo's still lifes "are as reflective of her internal reality as are her self-portraits," writes Grimberg, a psychoanalytic art historian who is one of the authors in the recently-published Frida Kahlo - Song of Herself. The artist's internal reality was colored mostly by "her struggle to master the fearing of loneliness and of confronting death." Along with giving biographical background on Kahlo and examining the tensions and hopes in her relationships as these topics shed light on Kahlo's paintings, Grimberg ties together details of Kahlo's life and both objects and qualities of particular still life paintings. With respect to the coconuts with tears, for instance, the author explains that the Spanish title "Lagrimas de coco" of one painting with such coconuts is a play on the Spanish "lagrimas de cocodrilo" for "crocodile tears." Kahlo hung the painting by her bed after it was returned by the woman physician who had commissioned it. It appears it a photograph of Kahlo in her bed shortly after she had one of her legs amputated. Grimberg draws the connection that the weeping coconut represents Kahlo's mood. And even in such a somber mood from her realization of her diverse, chronic health problems requiring painkillers and tranquilizers, Kahlo expressed her wry humor in the word play connected with the painting. Over and over, Grimberg's critiques and insights bring together biographical, artistic, temperamental, psychological, and psychoanalytical material to shed light on the complexities of Kahlo's personality, origins and subjects of her paintings, and the connections between these.

Though limited in scope, this "Frida Kahlo - The Still Lifes" contains material, analysis, and also pictures of art works which bring a fuller understanding of the perennially-appealing, beguiling Kahlo.