Latest news with #Kahlo
Hypebeast
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
New Frida Kahlo Museum is Coming to Mexico City
Summary A new museum dedicated to the life and legacy ofFrida Kahlois set to open this September in Mexico City's historic Coyoacán district. The museum, Museo Casa Kahlo, will be housed in the Casa Roja, a family residence once owned by Kahlo's parents, with the transformation helmed by New York-based architecture firmRockwell Group. Museo Casa Kahlo will feature rotating exhibitions and contemporary art shows, with a spotlight on Mexican, Latin American, and women artists, enriching the artist's already celebrated legacy. Additional artifacts on view include photographs, dolls jewelry, clothing and letters from the artist's childhood. The new museum offers a complementary experience just a few doors down from the famous Casa Azul, Kahlo's childhood home. While Casa Azul, operated by the Fideicomiso de los Museos Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo trust, showcases personal artifacts and artworks by Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera, Casa Roja will focus on Kahlo's early life, her influences, and her cultural environment. 'This is a dream long held by our family,' said Mara Romeo Kahlo, the artist's granddaughter and heir. 'Frida's legacy belongs to the world, but it begins here — on this land, in these homes, and in the culture that shaped her.' Museo Casa Kahlo will open its doors on September 27.
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Mexico City to Welcome a New Frida Kahlo Museum
A new museum dedicated to the artist Frida Kahlo's life and work, Museo Casa Kahlo, will open this fall in Coyoacán, Mexico City, members of the Kahlo family announced on Thursday. The museum, designed in part by Rockwell Group, will be located at Casa Roja, a private residence purchased by Frida Kahlo's parents and handed down to Frida and her sisters. It was ultimately given to the museum by Mara Romeo Kahlo, the artist's grandniece, her closest living relative and heir. 'Everyone knows Frida the artist,' Romeo said in an interview on Wednesday, but not 'the human being, my aunt. The family was very important for Frida because it was her support.' Casa Roja became the home of Frida's sister Christina, who then handed it down to her daughter Isolde, who then handed it down to her daughter Mara Romeo. It will be adjacent to the famed Casa Azul, the family home built by Kahlo's father, Guillermo, that is part of Museo Frida Kahlo and managed by a trust — Fideicomiso de los Museos Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo — administered by the central bank of Mexico. While Casa Azul tells the story of her life with her husband, Diego Rivera, the new museum will focus on Kahlo's origin story, starting with her father and his photography career, which helped set Kahlo on her artistic path. Adán García Fajardo, who is currently the academic director at the Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City, will be director of the museum. The creation of Museo Casa Kahlo is made possible in part by a newly formed nonprofit organization based in New York City, Fundación Kahlo, that was established by the Kahlo family to preserve the artist's legacy and promote Mexican, Indigenous, and Latin American art and culture. The Foundation will oversee the development, opening, and stewardship of the museum, as well as programs on Kahlo's artistic legacy and values. Chaired by Rick Miramontez, the New York public relations veteran known for representing Broadway shows, the foundation plans on establishing the Kahlo Art Prize, a biennial award recognizing visionary contemporary artists, and Las Ayudas, a grant program. 'I'm Mexican American, so there is that big connection,' Miramontez said in a phone interview. 'When I met the family and heard their goals, I thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be of service.'
Forbes
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo And Paris In Two Exhibitions
Frida Kahlo, 'Frieda and Diego Rivera (Frieda y Diego Rivera),' 1931. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, gift of Albert M. Bender. © 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. And Paris. Art history's most beloved and toxic couple both spent time away from their native Mexico in Paris. Rivera (1886–1957) lived there for roughly 10 years. He loved it. He made friends with figures who, like him, would become the icons of Modern art. He fell in love–not with Kahlo. Kahlo spent two months in Paris and mostly hated it. In typical Kahlo fashion, she fell ill. Kahlo's and Rivera's experiences with Paris are brought to life in vivid, intimate detail through a pair of unconnected exhibitions on view at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (Rivera) and the Art Institute of Chicago (Kahlo). Diego Rivera (Guanajuato, Mexico, 1886 - 1957, Mexico City, Mexico), 'Dos Mujeres (Two Women),' 1914, oil on canvas, 77 3/4 x 63 1/2 in., Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation Collection: Gift of Abby Rockefeller Mauzé. 1955.010. Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock's interest in Rivera stems from his Cubist masterpiece, Dos Mujeres (Two Women) (1914). Yes, Rivera had a Cubist phase, a phase developed in Paris during the height of the Cubist movement. Yes, the Arkansas museum possesses the painting as part of its permanent collection. The painting was gifted to AMFA by Abigail 'Babs' Rockefeller Mauzé (1903-1976), daughter of Standard Oil heir John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960) and Abigail 'Abby' Greene Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948), in 1955. It was the first art donation to the Museum by a member of the Rockefeller family and the first genuinely modernist work of art to enter an Arkansas museum collection; a masterpiece at that. It is one of Rivera's largest and most important Cubist works, a picture that would be prized at The Met or the Louvre or the Prado or anywhere else in the world. Other members of the Rockefeller family later gifted artworks to the Museum, many of which are now foundational to the collection. Babs Rockefeller was the older sister of Winthrop Rockefeller, who first moved to Arkansas in 1953 for business pursuits and later became the state's governor. The painting was given to Babs by her mother. How Abby Rockefeller acquired Dos Mujeres is not precisely known. AMFA research suggests she purchased it through Frances Flynn Paine, Rivera's American sales agent and a close friend of the Rockefellers. Rivera and the Rockefellers have a storied history. Famously, in 1932, Nelson Rockefeller commissioned Rivera to paint a giant mural on the lobby wall of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. Into the mural, Rivera, a communist, painted a portrait Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. This had not been part of Rivera's initial design. Discovering this, avowed capitalist Nelson Rockefeller asked the artist to change or remove it. No dice. Rivera was taken off the project and the mural–a treasure, a room-filling testament to artistic brilliance, a would-be, should-be, bucket list pilgrimage for art lovers worldwide–was subsequently destroyed. Despite this, many Rockefellers continued collecting and supporting Rivera throughout his career. The centerpiece of AMFA's 'Rivera's Paris' exhibition, on view through May 18, 2025, and free to visit, is Dos Mujeres (Two Women). Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886–1957), 'Portrait of Ilya Ehrenburg,' 1915. Oil on canvas, 43 3/8 x 35 1/4 in. (110.2 x 89.5 cm). Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas. Algur H. Meadows Collection, MM.68.12. Photography by Michael Bodycomb. As an artist, Rivera was a child prodigy. Following formal training at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City and showing great promise, Rivera's teacher, Gerardo Murillo, provided his pupil a letter of introduction to Spanish painter Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera. With money from a three-year study abroad grant provided by the Veracruz government and further supported financially by the sale of all 26 works he presented in his student exhibition, a 20-year-old Rivera arrived in Spain. He spent two years studying in Chicharro's Madrid studio with off hours at the Prado museum studying Velázquez, El Greco, and Goya. Rivera travelled widely throughout the country. He met Spain's famous 'master of light,' Joaquín Sorolla. In 1909, Rivera moved to Paris, at that time, a hotbed of radical artistic experimentation and the center of the Western and Modern art worlds. Cubism was at its peak. Picasso's Cubist and modernist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was produced in 1907. It shocked the world and remains one of the most important paintings in art history. 'I've never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso,' Diego Rivera said. He considered Picasso his 'idol.' The two met in Paris and became good friends. Rivera also befriended Amedeo Modigliani. And Piet Mondrian. Rivera's Paris circle additionally included Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jean Cocteau–the exhibition has a fantastic portrait of Cocteau by Rivera. Marc Chagall was there. And Matisse. Paris at the time was bursting with artists from Russian, Poland, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Latin America. Hundreds of Latin American artists like Rivera. Along with drawings and paintings by Rivera, works by his influences and contemporaries including Modigliani, Cézanne, Picasso, Chagall, Sorolla, and others are featured in 'Rivera in Paris,' providing a rich portrait of the artist's life at the time. In addition to the artworks, detailed wall text and contemporary photographs of the artists, their studios, and Paris taken at the time add delicious context. Between 1908 and 1914, Cubism was all the rage in the City of Lights. Substituting single-point perspective, Cubist artists portrayed subjects from multiple perspectives, usually using abstracted and fragmented forms. Rivera's Cubist period is little-known; this exhibition and Dos Mujeres seeks to correct that. One of the two women in Dos Mujeres is Russian artist Angelina Beloff (1879–1969). She stands at the right. She was also a Paris transplant. She and Rivera met through his Spanish artist-friend, María Gutierrez Blanchard, in Bruges, Belgium 1909. Beloff would become Rivera's common law wife in 1911, long before he met Kahlo. The other woman in Dos Mujeres, seated, is their close friend, fellow artist, and neighbor, Alma Dolores Bastián. Rivera briefly returned to Mexico in 1910-1911, a period that coincided with the Mexican Revolution. A massively successful show emboldened him financially and artistically to return to Paris. He also missed Beloff. Reunited in Paris, the couple lived together for the next 10 years, though never officially married. 'During all that time, she gave me everything a good woman can give to a man. In return, she received from me all the heartache and misery that a man can inflict upon a woman,' Rivera, as quoted in exhibition wall text, said. As Kahlo would be, Beloff was treated shabbily by Rivera. Perhaps along with Cubist theory he and Picasso commiserated over drinks on the Left Bank about their shared terrible mistreatment of women. Rivera and Beloff's relationship produced a son, Diego, who died at 14-months. This strained the couple and resulted in their separation. Rivera, typically, soon took a lover and had an on-again, off-again, multi-year relationship producing a daughter. As would be the case many years later with Kahlo, an ill-fated reconciliation with Beloff was attempted. AMFA organizers went through great pains in securing the loan of a wonderful 1914 still life with bottle by Beloff from a private collection in Mexico. Beloff ultimately moved to Mexico and had a relatively successful career there. Rivera's time in Paris coincided with the onset of World War I which brought terrible devastation to the city. Fortuitously, Rivera, Beloff, and a group of friends had left for Mallorca just prior to the war's beginning. Throughout his time in Paris, Rivera travelled widely across Europe. Shortly before leaving for good and returning to Mexico, the artist received a grant to visit Italy and saw and studied murals there. That's where he picked up the skill that would lead to his becoming the world's greatest muralist and one of its most famous artists–then and now. 'He didn't descend from the heavens fully formed as the Mexican muralist that we know him to be,' Catherine Walworth, Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr. Curator of Drawings at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, told 'Rivera in Paris' and Chicago's Kahlo in Paris exhibitions show how the two were both part of wide communities of artists, all sharing and shaping each other's work, defeating the 'Lone Genius' myth of artmaking. From the Renaissance through today, the world's greatest artists have influences, teachers, mentors, and colleagues they take direction and inspiration from. 'It's a cacophony of voices (in Paris) and (Rivera and his circle are) picking up on different influences, and some of those influences are Spanish religious paintings, El Greco, it's not always the extremely modernist sources we expect,' Walworth said. By the time Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921, he had spent most of his adulthood in Paris. 'What I love about this era, what everyone thinks of New York in the 1950s with the Abstract Expressionists being rowdy and competing with each other and hanging out at Cedar Tavern, there was a whole even wilder bunch of people in Paris doing that in the aughts and teens and twenties,' Walworth said. 'This moment is incredibly exciting, and Paris is not monolithic. It's not a story about one identity. These people came from all over the world.' Frida Kahlo, 'Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (Autorretrato con pelo cortado),' 1940. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. © 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © 2025 MoMA, N.Y. A 15-year-old Frida Kahlo first met 37-year-old Diego Rivera in 1922, the year after his return from Paris. Rivera was flush with all the currents of Modernism, gargantuan talent, career success, and stories of hobnobbing with fellow legends of the day while barnstorming around Europe. This was before the bus accident that nearly took Kahlo's life. The couple were reintroduced in 1927, entering a passionate love affair. Marriage, affairs, miscarriages, abortions, divorce, remarriage. 'Frida Kahlo's Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds,' on view through July 13, 2025, at the Art Institute of Chicago focuses on a pivotal period in 1939 when Kahlo resided at the Paris home of Mary Reynolds (1891–1950), an American avant-garde bookbinder, whose home was a hub for the city's artistic community. Kahlo was invited to visit Paris by André Breton, the architect of European Surrealism. He had visited Kahlo in Mexico the year prior. Rivera did not accompany her. The show illuminates the period of Kahlo's rise as an international artist and her chance meeting with Reynolds, a lesser known, but highly compelling artist and maker of innovative, one-of-a-kind book bindings. During Kahlo's first and only trip to Paris for two months early in 1939, she fell ill and was invited by Reynolds to recover at her home. This home—where Reynolds lived with long-time partner Marcel Duchamp—was a living work of art and abundantly installed with their own artworks, from unique books to paintings and sculptures from close friends and artists. In this space and in her friendship with Reynolds, Kahlo found new inspiration and set off down a new artistic path for the remainder of her career. The exhibition features extraordinary loans from public and private collections across the United States, Mexico, and Europe, and also draws on the Art Institute's own extensive Mary Reynolds Collection. Reynolds was born in Minneapolis. Following her death in 1950, Reynolds's brother, Art Institute of Chicago Trustee Frank Brookes Hubachek, collaborated with Duchamp to place her bindings and collection of books and papers at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. On view are 100 objects, including seven of Kahlo's most important self-portraits, a stupefying assemblage of her greatest works on loan from the greatest art museums in the world–the paintings for which she's become an icon, an unsurpassed self-portraitist, the best of the best, art history textbooks come to life–letters written by Kahlo recounting her time in Paris, book bindings, works on paper, photographs, and more. In addition to works by Kahlo and Reynolds, the exhibition also incorporates many artworks created for Reynolds by artists who socialized in her home and welcomed Kahlo into their circle, including Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and Constantin Brâncuși. These works form a collective portrait of the Paris avant-garde during Kahlo's time in Europe on the eve of World War II, particularly the Surrealists, a generation after Rivera first arrived there.
South China Morning Post
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong Ballet's Frida is a visually powerful production, if lacking in clarity
Hong Kong Ballet's latest production, Frida, explores the life and art of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Advertisement The full-length work by choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa was developed from a one-act ballet, Broken Wings, which she created for the English National Ballet in 2019, and the retitled two-act version for the Dutch National Ballet followed in 2020. Frida is not a narrative ballet as such. Instead, Lopez Ochoa offers a series of snapshots of key moments from Kahlo's life, interspersed with interludes featuring characters from her paintings. This kaleidoscopic concept would have worked as a one-act ballet, but a 90-minute production needs more clarity and structure to keep the audience engaged. This is a powerful production visually, full of striking, flamboyant images and there is some good choreography – the first duet for Kahlo and Rivera is outstanding; the scene where she miscarries, her body twisting into terrible contorted poses, is gruesomely dramatic. However, while Kahlo's admirers will enjoy the references to her paintings, their symbolism and the way Dieuweke van Reij's ingenious costume designs bring them to life, those not familiar with the paintings are likely to be left bemused. Advertisement Kahlo channelled her suffering – physical and emotional – into her art. She had a limp from childhood polio, and horrific injuries from a traffic accident when she was 18 left her struggling with pain and disability for the rest of her life.
Axios
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Frida Kahlo exhibit opens at VMFA with rarely seen art
Frida Kahlo is taking over the VMFA for the next six months. Why it matters: The Richmond museum is the second place in the country to host the exhibition, which opens Saturday. The big picture:"Frida: Beyond the Myth" vows to move past the commercialized portrayal of the 20th-century Indigenous Mexican artist and her famous eyebrows. Axios got a sneak peek this week: It weaves you through the defining moments of Kahlo's life, captured through the lens of her father in the early years and, later, those close to her. You get to see her as a kid, defying gender norms while wearing her dad's three-piece suit in a family portrait. Through her paintings and drawings, you see her process miscarriages, and the back-to-back betrayals from her husband Diego Rivera. Yes, but: The exhibit doesn't reduce her art and life to just her suffering. It instead shows how her disabilities — which include chronic pain from a traumatic bus accident, an amputation and depression — shaped her will to live. They influenced her politics, queerness, rebelliousness, fashion and humor. "She was someone who really fought for her right and her freedom to express herself however she wanted, from the beginning of her life to the end," curator Sarah Powers told Axios. Zoom in: Where the exhibit thrives is in its design. Its walls are colored like the Casa Azul, the blue house Kahlo grew up and died in at the age of 47. There are terracotta-painted windows throughout that give glimpses into the works you'll see next — many of which have rarely been seen outside of Mexico, per the VMFA. And there are few chances to interact with the art, including a backdrop mimicking the " Frida on White Bench" photo. All the info and descriptions are provided in English and Spanish. What's ahead: Throughout these next six months, the VMFA will host events honoring Kahlo, including: April 5: ¡FridaFest!, a full day of live music, paintings and food from local Mexican restaurants. 1-7pm. April 25: A talk with Hayden Hererra, the author of the Frida Kahlo biography. 6:30-7:30pm. $8. April 26: A film screening of "Frida" starring Salma Hayek. 1-4pm.
