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- Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently dated back its rare Diego Rivera portrait of Frida Kahlo.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently dated back its rare Diego Rivera portrait of Frida Kahlo.
16 July 2024
The peculiar little picture was acquired by LACMA 20 years ago as a bequest from Bernard and Edith Lewin, former Southern California art dealers who were experts in Mexican paintings. However, it was not dated. For many years, knowledgeable speculation estimated that the portrait was painted "around 1939."
The designated date has now been safely moved back to 1935 by Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, as he declares in his article published yesterday bythe LATimes.
He writes:"Four years is just a slight alteration, to be sure, but not an insignificant one for reasons I’ll get to. Although Rivera included Kahlo, his wife and fellow artist, in more than one revolutionary mural that he painted on big government walls in Mexico City, as well as rendering her for a few prints and drawings, the little portrait (just 14 by 9¾ inches) is the only known easel painting of Kahlo that Rivera ever did. For that reason alone, it’s important."
While he was searching for Diego and Frida's photographs in the fascinating photographic archive held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, he made this discovery:
"The Smithsonian’s immense Juley archive numbers 3,500 artists’ portraits and 127,000 images of paintings, drawings and sculptures. As I flipped through the digital files on on my laptop, I wondered whether I might find anything visually related to these glass negative photographs, since they clearly were not among those donated to the museum. Suddenly, a surprise popped up on my screen.
LACMA’s little Kahlo portrait by Rivera stared back. The archive, assembled from carefully annotated company records, includes a black and white image of the painting. The date on the Juley photograph is unambiguous: 1935."
"The painting’s new date, 1935, was the year when Kahlo had had enough. She had undergone the physical and emotional trauma of yet a third miscarriage, walked out on her philandering and volcanic husband, got her own apartment in Mexico City, began an affair with American artist Isamu Noguchi and took off for New York, then Paris. Rivera’s portrait arrived at a turning point.
The new date raises questions. Before, Diego’s portrait of Frida was thought to be a hopeful expression of longed-for reunion amid all the tumult, painted as she appeared ready to perhaps reconcile. Now, the earlier date might frame the ethereal image as a memento of profound loss — a talisman for a severed relationship with a woman Rivera adored.
Differing dates suggest different intentions. That’s finally a problem for art historians to hash out, but I’d read the painting as a deeply felt keepsake, an artist’s hedge against potentially permanent loss. Rivera, even after reuniting, kept the Kahlo portrait in his studio until the day he died — through divorce, remarriage, career fluctuations, affairs and ultimately her 1954 death, three years before his own. For now, given the new date, that motive seems cogent — at least, it does unless something else turns up."
Read the full story at this link.
