ruminations | Julie Mollins

An exhibition featuring the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera currently on show at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario
(AGO) would have sparked heated debate in the late 20th century, but in today’s post-feminist world the pairing sidesteps controversy altogether.

In the past, celebrating a woman artist side-by-side with her husband would have been seen by feminists as a sign of her oppression by the patriarchy. However, traditional feminist debate about women artists, which has historically centred on a fight for individual recognition in a male-dominated art world — so common in decades gone by — is not mentioned in the AGO show or in the exhibition catalogue.

Instead, curator Dot Tuer inverts the tradition that would have cast Kahlo in Rivera’s shadow and celebrates Kahlo’s artistic abilities, proposing that the powerful feminine themes of her work have eclipsed the outmoded activist bent of Rivera’s.

Rivera reached international renown as a communist mural painter in the 1920s, depicting the Mexican revolution and class struggle, while Kahlo — 20 years his junior — was at the time more modestly acclaimed by the surrealist movement and the Mexican art world for works focused on her own personal suffering.

“Rivera no longer looms larger-than-life in the public imagination as Mexico’s greatest muralist accompanied by a much younger and diminutive wife,” Tuer says in the exhibition catalogue. “Instead, Frida is seen as the iconic artist with Diego cast in a minor role as her much older and philandering husband.

“Numerous exhibitions have enshrined her as one of modernism’s most profound women artists, whose self-portraits embody both the physical suffering she endured after a debilitating bus accident and the spiritual anguish caused by Rivera’s infidelity and her inability to have children.”

Rivera’s reputation declined during the Cold War and with the rise of abstract expressionism, Tuer writes, his work now dismissed as cartoonish political propaganda, despite major retrospectives in Mexico City, London and Detroit since the mid-1980s.

These supportive claims for Kahlo’s work must surely mark sweet victory for such feminist art critics as Lucy Lippard, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock who struggled in the latter part of the 20th century to stake a place for forgotten women artists on gallery walls in the world’s major art collections.

Also for such artists as Judy Chicago who sought to generate valid “herstory” through her internationally recognised “Dinner Party” and “Birth Project” art exhibitions of the 1970s and 1980s.

The installations, which featured ceramic plates and tapestries, named women whose importance Chicago said had been largely written out of history. She argued that craft — typically ghettoized along with artistic women — should be considered art and that art made by women should be taken seriously by the establishment.

Such universal concerns led eventually to the creation of a women’s art museum in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1987.

“By its very existence, the National Museum of Women in the Arts challenges the unequal representation of female artists in other museums, in galleries, and in major shows and offers an important and national alternative space,” wrote art historian Alessandra Comini in the 1987 museum catalogue.

Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting, which closes at the AGO on Jan. 20, 2013, before re-opening at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art on Feb. 14, offers an unapologetic perspective on Kahlo as an equal with her husband, not as a victim toiling in his shadow.

More than 80 drawings and paintings, accompanied by photographs of the couple show how their lives were intertwined, despite troubles that led to their divorce and remarriage.

Not long before Kahlo died in 1954 at age 47, she referred to Rivera as “my child, my son, my mother, my father, my husband, my everything.”

Rivera referred to Kahlo’s death as the most tragic day of his life.

“Too late now I realised that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida,” he said.

Picture credit: Hospital Henry Ford, 1932, oil on metal, from the
Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico. Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society, New York.

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Addendum

I painted this plaster cast, a copy of one Kahlo wore and painted, for a production of a 1994 play titled “Frida K” produced at the Toronto Fringe Festival.

I wrote this eulogy to deliver at my aunt’s funeral, which was today at Vinters Park Crematorium. She died on May 1, 2012.

Lily was a lovely, lovely lady.

That’s what Paul Chisholm, a friend of my father’s from New Zealand wrote about Aunt Lily after he heard the news of her death. Paul met Lily and her husband Joe Parkes in London through my mother and father in the 1950s.

Lily and my mother had met in 1947 when they were working as maids in a rooming house in the Holland Park area of London.

The two were like sisters and as young women were almost inseparable. Lily often talked about how my mother would mysteriously procure a delicious punnet of strawberries and block of ice cream even before rations were lifted in post-war Britain.

My mother often tells tales of sitting “up in the gods” at many West End theatre productions, thanks to free tickets from producer Bill Linnet, for whom they each worked in home services at different times.

Although my mother moved to Canada in 1968, she and Lily remained in constant contact over the next 43 years by post, telephone and many transatlantic visits.

To my sister Tracey and I, Auntie Lily was magical – an angel, a fairy and a friend all rolled into one – her unconditional love most prized throughout both childhood and adulthood.

It’s unlikely anyone would contest Paul Chisholm’s view of Lily – a kind and gentle person who loved flowers, animals, children – and even adults.

No doubt the patience acquired during her years working as a telephonist and supervisor with the post office helped give her the ability to put anyone at ease in an instant.

Auntie Lily’s calm determination gave her the fortitude she needed to at times carry the weight of working, maintaining a household and looking after Joe Parkes, who suffered from tuberculosis and at times was unable to work.

She often put her own interests second in order to help others. Not only did she and Joe warmly welcome my Canadian father Carl when he and my mother became a couple and then married in 1959, but she also extended her friendship to my father’s colleagues, friends and family who came to England.

For instance, my Canadian Aunt Bettie gave birth to her eldest daughter in 1964 in Little Hadham, some 40 miles from London where her husband, my father’s brother, was working as a teacher. As a foreigner, she wasn’t expecting any visitors, but Lily made the trek from London more than once to see her. Bettie and Walter never forgot her kindness.

Perhaps one of Lily’s most remarkable attributes was that despite the hardships she endured, including the loss of Joe, she never became bitter. Maybe partly because of the great support she received after his death from Joe’s sister Doris, her brother-in-law Cecil and her brother Fred.

Throughout her 90-year-long life, she continued to develop important, meaningful relationships, including the one she had with Rob Tagg, whom she married in 1978, almost 10 years after Joe’s death.

With Rob she gained a step-daughter, Lynne, and two step-grandchildren, Nick and Melanie. The all-important Prince – her much-loved dog — also came with that marriage, which unfortunately ended four years later when Rob passed away. Some 30 years after that, Melanie and her husband Lee produced baby Sienna.

But there was another side to Lily – her resilience.

Her self-professed “Foremanism” – a playful reference to her maiden name and a strong streak of independence she considered part of her genetic make up – could also come into play.

Among the caring friends and neighbours who looked after her in her latter years, it is Dennis Edwards who tells the story of returning home from work one day to see her dangerously perched on the roof of her car port blithely painting her window frames – already well into her 70s.

His concern made her more aware about when she did her chores, and she would always giggle as she undertook a dangerous task, saying, “I hope Dennis isn’t watching.”

Lily’s legacy is the kindness, love, helpfulness and friendship from which we all so fortunately benefitted and which brought us here together today.