Hello, Kahlo

Gilcrease photo exhibition offers insight into the multi-faceted life of Frida Kahlo

“I suppose I figured she would’ve had more affairs,” I said to a friend over drinks. Having just left the exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray” at Gilcrease Museum, I was still replaying Muray’s photographs of Kahlo in my head. 

“Why?” my friend asked.

Notorious, among many things, for her volatile marriage to the famed Mexican painter Diego Rivera, it seemed strange to me that Kahlo stayed married for so long. Anyone somewhat familiar with Kahlo’s story might wonder the same. The show at Gilcrease sheds light on that question.

The exhibition tells a visual narrative of Kahlo as seen and understood by Nickolas Muray, a revolutionary photographer, advertising mogul, Olympic athlete, and Kahlo’s longtime lover. The photos also depict Muray, Rivera, and the many chaotic compulsions of their romantically triangulated relationship. 

But the meat of the show is in what’s happening for these individuals off the canvas.

“They’re very complicated people living in interesting times,” Gilcrease associate curator of history Mark Dolph explains. “They didn’t have a dull existence.” 

At 21 years old, Hungarian-born Muray immigrated to the US to pursue color photography. He quickly worked his way up in the 1930s photography scene, capturing photos of the who’s who of the New York City literary, fashion, and pop culture elite. During this heyday, a Mexican photographer named Miguel Covarrubias invited him to vacation in Mexico, where he met Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida. 

The encounter sparked a heated affair between Kahlo and Muray that would span ten years, an intimate friendship between them that continued until her death in 1954, and 20 years’ worth of telling photography to color both. 

When Kahlo and Muray met, she was relatively unknown. Her status as a pop icon didn’t come to fruition until the late 1980s, when Madonna famously began buying her work. 

“I’m just speculating here,” Dolph offers, “but Madonna is kind of an outsider figure, and Kahlo certainly is, and I think she appeals to people on the margins, outsiders in all kinds of ways.” 

Fast forward to 2016, when more than 30 of Muray’s best shots of Kahlo and her inner circle hang in a traveling exhibit at Gilcrease, augmented by handwritten correspondence between Kahlo and Muray and prints of a few of Kahlo’s finest works. Dolph has already seen it pull in a new and curious demographic to the museum. 

“I think a viewer brings—probably to any exhibit, but I think more so with this type of exhibit—their own search for a relationship with the art or the artist. There’s this theme of pain—whether it’s emotional pain or physical pain, as Frida struggled with for most of her life. 

“And people see many different things in Frida Kahlo. I can see one thing, and you might see something else. She’s this very multi-faceted, multi-personality persona.” 

The photographs show Frida both posed and candid, all stunning in their composition and narrative depth. Each highlights a different aspect of Kahlo’s life: art, pain, emotional turmoil, marriage, infidelity, family, fashion, and desperation—all sharing space on a wall. 

Kahlo wore her emotions with an unapologetic fierceness, her signature brow furrowed into a sign of overt contempt in some shots, half of it raised in coy suggestion in others. Every image seems to communicate something different to Muray himself, as if through image was the only way she could express what she was thinking to the man behind it, and the only way for him to understand it. 

“I think you get a sense of her personality,” Dolph said. “It seems to swing on a pendulum from what we used to call manic-depressive: from high highs to low lows.”

But the exhibit is less about Kahlo’s life than it is about Muray’s doting existence on the periphery of it, and his attempts to quite literally capture it.  Put more simply: it’s about romance, and how easily love sways between adoration, exasperation, indifference, and possessiveness. 

The photos belie a central reality: Frida is filtered through Muray’s longing gaze. In this sense, who’s to say if we’re really seeing the “real” Frida?

A caricature shows Muray in fencing attire depicted as a lady-killer, with his foot proudly planted on the back of an attractive, fallen woman. It’s an overt nod to his power—Muray as the master of color, composition, and consummation. In this sense, one could argue that the show is really about capturing the female: the woman as object, the woman as conquest, the woman as every archetypal character in between. 

The exhibition also features handwritten letters passed between Kahlo and Muray, perhaps the truest representation of Kahlo in the show. 

In one letter, she details her impatience with the pretensions of high-brow artists and the intellectual elite in 1930s Paris: “I would rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas then have anything to do with these ‘artistic bitches’ of Paris.” 

For more from Megan, read her article on Living Kitchen.