LOOK at NY ART

06/13/2024

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05/04/2024

A wonderful Saturday doing what I love, leading two tours of incredible works of art at NYC art galleries. I am grateful for the sold-out tours today and for the wonderful feedback. I am convinced that this is what I was meant to do.

We started at David Zwirner on East 69th Street and moved North along Madison, starting with Brazilian painter Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, followed by a superb Dubuffet and Giacometti show at Nahmad Contemporary, Anselm Kiefer photography at Gagosian, and then Cara Nahaul paintings at Alexander Berggruen (and it was lovely that Alexander came out to see us and chimed in), an incredible group show at Mnuchin, then new paintings by Eric Fischl at Skarstedt and finally Wayne Thiebaud's delicious paintings of sweets and snacks at Acquavella.

www.lookatnyart.com

12/26/2023

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year. Start your New Year with a private New York City tour for friends or work colleagues exploring art galleries in TriBeCa, one of the hottest neighborhoods exhibiting Contemporary Art. Join me as I brief you on emerging artists having their first NYC retrospective. For instance, we will explore and discuss Constanza Schaffner's first solo show at Luhring Augustine. Born in Argentina and now a NY-based Contemporary artist, Schaffner's paintings explore the intersection of the poetic and rational, abstract and figurative.
Private tours are a full two hours, include 7 to 8 galleries, and start at $350 for groups of up to 10. It's a perfect group outing, team-building activity or gift for Valentine's Day. Clients say I bring art to life, making it accessible, and providing insights on why it's important or valuable.
Contact me at: www.lookatnyart.com

11/29/2023

In New York City, we are surrounded by the sculptures and astonishing legacy of six Italian brothers.

The masterly Piccirilli brothers set up a shop in the Bronx and used hammers and chisels to create some of the most important public sculptures in the city.

11/10/2023

TBT.
Pets are not just adorable companions.
For those of us without kids, they give us tremendous purpose.
My life has never been quite the same since Chico left me.
I know there is a little creature out there who will benefit from my love and care again, and who will bring me a great deal of purpose.
I am enjoying a break and travel, but they will arrive in 2024.

I find myself missing an enormous part of who I was and I understand how much love and care I can offer.

11/06/2023

At Look@NYArt, we know that art can bring people together, enable combined and careful looking, and spark new ideas and engaging conversation.
Contact me to arrange a NY-based customized art-focused team-building experience for your work colleagues, clients, and alumni association or club, or family and friends.
Ideal for groups of up to 20, I will customize an art gallery walk that meets your group's schedule, timeframe and interests. I will brief you group on all artists and discuss and guide a conversation on key works. We will include up to 7 to 8 galleries in NYC gallery-rich neighborhoods including Chelsea, the Upper East Side, TriBeCa, or the Lower East Side. I recently led a group for leaders at an international consulting firm who aimed to look at art that could spark creative forward-thinking. I have equally led tours for local alumni associations in NYC or can arrange a private tour if you will be visiting NYC.
If you are NYC-based, don't get stuck with the same ideas for holiday team outings or team-building outings. We can work with you to arrange an art gallery walk and a nearby drink or dinner gathering or even wine-tasting add-on. We can also arrange a visit to an artist's studio.

Visit us at www.lookatnyart.com

10/09/2023

Studying Picasso's body of work from his Summer in Fontainebleau, 1921. Among many other works, he painted two version of his Three Musicians, considered the culmination of his prewar cubist style. One is at MoMA in NYC and the other in Philadelphia.
A rather well-accepted hypothesis is that the three musicians represent:
1) Picasso himself as the Harlequin at center
2) his friend the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire as Pierrot (a French Pulcinella) on the left
2) and his friend and poet Max Jacob as a jolly drinking monk on the right, who had recently just moved into a monastery.
Picasso depicted harlequins often and early on as they were frequent characters in popular culture. Picasso had actually designed costumes and sets for Igor Stravinsky's 1920 Pulcinella, a ballet based on commedia dell'arte.
MoMA's director Alfred Barr Jr. fought to acquire Three Musicians since 1936 when it was on sale for $10,000. He described it to Museum Trustee's at "really one of the greatest 20th Century paintings...which would distinguish our collection and above all would remove immediately the stigma of our not being sufficiently modern" Having been unable to raise the funds, Barr described his failure as the worst disappointment in his 7 years as director. It was finally acquired for MoMA in 1949 and described as "the culminating work of cubist, the most important movement in art of the first quarter of the century"

09/27/2023

October is usually a beautiful Fall month in NYC. This one is particularly special for me. Given that it's Hispanic Heritage Month, yours truly gets to lead two MoMA member tours on Saturday October 14th that will specifically focus on Latin American, Spanish and American Latinx artists across the MoMA collection. I will be offering two member tours on October 14th, one in Spanish and one in English. Please join if you can. Members can join group tours at special discount prices.
I get to include works by Mexican muralists including José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Surrealist objects by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Frida Kahlo and abstract works by Uruguayan Joaquín Gonzales Torres, Venezuelan artists GEGO and Jesus Rafael Soto, and Argentinian's like David Lamelas and Yente. We will look at and discuss photography by Mexican artists Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Gabriela Iturbide. I also get to speak to work by American-born contemporary Latinx artists. These includes Cuban-born Felix González-Torres, Peruvian-born Milagros De La Torre and Joey Terrill, a self-described gay Mexican-American Chicano from LA who arrived in NYC in 1981, spent time in Fire Island, and couldn't find tortillas anywhere. I confess I took the liberty to write to him today. I wanted him to know I love his work and thought we shared a great deal.
Please join MOMA to be able to attend one of these and get the discounted price. Group tours are usually for groups of at least 10 or more and start at $450. This is your opportunity to join other members and get a great tour through masterworks of the collection that are Latin American and Spanish.

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, join us for a guided tour of masterworks by Latin American and Spanish artists across three floors of MoMA’s collection galleries. We’ll look at the ways in which these artists explore cultural identity and consider the influence of groundbreaking art m...

09/27/2023

The years before WWI were a time of some of the most radical and forward-thinking art of all time. This included Picasso and Braque's Analytical Cubism, Malevich's Russian Suprematism, Mondrian's earliest abstracted grids, Kandinsky's early abstract paintings and the recently-discovered work of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint.
Here is the thing: WWI was a much longer, more deadly and entirely more traumatic war than originally expected. Not only that, it largely coincided with a Russian Revolution. Art significantly changed after that war.
The Return to Order was an artistic movement after WWI which brought about a return to more traditional approaches toward art and a rejection of the extreme avant-garde trends leading up to the war. There was a post-war sense that it was best to hold on to tradition and to stop pushing boundaries.
To share a great example of this trend, I offer you a comparison of Picasso's Ma Jolie (1911-1912) and Picasso's Three Women at the Spring (1921). In 1911, Picasso was deeply committed to challenging how figures and space should be depicted. His Analytical Cubism explored how figures might look if we were to get rid of traditional notions of perspective, seeing them from every single direction, front, side and back. In Ma Jolie, we can just barely make out his lover Marcelle Hubert. By 1921, Picasso presents us with this group of significantly more classical muses by a Spring. While he has given them an overly voluminous and weighty presence, he presents them in a way that is readily readable in a more traditional style.

09/25/2023

One of the late artist Ashley Bickerton's most iconic works is his Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) from 1987-88. I was coincidentally studying this particular work at MoMA when Gagosian announced a retrospective of his work (having gained representation by the gallery and having died of ALS the same year, 2022)
Bickerton was one of the four main artists who made a big splash and were deemed "the next best thing" when presented at Ileana Sonnabend's SoHO gallery in the late 80s. They went on to be described as Neo-Geo, "Masters of Hype" and more. Some art critics thought this was brilliant and others thought it was garbage.
In this three-dimensional assemblage and portrait, made with an industrial signboard, Bickerton is referencing Van Gogh's tormented self-portraits at Arles. But, he does not use oil on canvas. He has created a work covered in logos that suggests that a portrait is best displayed as a series of consumer brands that someone drifts toward. Are we really our face or are we best represented by the ci******es we smoke, snacks we eat or gasoline we put in our car? Not only that, the portrait is not his own but rather that of his alter-ego brand, Susie. He created a brand called Susie, with its own logos and signatures on the works. Given his use of readymades, I find his use of an alter-ego a potential homage to Marcel Duchamp's alter-ego Rrose Selavy. There is something to be said for the structure appearing like a shield.
While artists like him reference consumer products like Pop Art did, earlier artists first elevated consumer goods to the level of art. At this time, these artists are essentially making these part and parcel of who we are, stating that they have taken over our life, critiquing them, mocking them as ubiquitous and kitschy in the case of Koons.

09/25/2023

If you've ever seen sculptures by the late Pop Artist George Segal, you will recall that they are usually life-size and often white. In 1961, the husband of one Segal's students worked at Johnson & Johnson and asked him if he could explore whether their new plaster bandage material for broken bones might prove useful in art projects for children.
Segal went home with these and placed the plaster bandages on his own body, essentially molding them to appear as himself. It is in this way that Segal created his first-ever sculpture, Man at a Table (1961) a white life-sized self-portrait. This would be the beginning of a life-long career devoted to plaster-based life-size sculptures that were often shown in Pop Art circles but which focused less on the consumer products (like Warhol or Oldenburg) and more on the consumers themselves in realistic tableaus.
There is a significantly deeper read to his sculptures and the material he uses. His placement of bandages on human bodies is not only a practical way of creating sculptures.
Segal was born in 1924, the child of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father would go on to lose all of his brothers to the n***s. Upon placing them, bandages protect and hug humans. He went on to create "bandaged" sculpture memorials to honor both the people who fought during the Stonewall Riots in Gay Liberation (1980) as well as Holocaust (1982), for a commission for a park in San Francisco.
Join me on a tour of Chelsea galleries to view and discuss Segal sculptures currently on view: www.lookatnyart.com

09/19/2023

This late afternoon, I took notice: the natural light coming through my window illuminated my sculpture by The Recycle Group, "Breaking News," making it even more haunting and spectacular than usual.
Russian artists made their sculpture series using strong but malleable plastic mesh, normally used to protect trees from insects. Their figures wear elaborate robes and make us recall brilliant Baroque sculpture by Bernini and the stories and aesthetic of biblical time. Yet, they surprise us with an anachronistic and contemporary twist with the three figures eagerly look at the breaking news on their I-Pad and smartphone.
I love this work because it's beautifully crafted and became it it provokes so many thoughts and possible reads. Has WiFi taken over spirituality? Would biblical figures be on their smartphones if they were with us now? Has the never-ending news cycle at our fingertips become our new religion?
If you want to know more about the artists, here is their page https://recycleartgroup.com/info/biography/
And here is my shoutout to Richard Taittinger Gallery because Richard Frerejean Taittinger represents incredible artists and it's been a pleasure to collect a few wonderful works from him throughout the years.

09/14/2023

It is delightful to get the opportunity to look at and discuss a masterwork like this one with tour guests: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí (1931).
A few things to know. Surrealism was an art movement with formal manifestos and members. Its founder, André Breton, was actually a Psychiatrist interested in both mental illness and in Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and the concept that there is another reality (a sub-reality) that is absent when we are awake but comes alive through symbols in dreams.
Dalí's paintings are entirely figurative, far from abstract, and rendered with enormous attention to minute details. In that regard, they are a throwback to the detail we saw in a 15th Century Jan van Eyck Arnolfini Portrait than to most art from the early 20th Century.
The Persistence of Memory contains some of the characteristics often found in Surrealist painting: Dislocation and Condensation. Dislocation refers to objects being shown entirely out of context (Why would there be watches, and melting watches of all things, on a barren landscape?). Condensation refers to objects being brought together that normally wouldn't be (why would ants be attracted to watches?)
Dalí described melting watches as if they were Camembert cheese....smelly objects that wither, symbols of the passage of time. Ants on the gold watch are stand-ins for decay. The far-off cliffs do recall those from Dalís native Catalunya.
At center, we see a biomorphic figure, part otherworldly creature and partly familiar, arguably part Dalí's own profile...Take a look at the bottom portion of the figure and now imagine turning it 180 degrees to be upright. It looks like Dali's profile, nose, large eyelash and a snail coming out of his nose.
Dalí painted this work at a time when he was purposely inducing hallucinations. If the scene looks nonsensical and trippy, it is because it absolutely it is. He is sharing a reality that lives in dreams, beyond the reality we see while awake (Surrealism).

09/09/2023

On March 17th, 1960, New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller joined about 250 other guests at MoMA's Sculpture Garden.
They were there to watch Jean Tinguely "detonate" his new self-destructive work of art: Homage to New York. This performance piece involved watching a complicated highly-engineered, machine-like art- object destroy itself. The contraption was equipped to move in all sorts of ways, make sounds, create clouds of smoke, etc. In the end, it was pre-determined (in entirely analog manner) to die in front of the audience.
I have included a video of part of this performance. As it turns out, the art object starting getting a bit out of control, running the risk of burning attendees. The NY Fire Department interceded, axing the machine before it could entirely self-destruct.
Tinguely's iconic work arrived at a moment in the 1960s which artists sought to expand the possibilities of what is art. In particular, Performance Art sought to establish that art could be about a finite performance that has a beginning and and end, documented only through remaining evidence like photographs or documents of the performance. At MoMA you can see remnants of Tinguely's self-destructive art.
This is by far not only self-destructive artwork. You may remember the Banksy that self-destructed a few years back.

This is "Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York, 1960" by Museum Tinguely on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

09/08/2023

I have decided to end my after-hours tour tomorrow in a grand way, having a private group admire and reflect on James Rosenquist's massive F-111 from 1964-65. The work's title refers to the most advanced fighter aircraft available as the US embarked in the Vietnam war. Rosenquist had been involved with large-scale billboard advertising and presents us with a massive multi-wall painting with an array of dislocated objects: parts of the fighter jet, canned spaghetti, a slice of cake, an atomic bomb mushroom cloud and the face of a girl sitting under an old-style beauty shop hairdryer. While usually classified as Pop Art, and often compared to Warhol and Lichtenstein, Rosenquist brings massive scale and a surrealistic quality to the work by his combination of dislocated seemingly unrelated objects. F-111 has to do with the idea the America is creating destructive fighter jets to protect a highly consumer-focused society. Rosenquist specifically created a work that is so large that it's impossible to view all at once with our peripheral vision, suggesting that Americans at the time and even today are unable to see the full picture of what is happening

09/05/2023

My upcoming art tour will highlight major works of Modern Art from 1940 to 1970. One of my challenges is picking and choosing the works one might include in a fairly compressed hour and ensuring it crosses geographies. The Japanese post-war Avant-garde movement known as Gutai must be mentioned, including artists like Kazuo Shiraga, Saburo Murakami and Atsuko Tanaka. These artists aimed to make art unlike anything that came before. In particular, they chose a performative approach by which their own bodies were instrumental in creating the art. They broke away with easels and brushes, letting their own bodily movement create the artistic output. The painting you see was created by Shiraga using his feet on paint while holding on to ropes and performing an action above the painter surface. Saburo Murakami famously set up a series of papered curtains, and ran through them, tearing them apart to produce a work of art. Atsuko Tanaka wore electric dresses made of light bulbs and created paintings while dancing on a surface. Gutai translates into embodiment or concreteness. It is as if these artists believed in post-war Japan that they needed to be directly engaged with art to bring about something new and different from art that came before. By the way, this is an Instagram post being copied on FB. Off FB for Sep

08/30/2023

Insane that Facebook pulled my post because I shared and described two iconic works of art at major museums. Absurd. Amazing that art education is what you go after. Shame on you FB.

08/29/2023

American artists have often focused their attention on gas stations. Particularly in the Mid-20th Century, the US was known for its cars. Gas stations became ubiquitous across American interstate highways, and growing cities out West. American car culture reached its peak in the 1950s, with gas stations an integral part of it. Cars were central to movies like Rebel Without a Cause (1955) or books like Kerouac's On The Road (1957). I have put together a few works by American artists focused on these architectural structures, often bright due to highly-saturated reds, blues and other colors either on pumps or oil company signs. This could be an entire dissertation, but it's been on my mind on the eve of the opening of the largest-ever Ed Ruscha retrospective and first-ever solo show at MoMA.
These are Edward Hopper, Gas (1940), Ed Ruscha, Standard Station (1966), William Eggleston, Untitled (Nowell's Service Station), Webb, Mississippi (1969 )and Stephen Shore Chevron Station (1975). Enjoy

08/28/2023

So far, I've given tours of MoMA's 5th Floor masterworks (1880-1940). That tour still includes a great deal of figurative art whether Post-Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism, and more.
I am moving on to give tours of the 4th Floor (1940 to 1970). These are works that are abstract (more often than not) and which raise the bar on getting through to mainstream audiences. There are no more Cezanne bathers, Van Gogh irises or Monet Water Lillies. There are no more Leger machine-like women or paintings of melting clocks.
We are now in the world of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Minimalism, Op Art, Pop Art, Conceptual art. A great deal of this are will raise eyebrows if not properly explained or put in context. The ultimate question: Why is this important? Why is this here? Not that Russian Suprematism or Duchamp's Readymades were easy...
Once again, my challenge is how to create a compelling one-hour tour that can cover such enormous ground. Here is an initial selection of what I might include in the 4th Floor masterworks tour. Enjoy the selections. I welcome your comments or questio

08/23/2023

Our MOMA collection includes these original 1945 containers by Earl Tupper. We take these for granted but in 1945 these were groundbreaking new containers made of plastic. Their two biggest selling points were: food was preserved and their transparent walls allowed you to see how much food was left.
And yes, a woman came up with the clever idea to market them via Tupperware parties.

08/15/2023

While Tina Modotti was born in Italy, it makes sense to include her in my ucpoming tour of Latin American artists at MoMA. Having moved to the US at 16, and having modeled and acted in silent films in Hollywood, she met Modernist photographer Edward Weston in 1921. Weston became Photography mentor and lover both, and they moved to Mexico City in 1923.
It is from 1923 to 1930 that Modotti devoted her time in Mexico to Modernist and Lef-leaning Photography often focused on celebrating and empowering Mexican peasants and indigenous communities. She was a Modernist and also part of avant-garde Indigenism, a Post-Revolutionary movement that embraced and celebrating Mexico's indigenous roots and history of people from Mexico. She immersed herself in Mexican avant-garde circles, becoming friendly with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Russian ex-pats Sergei Eisenstein and Leon Trotsky. Before the Mexican Revolution, upper classes during Porfirio Diaz's 31-year dictatorship (Porfiriato) had focused on making Mexico more European, particularly French. After the revolution and downfall of the Porfiriato, artists in these circles focused on Mexico's indigenous heritage and the plight of workers (e.g. Frida proudly wearing embroidered tehuana dresses a great deal of time). Modotti would spend time photographing Tehuanas a great deal.
Modotti shot "Worker's Parade" (1926) on May 1st, May Day or International Worker's Day. It combines her interest in revolutionary causes and adept aesthetic choices. Using a unique bird's-eye view from above, she captures a sea of sombreros worn by agrarian workers, removing faces, and conveying a sense of forward-movement and power for the group combined, over the individuality of each worker. Closely-cropped, there is no horizon line, as if the workers are everywhere.
Modotti created a number of still life photographs that replace traditional fruits or glasses with objects uniquely tied to Mexican traditions and revolutionary causes as in "Sickle, Bandolier and Guitar (1927)" The sickle is a popular Communist symbol and the bandolier (a pocketed belt for holding ammunition) is the symbol of the Mexican Revolution. These are arguably closest to some of Edward Weston's stunning work with peppers, lettuce leafs and other still life objects.
After joining the Mexican Communist Party, Modotti was eventually deported from Mexico in 1930. She eventually became entirely focused on political activism in Russia, and died in 1942

08/11/2023

I wanted to see Pablo-Matic given the largely disastrous reviews it's received from critics alike. I enjoyed the initial setup and premise: that Picasso's larger-than-life fame is the product of art history that historically elevated white Western male artists and proclaimed them geniuses despite misogynist and colonialist subject matter, ideas and behaviors, and at the expense of everyone else, excluding women, and non-Western and non-White artists. Part of me felt like some of this is old news. The great Linda Nochlin essay from the 70s had already asked: "Where Are All the Great Women Artists?"

Australian artist, writer and comedian Hannah Gadsby and curators set up a show meant to re-examine Picasso's legacy through a contemporary lens, raising questions about his presumed genius, and critiquing his work, whether sexist, misogynistic, overly-sexualized, or which appropriated art from Africa and elsewhere. In doing so, she and curators aim to show us how a group of diverse women artists have rightfully gained a place in the art history canon in the last 50 years since his death, told stories of women from their own point of view, reclaimed the female body from the male gaze, and have created art that empowers women and shows them as strong and independent.

Some of the issues with the show includes the small number of actual Picasso works to look at, particularly paintings. That's very strange. It's as if we're going to take down the man with a small assortment of low quality works.

The works by women artists are often referencing and reformulating works by male artists in the Modern Art canon, but not necessarily Picasso. They are critiquing Courbet, Manet, Matisse and others, so that's less about Picasso than about frequent subject matter chosen by male artists.

The women artists in the exhibition have long complex practices, and so having just one work by them manages to reduce each of them to a single idea. The only connection between their work and this exhibition is a quote by each on Picasso and more often than not they begrudgingly admit that his visual experimentation was extremely impressive despite being an A-hole.

Hannah Gadsby offers comedic critiques to the Picasso works available, often rather silly and infantile. Her comments and the exhibition overall actually undermine the incredibly deep analysis that expert women art historians have brought forward for years now on the biases and issues with Modern Art, Rosalind Krauss and others.

I am still glad I saw it, and it was good to revisit some of these issues and see a sampling of great works by women artists: Ringgold, Sherman, Smith, and others.

08/08/2023

Work of the Day
Frida Kahlo
Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940)

When first looking at this painting we might ask ourselves whether we are seeing a man or a woman sitting on a single yellow chair at the center of its composition in a rather barren and unknown location. We are looking at Frida Kahlo in her Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair.

Now a global icon and highly acclaimed artist from Latin America (from my native Mexico City), Kahlo painted this work in 1940, at a time when she was not yet well-known, and largely living in the shadow of her husband, prominent Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera. Just over one third of Frida’s artistic output involves self-portraits like this one, offering us a visual diary of her colorful and painful life. Frida had suffered from polio, a tragic and life-changing bus accident that led to multiple surgeries, lifelong chronic physical pain, the need to wear braces, and a traumatic reproductive life with three miscarriages.

This work is from the year after she and Diego divorced, after a turbulent marriage with a series of extramarital affairs, her own including both men and women. An opera about their relationship was just launched by the San Francisco Opera. Prior to the divorce, Frida had been particularly hurt by Diego’s affair with her younger sister.

Working in the traditional medium of oil on canvas, and in a naturalistic, detailed style, Frida portrays herself here sitting in a single chair in a strangely barren space, wearing an oversized gray suit, scissors in hand, having cut most of her long hair, which lays on the floor all around her. She has kept her high hails, earrings, and make-up on, some aspects of her femininity. Frida is known for not plucking her “bozo” (or mustache) or her unibrow, small acts that always defied traditional notions of femininity, here she goes much further, removing the long feminine hair Diego loved, and sporting an oversized gray drab male suit, likely his, instead of the more feminine cheerful tehuana dresses she often wore.

One can consider painting in part acknowledgement of her own bisexuality, or a declaration against needing to remain feminine, and in turn submissive, in the context of Mexican machismo and Diego’s affairs. Scissors also appear in her The Two Fridas, painted the prior year, and make us consider the violent act that’s just taken place, the pain of a difficult martial rupture, and even her miscarriages. She further clues us into this gender-bending act of defiance by including words from a popular song at the top of the painting which read: “Mira que si te quise fue por tu pelo, ahora que estás pelona ya no te quiero.” Look, if I loved you, it was for your hair; now that you have no hair, I no longer love you).” She explicitly provides a clue about how Diego would no longer have desired her this way.

Adopting this look and cutting hair also suggests a fresh beginning. This work coincides with the moment when Frida’s own work starts getting greater acclaim and starts being exhibited internationally, including in a show of Mexican art in Paris in 1939.

The founder of Surrealism André Breton had embarked on his first trip to Mexico in 1938 and stayed with his wife with Rivera and Kahlo at their legendary home, Casa Azul. After seeing her work, Breton declared her a Surrealist (in the way he would on occasion anoint certain artists). Breton called Mexico “the Surrealist place par excellence. While Frida sought to remain independent from the Surrealist label. “Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself,” Frida once wrote. However, she did start lending her work to Surrealist exhibitions including one in Mexico City in 1940 that included Dalí, Ernst, Magritte, and other Mexican artists including Remedios Varos, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. This is why art historians and MoMA place her work in a gallery like this one, alongside Surrealist artists.

While her imagery is Surrealistic, and may appear to emerge from the unconscious, (e.g., a single dislocated chair in an empty space, an excessive number of spider-like or moustache-like clumps of hair all around her), Frida’s works are clear dramatizations and manifestations of her joy and deep sorrow, grounded in actual life events.

Many fans of Kahlo today admire her strong character, independence and defiance of traditional feminine roles.

The painting’s relatively small size and subject-matter convey a sense of intimacy, as if Kahlo is confidentially inviting us to experience some of her private pain. While not religious, it is reminiscent of small religious paintings in Mexico called ex-votos which people paint on wood or metal panels and leave in churches to describe a desperate time, both visually and through accompanying text, and begging for a miracle.

Kahlo’s work has been viewed through the lens of Realismo Magico or Magic Realism, a literary style that took hold in Latin America in the 1940s and which includes fantasies as a way of depicting the strangeness of reality as opposed to the unconscious.