Monday, March 10, 2008

Kahlo's Star Dims

I recently went to the famous blue house of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. A recent Washington Post article has some great bits.

"Lots of artists that I've talked to say they've had enough of her: In light of current art, her painting can seem overwrought and underskilled, more fussy than profoundly complex."

"She constructs a vision of herself as a very idiosyncratic kind of a woman, immersed in her own homemade visions of femininity and Mexicanness and resistance to norms -- social, sexual, artistic and political."

"The weaknesses in Kahlo's paintings are irrelevant, so long as you think of those pictures as nothing more than documents or ephemera left over from the larger creative project of her life. We don't blame great dancers or architects -- or performance artists -- if there are flaws in the images and evidence that fill us in on their achievements."

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