Frida Kahlo in Philadelphia

Here's Patricia Milder's review of a centennial Frida Kahlo exhibition, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sunday, if you're going to be in the fifth borough any time soon, or like reading about Frida Kahlo.

The French poet and Surrealist theorist André Breton described Frida Kahlo’s work as a “ribbon around a bomb.” His support influenced her career and simultaneously encouraged association with the Surrealist movement, but Kahlo herself was self-taught and never fully engaged in identifying with a particular school. Sympathetic to both leftist political art and the artistic avant-garde, an argument can be made for her as the first contemporary artist – the first to place herself as the subject and object of her works, and to make her body into art. During her lifetime, Frida Kahlo was a modern artist’s artist, admired by Marcel Duchamp, Vassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, however, it is significant to note that her first and only solo exhibition in Mexico occurred in 1953, one year before her death.

The irony then, of the amusement park-like atmosphere of the current retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is frustratingly clear.

(Read the rest of this review here.)