My Dress Hangs There: Frida Kahlo as Fashion Icon

thank you so much for joining us today and pleasee join me in welcoming our speaker Michelle Fenimore okay thank you Kristen for the introduction and uh thank you all for coming I'm really delighted that you're here to hear a little bit more about Freda Koo as a fashion icon um so I am the curator of 20th and 21st century Arts so that is my specialty and I'm going to try to kind of look at Freda through the lens of her garments um and I'm going to throw a little bit of film in there too because I like film uh so let's get started um so the esteemed Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes encountered fredao only once in his lifetime but the memory stayed with him um he wrote I only saw Freda Koo once but first I heard her at a concert at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City which you see here Koo entered this quote italianate mausoleum in White marble fashioned in the purest wedding cake style the interior was adorned with bold and colorful mural by Jose Clemente Orosco David Alfaro SOS and Diego Rivera freda's husband but all of this paled in comparison when Freda entered the Box on the second tier of the theater the jangling of her Sumptuous jewelry drowned out the sounds of the orchestra and he writes it was the entrance of an Aztec goddess a Christmas tree a pinata more like a broken Cleopatra hiding her tortured body her shrivel leg her broken foot her Orthopedic corset under the spectacular finery of the peasant women of Mexico Freda Koo showing us all that suffering could not wither nor sickness stale her infinite variety she upstaged everything and everybody um when Freda Koo died in 1954 her obituary in the New York Times read Freda Caro artist Diego Rivera's wife so she was originally known as Diego Rivera's wife and certainly in her own day but I think now we are pretty um we can very safely say that she has eclipsed Diego as a pop culture and visual icon um so if you go to Google and you type in Freda you don't even have to type in Ko you will get a plethora of images of everyday people dressed up as fre to col um they've taken on this Persona and they've run with it and it's really amazing and remarkable what the range is from that little girl in the front center who's just adorable to um people from all walks of life and then this contemporary artist uh Christina Gallo who actually depicted the late Amy win housee as Freda Koo in the image um on the upper left um so in in some ways she's kind of been reduced a bit to certain aspects of her wardrobe The Rose headdress the whip heel the traditional Mexican dress and the ethnic uh jewelry um but people have gone a little bit deeper as well to kind of think about her in terms of her pain and suffering which I think comes very much across not not only in her clothing but certainly in her canvases um and so she's really been an inspiration for fashion designers um throughout the last 20 to 30 or so years um so here are some images of contemporary fashion inp by Freda koo's look um and you'll see this is a John Paul gotier campaign from um 1998 and he used not only the print imagery was kind of done in Freda koes style but she he actually kind of touched upon these various Persona that she embodied through the actual garments as well from the orthopedic corsets to her wearing um and adorning of men's wear which we'll see um as well as kind of the more flamboyant um traditional dress that she also wore um other designers I mean it's really too numerous to even go through and mention because there are so many designers who have referenced for dealo in their work but I can show you some here um the upper left is Lena hosek um a German uh designer from 2013 on the upper right is uh deepar Perani from again from 2013 so some are quite uh literal references to her look and her power as a visual icon and some are a bit more kind of deeply rooted in who she was and the pain she experienced throughout her life um including on the lower left is an image of a dress by Ray kawakubo for K garon which makes direct reference to some of these Orthopedic corsets which we'll see later and then this is a collection by Ricardo tishi for xoni on the lower right um which um again kind of gets a little bit more deeply into her um kind of tortured soul in terms of the way he's interpreting the garments and so where does all of this stem from um if we look back to about 1983 um there was a very seminal biography written by Hayden Herrera um which you see on the left this biography has really formed the core of most of the information that circulates about Freda as well as a lot of the kind of Mythology surrounding her and some of the stories that we'll kind of hear throughout my presentation um and then there was a movie made in 1983 same time by a Mexican uh filmmaker called um or French Freda nature vivante or still life and then I think many of you are probably more familiar with the 2002 uh biopic um with Selma Hayak which was hugely popular and they took that moment to relaunch the biography and um instead of putting the image of Freda on the cover of the biography they put Salma Hayek instead so they actually I mean there's this complete kind of co-opting of her look in this which I think is quite amazing and this really all of this has really cemented her Fame as a fashion and uh pop culture icon but what is really at the core of all of this I want to delve in more deeply today and look at her more deeply and how she dressed herself and presented herself to the public so um oh let me just go oh sorry I think oh here it is sorry I have it a little mixed up but anyway this is uh Freda uh in a photograph taken by Nicholas Murray who's a Hungarian born photographer who lived in New York City she had a decade long affair with him and he took some of the most compelling and beautiful color photographs of her in her lifetime and you'll see a number of them sprinkle throughout the talk um and Freda once said I am my own muse I am the subject I know best I am the subject I want to know better um and the complexity of Freda as an individual actually makes it extremely hard to to kind of think about how to organize a talk because she's a remarkably complex individual um and it's a remarkably Rich subject so throughout all of it this you'll see that she is a study in contrasts she is bicultural biracial bisexual handicapped an artist a communist her paintings addressed infertility abortion illness sexuality gender equality miscarriage pain and heartbreak um she Smoked Cigarettes she drank tequila yet she wore F the French um per shalomar and she loved uh bright red lipstick um she doesn't fit into a type and so that's what makes it a bit more challenging to think about how to organize the talk so um so what I want to do is explore the roots of Freda as a visual icon and how her self-fashioning and this image she projected really feeds into her current obsession with her um so if we go back um the way I've organized the talk is to deconstruct Frida into three different Persona that all overlap and intermingle and you'll see how that comes together at the end but um we're going to look at her as first on the left as a chica modna um Freda has come of age in the 1920s in Mexico City a vibrant Cosmopolitan City and she's very much a part of 1920s culture and the era she's really grows up in the era of the flapper um and she's really part of this moment of contemporary standards before she starts dressing more fully in Mexican garb um secondly we'll look at Freda in the middle as a mtia um this is really related to her Allegiance and manipulation of her mixed Heritage so mytia means a mix of European and Mexican Indian Heritage um and this is very much it's very important to her and has a political agenda as well as an artistic one for her thirdly we'll look at um Freda and how all of this coalesces into her work as an artist um so through her diary and her clothing um both of which um The Diary was recently um translated into English it's available in the shop it's really fascinating um and her wardrobe was only opened in 2004 so her wardrobe was locked away after her death and Diego insisted that it' be locked up for 50 years so it was only in 2004 that we actually gained access to the act the real clothes and garments and those open up a much more Fuller and deeper understanding of Frida as a person and as an artist as well so to begin we will look at Freda as a oops uh chica Mna there we go um so Freda was born in 1907 in a village called cooan on the outskirts of Mexico City but most of her life was spent in Mexico City um and here she is at the age of 10 um she grew up in a Cosmopolitan environment in a middle class um Bourgeois household Mexico City at the time was a vibrant cultural Cosmopolitan place um and she's really growing 19 in 1910 the Mexican Revolution had occurred this of course affected life on all levels in Mexico but there and there was this incredible energy and dynamism to life in Mexico City in the 1920s um certainly um and so Mexico City you know was vibrant it was um cross-cultural there were people of many different um ethnic backgrounds all mixing in here um it was it had movie you know movie theaters it had Department Stores um this is an early image uh about 1900 department stores in Mexico City um High fashion uh styles were being copied from France as early as the early 1800s in Mexico City so it really is this kind of cross-cultural blending and mixing of influences um that kind of begin in the Spanish colonial era and certainly continue through out um throughout the 20th century uh so here's an image of one of the department stores of Mexico City by around uh 1900 there were actually five huge department stores in Mexico City that were bringing in goods from all over the world so you're exposed to all sorts of things um there were fashion plates and fashion magazines that were being circulated on a regular basis starting in the 19th century as well so Freda is really kind of privy to all of this and when we think about the kind of imagery that was circulating at the time we have to think about film Freda was an avid filmgoer she loved going to the movies um she is really one of this new generation of women who could now Express themselves sartorially and Visually and much has been written about her change in Persona and her style as being ATT tributed to Diego's kind of push for her to take on this traditional Mexican dress um but there really is real personal expression here and there really is um this kind of response to what is happening and what is out there in the cultural Zeitgeist right now so here we have an image of um a movie star of the 1920s putting on makeup this idea of putting on makeup was quite new in the 1920s and had actually become acceptable at this stage 19 before 1900 this was not acceptable unless you were somebody from the theater or somebody from questionable background um so putting on makeup um wearing this kind of flapper style Garb which was much Freer it liberated the body there was no corset underneath it so everything was very much about youthful movement and energy and dynamism um and there was also this idea that you could try on a Persona through dress um and this again is a New Concept in the 19s and 1920s and this idea that a woman can be in control of her own image making is something that is quite novel no and new but is something that is really embraced in the 1920s um and here we have two very famous Mexican film stars who left Mexico and then um became quite famous in Hollywood one is Dolores Del Rio and one is lupy valz and you can kind of see these two different types of um Cults of Personality that are expressed in film and through various media in that era so Dolores Del Rio on the left is your prototypical flapper she has on the loose shift she has on she has bobbed hair she has that clo hat um and lupy vez is the prototypical vamp so she is wearing this kind of exotic Garb she has the dark eyes um she has this kind of unidentifiable kind of gypsy dress on as well um and if we look at two more images of them here again Dolores Del Rio and lupy valz on the right uh Dolores um Del Rio is wearing the typical Flappers dress so if you know it's really basically a tube um a lot of skin is showing this is also something that's quite new and novel in the 1920s so she has bare arms the loose construction um and then lupy valz I love this image she's very kind of casually posed she's very um confident she's very assertive she's wearing this Asian inspired robe and she's smoking a cigarette and so again when we think about women's freedoms and what they were allowed to do that they hadn't been doing prior to 1900 smoking and drink Ing and socializing outside of um the household was also something that was a relatively new development so how did this translate to Mexico City um on the right are is an image of two Flappers or flapper ristas as they were called in Mexico um from 1928 and you see they're wearing again kind of the typical flapper dress they both have bobbed hair um on the left is an image from a a magazine that was circulating in Mexico and it shows Las mues modus and so you see again kind of a lot of the bear skin um but a lot of the confidence in and kind of uh assuredness in their their own sexuality um and I love the image on the lower left of this woman in the bathing suit and she has this plane that's kind of this large scale plane across the body of the bathing suit because again this idea of kind of energy and movement and the quickened pace of life was very much tied in to this idea of this Modern Woman um and so what about Freda so here we have an image of Freda that was taken in the 1920s um yeah by her father um who was a studio photographer uh and these are some of her friends she is in the middle and then her sister Christina is on the right hand side um so you'll see she has the Bob tear and she has actually a much more severe version of Bob tear it's called a shingle Bob um in the middle and then her sister Christina has the Bob tear as well and it's a slightly more feminized look she has the curl it's a it has a little bit of a cap to it um but I mean class and race really did determine styles of dress at this moment hairstyles as well as public behavior and it was really considered quite Advanced for young Bourgeois women to wear these short styles and to cut their hair that was quite dramatic in the 1920s um a mytia or a real indigenous working woman would never do this um a bouris woman from mexus Mexico City however would respond to this trend and she would actually participate in that and could be a flapp Arista um and here is another image of Freda Koo again taken by her father when she's only 18 years old um she has that quite severe hair hairstyle but again this was actually very common I mean it was not unusual for women to cut their hair in this way um and here's another image of her a little bit later but with um Tina MTI the photographer and Freda Koo on the right um again just kind of showing that they were really adapting to what was then currently fashionable clothing but Freda also dressed like this so um you see her on the far left um and there is kind of this great scene in the movie the sahayak movie where the family is all gathering for their family portrait and they're waiting for Freda and she comes running out and she's wearing a suit and everybody you know her father just rolls his eyes and he takes the picture um but but this you know even though it seems somewhat revolutionary to us to see her dressed in this men's suit within the context of this picture and I'm sure it did raise some eyebrows um it was not unusual for women to women were really starting to to take on um the wearing of men's garments and male styled tailored garments in the 1920s and it was really an indication of these new freedoms and this new emancipation that they were experiencing um so this is a little brochure um from a firm called o rossen and this is actually in the MFA collection and they were one of these firms in France who really promoted this garon or the boyish look um that kind of really did have its roots in France and traveled you know and really did kind of spread quite widely throughout um the world really um and there's another image here of Freda um again when she was quite young um with she still you can see exactly how short that Bob is um and just compared with some of these other Flappers I think this image is from London um with this woman very very kind of again the sever haircut and manstyle Tuxedo Ensemble right there um one thing to bear in mind is that Freda also was quite um she was quite uh you she was a kind of a frisky young girl and uh she was known as such and she um was part of this group called Lukas and excuse my Spanish which is not very good or the caps at school and they actually would wear denim clothes they would wear the the kind of garments of the workers or the proletariat and it was their statement they're kind of thumbing their nose at Authority um and so she was one of that kind of group at school as well so this was another way she expressed herself and I think it all kind of melds together in a really interesting way um oh and then I just wanted to also um talk a little bit about again kind of more generally about what's happening in the 1920s I don't know if you know the novel Orlando by Virginia wolf and that novel is actually about um the main character who changes Sexes throughout the throughout the novel again 192s and she travels through time changing her gender um and wolf has one of my favorite quotes I think in terms of uh when we think about what clothes actually mean to us and what I think that clothes certainly meant to free to col and so I'll read this uh vain Trifles as they seem clothes have they say more important offices than merely to keep us warm they change our view of the world and the world's view of us there's much to support the view that clothes wear us and we not them and not we them we may make them take the mold of arm or breast but they mold our hearts our brains our tongues to their liking so again this is like when we think about the 20s and we think about what people are grappling with in terms of expressing themselves through dress this is a relatively New Concept but it's something that Frida certainly wholeheartedly embraced and she really was a chica modna herself and she was always very mindful of the significance and the power of clothing so now we're going to go on to Freda as a mastia or a mixed um um a woman of mixed Heritage excuse me so here's an image of um one of her paintings it's called lasos fredas it's from 1939 and it shows Freda um wearing both European dress on the left and um Mexican indigenous dress on the right so that is a very typical Tana style garment which we'll talk about a little more in a minute um and I think that what you see here is that there's very um as I mentioned um I don't know if oh maybe I didn't mention her father is from Germany he's of German and Hungarian descent her mother is of Mexican and Indian descent um and so her ve she has a very modern sense of herself image and she is you know kind of intentionally mixing the two and grappling with the two and you'll see throughout my presentation that she actually does mix it all up throughout her kind of self-presentation um so she not only wears uh garments from these uh quote unquote peasant classes but she also kind of mixes it together with um clothing of the middle or upper classes as well um so we think of this typical Mexican dress when we think about images of Freda we think of this as being very uniquely Freda um and of course it's not uniquely Freda it's just that her way of combining the looks was quite unique but I want to go back in time slightly and kind of look at the roots of this look and idea of what is typical Mexican indigenous dress so I'm going to go forward and have we'll have a look at a figure called the China paana um which you see here um China paana is was a 19th century Bell who was a mix of European and Indian blood um and what's interesting about the China paana and her style is that it again kind of brought all these different influences together in one garment so um there's when we think about U Spanish Colonial expansion and the colonial inhabitants it was they were actually clothed in finest silks from China for example if you were of a certain class all classes in colonial Mexico dressed in some sort of fabrics from Asia including the Indian population who were dressed in Cotton from India um and then it just kind of varied in degree of finess so the finer silks would be reserved for upper upper classes and um the M uh while the crays um while the Indian population might have the cotton rather than the finest silks from China but what's really interesting and I think if you saw Dennis Carr's excellent exhibition uh made in the Americas the new world discovers Asia you'll know that there was so much Asian influence within Mexico at this time and that's what this kind of really represents so China refers to any one of Asian descent um it also often kind of was mostly uh specifically associated with a maid or a servant girl and a poblana is a person from pbla um and they would wear European pett coats col colorfully embro embroidered Spanish style blouses they would be adorned with lace sequins other embellishments they would wear this ubiquitous Shaw or the rioto which is you see in green here and in a red here um and the rabota we'll talk about a little bit more because this really becomes a very standard um piece of the Wardrobe moving forward even into the current day um the images and literary counts abound of these 20th of these China panas and um Richard Henry Dana in two years before the Mast he wrote this in 1840 um and he was quite taken with the styles of the women of Montay which was then still part of Mexico rather than California and he wrote the fondness of dress among the women is excessive and is often the ruin of many of them a present of a fine mantle or of a necklace or a pair of earrings brings favor to the greater part of them nothing is more common than to see a woman living in a house of only two rooms and the ground for a floor dressed in Spangled satin shoes a silk gown a high comb and guilt if not gold earrings or necklace um and they actually would go on board ship and purchase more of this kind of embellishment to to further embellish their their garments um so I'll show you a couple more these are two China paana they were called the female dandies because they were so interested in their self-presentation um and so this is um from 1909 it's a postcard from 1909 and this is an actual China paana Ensemble from the Red Island School of Design Museum um and so again it becomes this emblematic romanticized look for Mexican indigenous costume it's eventually replaced by the tahana Tana look which we'll talk about in a minute but um this overall adornment the long skirts the jewelry and the shaw the Roboto become a signifier of this particular style um so this Roto that we see um they all wear but the one on the right I'll talk about briefly so the rioto was a head covering or Shaw um that really completed the China pablano Ensemble and it was an important accessory for women of all social classes so the usage can be traced back to the colonial era in Mexico um and they sometimes used an embroidered Chinese um crepe Shaw that came from the Manila trade but the actual Origins are lost people have not been able to specifically identify where the rioto has come from but it really is it in of itself is a mtio it's this mixing of Asian influences so it combines the Philippine song um it combines elements of Hindu textiles um with Spanish because The Fringe actually comes from a manila Shaw and pre Hispanic ones um it's a multi-purpose G uh textile and it's usually about 33 yards wide and about two yards in length so pretty substantial um and it's ECOT woven in either cotton or silk and ECOT weaving means that the warp and the weft are dyed before they go on the loom and then the wheat they're woven together and that actually creates the pattern so um an ECOT ECOT weaving is um a highly valued uh type of weaving so they would have have a lot of intrinsic value as well um and one thing about another aspect of the China paana that I think is really important to Freda and her kind of taking on of this um indigenous Mexican look is that they are often portrayed as being free from the restraints imposed upon women from fashionable Society so they can dress as boldly as they pleased there was no corsetry there was nothing confining about this look um so and I think that that also has kind of great appeal to certainly um the women wearing it but also this idea of the China paana as it kind of filtered out uh to the West um so so what does this mean for Freda um so the look that we normally associate with Freda is actually what is called the Tawana look um and this really does become the look for Mexican Garb even today um so the Mexican Revolution of 1910 led to this real fervent embracing of Mexico's indigenous and mtio past and the Revolutionary agenda actually was used to construct and celebrate the ancient indigenous and folk craft of Mexico and that's really the aspect of it I think that appealed to Freda on many levels so here you see Freda wearing this Tawana dress this is an exhibition from the Royal Ontario Museum that was just up um about a year or so ago that's showing Tawana dress in various guises so modern as as well as kind of more classic or or older Styles and then the map on the bottom shows you where it kind of comes from it's the Tawana um isus which is kind of smack dab in the middle of um Central South Mexico and Mexico City is right in the middle there um so uh Freda loved Mexican craft and folk art um and I also think that the attraction to Tawana dress could also have something to do with the fact that women of the ismos of tantek managed to sustain this matriarchal structure and women could actually hold high rank in econ economic and political positions and so it's this culture that kind of resisted European patriarchal um organization and I think that had you know probably had some great appeal as well um the other thing that's quite fascinating about the look is that it often includes these astral and Cosmic symbols related to m mixed with myths of creation and they always put woman at the center because she is the creative she is the creator of life so symbols of fertility they often have um imagery of the sun that's incorporated into the look and then these incredible headdresses which actually you'll see in another image where it forms like the sun rays around the face and so again it's kind of placing women at the center of all of this um you know kind of as a fertility symbol as the as the as the Creator um so Freda starts kind of creating and uh self-fashioning the self-fashioning related to her Mexican heritage during the first years of her marriage to Diego Rivera um so when she got married to Diego in 1929 one of her parents said it was as if an elephant had married a dove uh which is kind of not so kind but um but he was over 6 feet tall and he weighed over 300 lb Freda was just over 5 feet and weighed 100 lb so extremely petite um but their love and their passion for one another and their devotion lasted throughout their lives I mean it's really incredible when you read his um autobiography and her diary you can see that the passion was so deep and so profound um even though they you know were had affairs with numerous other people while they were married um Rivera wrote I was lucky enough to love the most wonderful woman I know she was poetry itself and genius itself um so it it really is this deep rooted passion they also came together politically they were very much on the same page with um their communist beliefs as well um and a lot of people speculate that this dress and there's this story that has kind of been perpetuated because of this Hayden Herrera biography that she borrowed the dress from one of her Maids or one of the household servants to wear for her wedding um which I have found absolutely no evidence for and actually in looking at the dress I'm pretty sure that that is not the situation so um if we look at uh this is our fantastic new acis relatively new acquisition of Dos mues which is upstairs in the American wing and making modern um and this is an image of the household help so she used um two maids in the the KO household as model so she's elevating kind of the working class um in doing this but look at their clothing it's very simple it's very straightforward of course if you're working um in a household you're not going to be wearing anything too uh flamboyant or or um fancy um but if we look back um at freda's dress uh and you look at what would normally be worn for a wedding it's not a normal wedding dress I mean that much is is quite clear um um so um this is an image of a painting that she painted in 1936 that's called my parents my grandparents and me and so here's the little Freda down there her parents above her and her two sets of grandparents above and they're all kind of interconnected with this ribbon SL umbilical cord um but her mother is in her wedding dress I believe and that is a very typical what would be perceived as a very typical high fashion wedding gwn of probably the 1890s or so um and you look at what fra is wearing and I'm sure by 1929 you know women are certainly still you know are are Dawning these very kind of more formal uh white wedding dresses um and it's interesting because a contemporary newspaper description where they published this image one of these images corroborates the idea that this is not a normal wedding dress it it was um published in LA prena in August on August 23rd in 1929 and it comment Ms in the article accompanying it that she's wearing very simple street clothes um so that was considered quite unusual for the time so she's certainly asserting her individuality there's no doubt about that um but and she's also asserting her individuality by not letting go of her cigarette I don't know if you noticed that she's holding a cigarette in her hand um for her portrait she's also lost an earring which is kind of interesting um but but I you know I was looking at this garment and I thought you know what is going on with this dress because it's it's not like much that I have seen it is definitely not an indigenous garment um it's something that was probably a country or day dress made by a local seamstress um cotton was certainly being imported from abroad at this point in the 19th century cotton was being imported from Manchester England into Mexico um and that was replaced by local manufacturers in the 1930s but I looked at this textile pattern and I saw modernist textiles from Europe um and other parts of the world and so if you look at this image you'll see the two top textiles are Soviet textiles from the 1920s and 30s they have a very similar kind of pattern to them the one on the lower left is a v Vera um textile the Austrian workshops um a designed by Joseph Hoffman in the late 1920s um and then this one on the right this is actually a design that's in the museum collection and it is a design from malonson silk company which was an American silk company that looked to indigenous um design patterns for their own line of silks um so it's very much in line with these contemporary textiles that are coming out of Europe and I think what it is it's a cotton that was made into this dress um by a local seamstress so now if we move forward and um we look at the colorized version of this portrait um so here you see she lost the cigarette she refound the earring which is which is good um but I wanted to point out so we don't really know what color it is I think actually the Roboto that she has draped around her neck was probably a different color so I don't think that the color is it may not be true because in hand tinted um color photographs the tinting comes after the photo so whether or not it's related to the reality is really hard to hard to know um but this is a really wonderful little um colorized version of their wedding portrait that was actually a gift to Jackson Cole Phillips um who was the owner of the Freeda portrait um that's upstairs in making modern so this photograph is up there so I'd encourage you to go look at it a little more closely but this is the more formal wedding photo um and then if we look at how Freda chose to depict herself a couple years later as her own painting wedding portrait you'll see that she has changed quite a bit so the the dress is very different the dress is more in line with this Tawana um style of dress the broad skirt um the vibrant coloration she if you look at the um the photograph you'll see she's wearing very fashionable satin Slippers With rhinestone buckles and in this portrait she has completely changed them to hes or the sandals the the Mexican indigenous sandals um she's changed her jewelry I actually looked at this image kind of closely with our jewelry curator Emily we were trying to figure out it almost looks like she has pearls on in the in the photograph um whereas she's kind of changed some of it to she's wearing um maybe Jade beads or something to that effect something that's more related to Mexico's past she also has changed her hairstyle so that she's wearing this very distinctive um Twisted ribbon like uh band in her hair that again is very much very typical for Tawana dress so she's using this portrait to portray her Mex mexicanidad or her Mexican cultural identity as well as her socialist political beliefs so she's using this taana kind of woman um which is an iconic figure for Mexico even today to kind of bring all of that out and communicate that and I think it for her it kind of represents strength um as well as sensuality um and then her favorite Roto is actually this looks red in the portrait but there is evidence that it was one of her favorite rotos and it was actually a vibrant magenta pink we'll see it a little later in the presentation and interestingly is made out of rayon so when we think of these um this kind of mixing I there's always these contradictions here in this mixing of the ancient and the modern and the the new and the old I mean it's all kind of wrapped up in many of these portraits and then um again there's always these contradictions when you're dealing with Freda um she wrote at one time that in another era of my life I dressed as a boy pants boots jacket but when I went to C Diego I wore a Tana outfit I've never been to tantek I have no relationship with its people but among all Mexican dress the Tawana costume is my favorite and that is why I dress like a Tawana so for her I mean I think you know I'm not sure exactly how much of that is rooted in in truth but you can tell part of it is a visual impulse as well as kind of a statement of her political beliefs as well um and here you see an image of her actually much more casually dressed at home at La Kaza Atul the blue house which was her home um and she's wearing these silk um and linen pajamas Chinese pajamas that she probably purchased in San Francisco um and then you see her depicted here in a mural by Diego Rivera called L Arenal um of 1928 and she's wearing you know the the kind of working outfit of the proletariat um she has her man styled hair and she's handing out guns to um the revolutionaries um but I think that by the 1930s certainly Freda has embraced this idea of um taking on her myso P mysa past as well was her um you know this interest in wearing Tawana Garb um so in 1930 she took a trip to San Francisco and this is a photograph by Edward Weston who photographed her and Diego when they came to San Francisco in 1930 um and he wrote I photographed Diego again his new wife Freda too she is in sharp contrast to Lupe who was Rivera's second wife uh petite a little doll alongside Diego but a doll in size only for she is strong and and quite beautiful she shows very little of her father's German blood dressed in Native costume even to the hes or sandals she causes much excitement on the Streets of San Francisco people stop in their tracks to look in Wonder um and according to Rivera's biographer their trip to America there were parties everywhere streams of invitations to tea dinners weekends and lectures with great audiences all coming to get a glimpse of this couple because she had such a striking and dramatic um you know visual Persona and it's really um quite interesting because I think that she of course realizes that and takes it on and this becomes kind of her standard look um so and here um she is in this really beautiful picture by Edward Weston taken at the time of her trip to San Francisco and again it's this real mashup of styles and influences so she has a long skirt and shirt on she has these huge Jade beads again that were used by the azte Texs for sculpture um and yet the Roboto now is a European Shaw European a Shaw of um European origin um and so here is an image of a painting that she painted um which is called self-portrait on the border of us and Mexico and she was often kind of grappling with her relationship um with the United States um she had been there by 1933 when this had been painted and there's really a conflict here um so she's looking at the progress of um industry you see Ford kind of FD on those smoke stacks back there and America is really depicted as this um kind of it's you know really about progress and Industry um and it's contrasted with the ancient traditions of Mexico and so you see the roots and you see the flowers and they've been replaced by these turbines and these pipes and and these Smoke Stacks spewing smoke um and it's interesting because she's straddling these two countries and what has she chosen to wear but this pink it's almost it's kind of a muted dress for her um and I I feel like it represents this kind of uncertainty that she's grappling with in terms of being modern and also being an artist who who has to sell her work in this capitalist economy and also stay true to her roots in Mexico um so she's wearing this pink dress she's wearing lace gloves the um necklaces are probably more indigenous in style and again she's um smoking her cigarette not surprisingly um but the colonial period also in Mexico kind of was marked by this idea of a mtio culture so it was both Indian and European so there were two mexicos kind of at the same time and I think that that's what probably some of this dress actually represents um this is oh and here actually I found this quite interesting so here she is in 1933 in Chicago with Diego Rivera when he was painting one of his murals and she's painting this painting um and it's a beautiful image and I just want to point out the heels on those shoes because they are so high um so anyway again it's you know she's kind of got this real mixture and blend of both the modern and the ancient um and so this this is the the image that the title of the talk comes from it's called my dress hangs there and it's from 1933 it's another allegorical painting that's full of symbolism that I don't have time to go into all of it but here she is her dress is hanging in the middle of this New York City landscape and she has chosen to use this Tawana or traditional Mexican dress to represent her in the middle of New York City it is not a positive POS view of of Mexico um I mean of New York City there are um kind of workers all down here um on the bottom of the of the canvas that are I think you know certainly related to her communist um beliefs um she um is hung her dress is hung between a trophy and a toilet you know I'm not exactly sure what that is but um but it's it's this very conflicted relationship as I mentioned that she is an artist she has to embrace this capitalist culture to some degree to sell her paintings and she knows that this image of herself and her own um self kind of fashioning are part and parcel of that but she has removed herself from the actual dress there's also a really interesting image on the upper left of May West who is another kind of very assertive um sexual uh woman it's kind of interesting that she's she has included that as well so her Public Image is certainly uh gaining traction by the 1930s in in 1937 Vogue magazine does a spread um on the senoras of Mexico and she is included and it's really kind of interesting she's one of about five or six women from Mexico City most of them are addressed in some form of indigenous clothing rather than high fashion um and the point of the article is somewhat demeaning um the whole article really talks about how refined the culture really is and that Society did exist there and that they're surprisingly sophisticated um and they actually give teas and they play golf like this should be a surprise but um but here she is really presented as the as Senora Diego Rivera the wife of the famous Mexican artist so her first name is mentioned in the article but it's not kind of mentioned um in the caption to the image um and they note that his studio is the mecca of foreign visitors who want to meet Diego and his beautiful wife in the quote unquote uh Native costumes she effects um so this is actually though it's a much more subtle even for 1937 much more subtle kind of use of some of this indigenous dress she has the white pett coat she has the Roto um the shirt itself is a little bit more kind of straightforward um but her and I'll show you the color image here um which is a really lovely color image um and you can see this is the color of her wedding Shaw that's that magenta rayon Roto that she's wearing in that um but she um she is affecting the braids of the Tawana the traditional Tawana look um so again she's kind of doing a bit of a mytia look here um so but you know Koo also is not the only one who is thinking in terms of how to present herself as a Mexican artist who is very much rooted in these Traditions so this is an artist by the name of is KERO um who um posed uh who was a contemporary of Kalos and was actually more prominent in her lifetime than Freda Koo um and she really lived rather than just represented Mexican femininity in many ways but she depicted herself very much like Freda did in these kind of traditional uh Mexican Garb she also was a surrealist artist as well very much like uh Freda herself so she's not alone in this idea this kind of mode of presentation oh sorry so there was a second article um that came out in Vogue just the year later I think maybe they found her to be such a fascinating subject they decided to do an article just on Freda alone so um it's called rise of another Rivera and it includes images of a lot of her paintings um so here she is depicting herself um as a teana although it does still say by the wife of the famous Mexican painter but but by 1938 she does kind of have more of a following um and then I wanted to point to the image here um there uh this one which is called self-portrait um with a heart to get a little more closely at this and dissect it a little bit more um and I because I think that this image this was painted in 1938 really captures this conflict she had with her clothing with her body um it's really evident here so she has put herself in the middle in a very basic white shift so the the central dress is not of as much consequence but she's flanked herself again kind of as a mytia she has flanked herself with her school uniform on the left and then this taana dress which keeps resurfacing in a lot of these paintings on the right um and then just to I'm I know a lot of you have been to many of the courses so you probably know a lot about her health history but if some of you haven't I'm just going to run through through some of her health issues um so that you're aware of really a lot of what she's depicting in this image so Freda suffered from polio as a child and so she had one lame leg and one that was slightly shorter and thinner than the other and then at age 18 her she was riding on a bus and the bus collided with a Tramway and a metal handrail pierced her body went through her left side through her womb and then perforated her vagina her spine pelvis collar bone leg foot and ribs were all broken and ironically she was left bloodied and naked after the crash but she was covered in Gold Dust because there had been an artisan traveling with a packet of gold dust on on the train so it's kind of this incredible um one of these Carlos Fuentes really he he uses this phrase Terrible Beauty over and over again in his essay to the introduction of the Diary which is a fabulous essay if you buy the book um and I think that that kind of captures that um so she had 22 surgeries after the accident um so much of her life was spent in pain in bed recovering um it's it's really quite quite awful um and so here I think you get a sense for that you get a sense for it in a lot of her imagery but here you see her arms have been kind of disembodied one is on one dress one is on the other the foot the lame foot um has been turned into a sailboat that may eventually sail off and it could could be this is 1938 a premonition because she eventually had to have her foot amputated and then uh gradually her leg um came off as well later in life so um it's this remarkably striking and um poignant kind of imagery here so this spear is uh is surmounted by two little angels on either end and it pierces right through her heart and then her heart is laying on the beach and then she has tears streaming down her face so um it's really you know her body is certainly broken and it's certainly something that she addresses over and over in her art but also the clothing of course um helps her cover that up so when you think about the kind of ensembles they are they really do um the long skirts the boxy wheel blouse it helps to cover the corsetry the Orthopedics um it is something that really suits what her physical condition is um so and you know as I mentioned before a lot of Scholars talk about um Diego as kind of uh T you know kind of um encouraging her to wear this Tana dress which he certainly did and it's certainly true um but she really does kind of take it on and embrace it and make it her own very specifically free to style and this is an image of a painting called um self-portrait as as Tana or Diego on my mind from 1943 where she has kind of fully embraced this idea of herself as a tana and then I think it's quite symbolic that she is put Diego front and center on her forehead I think probably showing um her Allegiance not only to him but also to this idea that he has promoted uh this kind of taking on of the Tayana style um and this is the actual headdress that is in the Kasa aul the museum fredao ex um in Mexico City um which is quite beautiful and has survived and was locked away in that wardrobe um and you see it's actually a very remarkably um similar likeness um to it and then this is a really lovely um so a picture of fredao um that is by it's called classic fra by Nicholas Murray again this Hungarian photographer from New York City from 1939 that's in the MFA collection it's a really beautiful and I think thoughtful image of Freda um and interestingly I was reading that um second Vogue article article and at the end it says Madame Rivera seems herself a product of her art and like all her work one that is instinctively and calculatedly well- composed it is also expressive expressive of a gay passionate witty and tender personality which I think is really quite spoton in many ways because they were very you know this writer was very much aware that she was kind of you know calculatedly forming this image of herself and so now we're going to move forward and look at Freda the artist through her clothing through the actual garments and through the words of her diary um and I kind of loosely titled this section dressing for Paradise um and here we have two really beautiful beautiful images of Freda again taken by Nicholas Murray I think his images of her are some of the most beautiful out there and some of the few really color images of her um in all of her glory um but what I think think that Vogue uh writer alluded to is that she can't really be extricated from her canvases they're one and the same and she really did create herself as a work of art um and so what I'd like to do now is look at her diary um the Wardrobe story is quite fascinating so when Freda died um uh Diego Rivera said he wanted her wardrobe to be locked up for 50 years so they took one bathroom of Kasa Atul and a lot of her personal belongings a lot of her more intimate items and her wardrobe were all locked up for 50 years and it was only in 2004 that they opened up this wardrobe and it really has kind of allowed us to get a deeper and Fuller understanding of Freda kind of as an individual and as an artist as well so I'm going to show you some of the images of what they discovered in that wardrobe as well as um some of the images from her diary now and to to kind of like better understand how deeply her dress and her painting are really intertwined um and so there is really um this idea that she is constructing a Persona is pretty clear when you look at her diary and you look at her life um she actually altered her birth date from 1907 to 1910 to correspond with the date of the Mexican Revolution so there is this real you know manipulation of image there and then in her diary she calls herself the ancient concealer um so again she's kind of referring to this idea that she is keeping some I mean you feel like so much of it is exposed so much of her inner life and turmoil and pain are exposed but she also is um kind of specifically constructing that um the other thing that I find really amazing about her is that it's this really passionate embrace of Life while confronting death on a regular basis um so the surrealist artist Andre Britton called her artwork a ribbon around a bombshell because there's Beauty and pain and suffering all wrapped up into one and our Diaries are really are replete with images of the yin and yang symbol so she's very much aware of this kind of um you know kind of uh dichotomy of life um and what I thought was very interesting and very compelling is that she called her clothing dressing for Paradise so in a way a lot of what she was doing was preparing herself for death um because it was very much a part of what she was confronting with on a regular basis and if we look at the imagery and some of the images um that she painted um Diego also encouraged her to use this rblo or exvoto form for the basis for her paintings and um these exvoto are usually these kind of modest paintings painted on tin and it's this intimate pain painting that translated pain into art and it tells a story so you see one on the left it's usually depicts an accident or a tragedy that has been overcome and so this is kind of the offering after the tragedy has been overcome it's a miracle and so she does kind of use that form in her own paintings because she is dealing with so much pain and suffering herself from 1944 onward I mentioned that she had her foot um amputated because of gang green eventually her leg um and then she had to wear a series of eight different corsets over the course of this kind of um dealing with how to address her spinal issues after her spine was broken because her she couldn't actually support herself the spine wouldn't support her body she suffered miscarriages um you know it goes kind of on and on um and here is Casa aul and so as I mentioned when she died at age 47 Diego began putting all of her personal effects into this bathroom um and the house became the Muse of fredao um um and they sealed up the room um until 2004 and in the um book about the opening of freda's wardrobe it's called self-portrait in a velvet dress um the director of the fredao museum um writes about opening it and it says the lock securing the door was removed even though we knew what awaited with us awaited us it was a very emotional experience to step into this space that had Lain undisturbed for so many years inside a strong half acrid half sweet pervaded the air a mixture of dampness medicines dust and Thyme and one of the first things they saw were these Orthopedics um that you see here in the bathtub um and then this is some other imagery of kind of what they encountered when they unlocked the door um and he writes we were dazzled it was wonderful to behold the wide variety of clothing inside Chinese and Indian Fabrics embroidered by Tawana hands um so as well as some of her personal effects her makeup her pwns cream um some of the medications that she took were actually still there locked up after 50 years so it was really like the unlocking of a time capsule um the museum was finally able to catalog and organize the bathroom contents including her it included clothing jewelry prostheses um 300 pieces in total um garments from Mexico Guatemala China handmade blouses and skirts made by local seamstresses some garments from the Europe and the US um and again everything eclectic no one style there was no one complete Tawana Ensemble it was all kind of mixed together this is an image of the exhibition at the Kasa Atul and you can just see kind of the great variety The Beauty and the color of this um and interestingly again when we think about this mixing of ancient and modern this was one of the dresses they found and this is um a dress that is again made out of black rayon and it has industrial embroidery as well as gold Rick rack embroidered onto it so again kind of having access to these very modern pieces as well as the ancient um the the diary is a really amazing read it's really kind of this Sur calistic almost automatic writing in style when you read it so it's really stream of Consciousness it's all sorts of ideas and thoughts kind of flowing through the journal um one thing I found really fascinating about it is this page in particular that's the cover and this is a page that's on the symbolism of color and so she was thinking very consciously about um what color meant and which colors she would use and which she would wear so um this is the imagery related to color and it says green equals a good warm light Diego's eyes are green and she mentions the depth of his color of his eyes and how she tries to kind of immerse herself in them and she thinks of green as nurturing and lifegiving as well um and here we see one of the classic images of Freda kind of surrounded by this green magenta um was the uh she thinks of as an Aztec color the color of the prickley the blood of the prickly pear and is one of the brightest and oldest colors and you think about her magenta Roto that was one of her favorites um she talks about the color of mle which is you know that chocolate based sauce that's used to Mexican cooking as being leaves becoming Earth um and then she writes nothing is black really nothing um and yellow to her is really sadness and Madness and mystery so yellow is not even though she wears yellow it's something that she has again kind of this conflicted um relationship with oh wait let me go back um but the other thing she writes that I think is really fascinating is that the caress of fabric the color of colors the wires the nerves the pencils the cells everything is him Diego so she actually Likens the experience of wearing such beautiful Fabrics to the sensual nature of Love um and she has this real predeliction from you know kind of mostly natural fibers that are really soft to touch and so I think that it's the sensual act of putting on those garments which I'm sure were kind of a salve to the broken body underneath that was also quite important to her um and she kind of talks about Diego as one who captures color and she calls him an oxac Chrome whereas a Chromo for is her role which is The Giver of color and so you know that this is a really important aspect of kind of not only her painting but also her presentation of self and it's full of all sorts of other amazing objects um this again is one of the corsets she had to wear um when she was trying to heal from um the spinal injuries um and what she was grappling with with more surgery Y and she again adorns almost everything in her life it's really fascinating to look at um this one actually has Mirrors that have been embedded in the corset and then of course it has the hammer and sickle which is communist um symbol um this is another corset one of the most kind of vividly decorated ones that almost it has kind of this aquatic uh scene on it but also could be you know kind of portray veins there's an eye there um really quite amazing and there's a really um at one point they brought in a Japanese photographer to document all of these objects um his name is is um iuchi makako um Who photo who did a lot of this photography and kind of did these really beautiful and I think uh compelling visually compelling images of some of these objects that have been left um her shoes of course tell quite a story so these are shoes that you can can see the difference in the height of her legs um and then also I love they found a number of Chinese textiles in the wardrobe and so she adorns her shoes with these Chinese dragons on the side which I think is quite interesting and this is another um image of one of her Prosthetics after she had the leg amputated and again she again kind of adorns it so she it's kind of incredible how she really um feels the need to Adorn kind of every aspect of life it is very much um kind of part of her being I think in many ways also um there was some makeup left over so uh this is some of the um nail polish that she wore um she we know that she always very carefully made up her face before she went out so there's some Cody uh Rouge and powder she used a TOA eye pencil on her brow and often I don't know if many of you know this but she would actually darken that mono brow so it was really again kind of this very um calculated specific look that she was trying to achieve and she had this very vibrant magenta lipstick as well um these are some of the blouses and these are China poblana blouses we talked about the China poblana these are two really spectacular embroidered China poblana blouses um that are in the collection um that this one um the one on the bottom right in particular is adorned with beads and really really complex embroidery um and here's yet another one of those kind of Orthopedic corsets that she's adorned with another mirror on the top um and I think that again kind of speaks to the pain and the suffering that she was really grappling with on a regular basis um and again you know when we think about uh kind of this image of Freda and how fascinating and she continues to be um you know some people critique it as this commodification of her look and who she is um and it's criticized as removing her real significance away from a lot of kind of the more subversive political historical and feminist content and yet I think that there is this continued Fascination is really um this kind of visceral response to this woman who had such a vibrant and diverse and kind of amazing life um and there here are two images of uh again this um Nicholas Murray photograph that were taken and used on Vogue magazine um fairly recently when the um the movie came out um and then more recently this is a singer named Natalya lafur card who is who kind of very recently publicly came out and said she is only going to wear Mexican um clothing Mexican uh clothing by Mexican designers and she really wanted to connect back to her Origins and again I think this is really kind of a direct homage to Freda in many ways because it was important to infusing her music with a more kind of authentic Mexican character um so it you know her influence continues to kind of live on so I'm just going to wrap up this is an image from one of the images from her diary again it's quite beautiful um and she writes that I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there were so many people in the world there must be somebody who like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same way as I do I would imagine her and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me um and what I think we kind of Come Away with is that there's nothing about Mexico in Mexico's history that's strictly linear or straightforward it's very turbulent in terms of the history and the culture it's uh Carlos Fuentes calls it a country made by its wounds and I think that freda's story is quite the same is very similar um but as a fashion icon she really crossed boundaries of class gender urban and rural life ancient tradition in modern modernity in a really fascinating way and she had this remarkably vibrant life that simultaneously embraced life and death um so she was a chica madna a mtia and an artist and I think that this quote nicely sums up her vivacity distinctiveness and style she wrote in her journal feet what do I need them for if I have wings to fly thank you [Applause] so I think we have time for questions if anybody wants to ask anything thank you all for coming oh sorry yes um is it known if she was her own seamstress because she obviously had to adjust you know it's i' I have found a couple references to her making things but I haven't nothing to infinitive but it does make me wonder and one of the things I kept meaning to do was um and I tried to kind of get in touch with the curator at Kasa aul um before just to ask her that question but I don't know but I know that they used a lot of the local seamstresses too but it does seem like with those shoes for example like you know that some of them are so crafted like handcrafted that I I do wonder I'm not really sure I'd be interested to know though sorry yeah anything else yes I had read that in addition to the Tana look yes that she also used influences from other native U Mexican grouping is did you find that as well yeah there is I mean I think that the Tawana is um kind of the most prevalent in her look but yes there are other indigenous you know she as I mentioned she was a an avid Shopper she was an avid collector she collected a lot of folk art um of Mexican folk art as well and I think that it again it wasn't you know one specific look it never was one specific look it always had a mix of all these kind of different influences so yeah there are some other other things um it in the collection as well that are not just specifically Tawana yeah yeah yes um was it known why Diego decided to lock that room for 50 years and why he picked 50 as I know it's it's very interesting nobody the director doesn't write specifically about why I mean I think maybe it could be the intimacy of those objects you know cuz like clothing is so personal and so intimate and I think that it was such a fret and he died just a few years after her so I mean even if he had intended to open it up earlier it just wasn't you know it wasn't to be but I think that he just um it may have been too difficult for him personally to kind of grapple with that so I'm not really sure and it there I don't know I haven't read his whole autobiography which he wrote with someone else but I'm wondering if there may be a reference in there that might say something more about it but I'm not sure yeah yes um she died at a very early age with all of her health problems what ultimately did she die from well that's there's a lot of speculation about that um from what I can tell when she had her leg amputated that um pulled her into a really deep depression um and she had a lot of pain um she was drinking heavily at the end of her life she also was had morphine injections regularly because of the pain and there is a lot of speculation that she committed suicide she had a couple she there had been a couple of attempts on her own life prior to that and so I think that may be in the end what it hap what actually happened yeah anyone else yes how prolific was she in her art how many pieces how how prolific um by the time she started writing the journal I knew she that was in 1944 she had about a hundred paintings that she had painted at that stage so and then I think she continued but it's interesting when you read the diary it is so clear the physical um decline of her body because you can see it gets more and more painful to write her drawings get more rough and simple so um I don't think she was doing as much after that point so it's certainly about over a hundred anything else okay thank you all for coming [Applause] appr

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 72,111

Keywords: frida kahlo, fashion, art, art history, mexican art

Id: edb-6xjtSj0

Length: 74min 17sec (4457 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2016