Art View

Some thoughts on the new Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which I recently saw with my friend Billy.

Frida Kahlo has never been my favorite artist, but I have always felt a certain power in her paintings, an undeniable brilliance, perhaps a bit too obvious for my tastes. However, I was very interested in seeing this exhibit to learn more about both her life and her work.

The exhibition itself will not disappoint. It is well laid out, chronologically, and contains a phenomenal line up of her greatest and most famous paintings. It is long, but not overwhelming. The audio guide was informative, but a little bit too basic. I quite enjoyed the exhibitions' overall emphasis on how Kahlo's life and work mirrored each other, and they were not afraid to intermingle artistic criticism with fascinating biography about Kahlo's dramatic, and rather , tragic life. Such an approach seems fitting for an artist who was almost obsessed with her artistic persona and whose most famous work are her haunting self-portraits. I found the collection of photographs in the beginning of the exhibition a fascinating look at the real Kahlo and her tumultuous marriage to the great Diego Rivera. Some of the photographs, showing Kahlo, Rivera, and men like Leon Trotsky were fascinating snap shots of 20th century intellectual history.

I certainly felt that I left with a greater appreciation of Kahlo's legacy and importance.

Book Watch II

Here is Oscar Wilde's, or rather Dorian Gray's, account of Huysmans' A Rebours (see below) in Wilde's phenomenal novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which will be the subject of my next Book Watch post.

"It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows."