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Viewing report
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CRUEL BEAUTY. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, Oct 2009, Pages: 64
CRUEL BEAUTY examines the self-portrait paintings of Frida Kahlo and her articulation of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ through the creation of an innovative feminine vocabulary. The work explores the representation of her sexual subjectivity in the body of self-portraits produced in her short life time, some of which were painted in a state of physical disability and created in the shadow of her legendary husband - socialist Mexican muralist and revolutionary Diego Rivera. An examination of the self-portrait paintings produced by Frida Kahlo, informed by her diary, personal letters, poems, and photographs, broadens the conventions of subjective self beyond the generic patterns of autobiographical narrative, characteristic of a masculine Western ‘self’. In Kahlo’s self-portraits the the urban Mexican proletarian woman draws stylistically from the domain of European self-portraiture, early studio photographic portraiture, biographical Mexican Catholic retablo art, and the legacy of ancient Aztec Indian symbology of self.
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