Excerpt from the New York Times [link to story]

February 29, 2008
Art Review
The People’s Artist, Herself a Work of Art
By HOLLAND COTTER

PHILADELPHIA — You really should come down, a friend e-mailed me this summer from Mexico City. She meant, come down for the Frida Kahlo centennial, with a retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and displays of memorabilia at Casa Azul, the Blue House, Kahlo’s home. You should come, she wrote, not just for the art, which looks fabulous, but for the place, the people.

Tens of thousands of Mexicans, young and old, rich and poor, had been standing in line for hours to get a glimpse of Kahlo’s paintings and her personal relics: her snapshots, her brushes, her ashes, the steel orthopedic corsets she wore under her peasant blouses and skirts to hold a wrecked body together.

The celebration, one gathers, was not the usual Fridamaniacal crush. It was more a fiesta, a devotional jubilee, an hommage to a Mexican saint in the city where she was born in 1907 and died in 1954. I couldn’t make the trip, but suspect that the essential Kahlo experience is the same anywhere. Through her art, we travel her life, a shining path of high Modernist adventure and a Via Crucis of physical pain, political passion and amorous torment. Basically, she felt what we all feel, only hugely, terribly. This is what makes her the people’s artist she is. And what makes her, to those who don’t get her extremist vibe, a romantic cliché. […more]