Friday, June 01, 2007

In case you're going to Mexico City this summer

MEXICO CITY (AFP) - The 100th birthday of artist and feminist icon Frida Kahlo will be honored with the largest-ever exhibit of her paintings, the Museum of the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico said Tuesday.

"The 354 pieces will be the largest exposition of Frida Kahlo," director of the National Fine Arts Institute Teresa Franco told reporters.

It will also be Kahlo's first comprehensive exhibit in Mexico, she said. After Mexico proclaimed Rivera paintings to be national cultural heritage, foreign owners feared lending her work to Mexico.

Besides one-third of her artistic production, manuscripts and 50 letters that have not been displayed previously, she said.

Works are on loan from Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nayoga, Japan.

Kahlo (1907-1954) twice married muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and was a close friend of Russian communist leader Leon Trotsky.

She suffered intense emotional pain inflicted by the philandering Rivera and physical pain after being stricken by polio and bus crash.

Pain and her inability to have children were common themes in her paintings, many of which were shocking, bloody self-portraits.

After her death, Frida became "first a legend, then a myth and now a cult figure," Hayden Herrera wrote in a 1992 biography of the Mexican artist.

The most recent international exhibition of Kahlo's work was in 2005 by the Tate Modern in London, which brought together 87 works.

The exhibit is tentatively slated to open June 13 until August 19. The museum is open 10:30 am to 6:30 pm Tuesday through Saturday.

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