'Frida' Makes Brief, Rare Mexican Visit 16 years of waiting, Monterrey Museum of Contemporary Art, known here as "Marco," finally hosts the city's first exhibit - devoted entirely to Frida Kahlo.
What: Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey ('Marco') When: 10 a.m. - 8 p.m. daily Admission: 50 pesos ($5) (free on Wednesdays) Web: www.marco.org.mx
by SEAN MATTSON
It took 16 years for northern Mexico's premier art museum to open its doors.
Not coincidentally, that's also how long it took for the Monterrey Museum of Contemporary Art, known here as "Marco," to host the city's first exhibit devoted entirely to Frida Kahlo.
But, as Marco's no-closed-days schedule this month suggests, the visit by the darling of contemporary Mexican art will be a short one.
Simply called "Frida," the collection of 57 of Kahlo's works, including some of her best-known oil paintings.
More than 4,000 people crowded through Marco's expansive second-floor galleries at the Sept. 1 opening, a first-day tally second only to a recent showing of work by Fernando Botero, a Colombian artist known for his rotund subjects.
"Frida" follows an acclaimed Kahlo retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, a monstrous 350-plus piece exhibition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth.
The Monterrey showing, though smaller, includes many of Kahlo's better-known pieces, including "The Two Fridas," a double self-portrait that is perhaps her most famous, and "The Broken Column," a testimony to the physical and emotional pain that marked her adult life.
Kahlo, who died at 47 in 1954, was overshadowed in life by her twice-husband Diego Rivera, famous for both his murals and philandering. "Frida" offers an intimate look at their torturous relationship in her paintings and numerous letters encased in plastic and hung in rows from the ceiling.
There also are more than 50 photographs spanning Kahlo's lifetime. The large blowups include portraits of Kahlo by Guillermo Kahlo, her father, and Manuel
Alvarez Bravo, a noted Mexican photographer.
As Mexico's best-known female artist, a pioneer of artistic self-examination, played in a film by Salma Hayek and even commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp in 2001, Kahlo is being more than compensated for the recognition she never received in life.
But the Kahlo craze has left museums scrambling to gather enough of her work to put on a show. It took Marco five years to organize this one.
Because of her poor health, "The work of Frida wasn't that numerous," said Beatriz de la Torre, public relations director for Marco. Much of it is in private collections, and the largest single collection has only 20 pieces, she said.
