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Frida Kahlo
Organized in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth, Frida Kahlo is the first major Kahlo exhibition in the United States in nearly fifteen years. It presents over 40 of the artist's most important self-portraits, still lifes, and portraits from the beginning of her career in 1926 until her death in 1954. Rendered in vivid colors and realistic detail, Kahlo's jewel-like paintings are filled with complex symbolism, often relating to specific incidents in her life. In her iconic self-portraits the artist continually reinvented herself. Paintings like The Two Kahlos (1939) demonstrate her penchant for self-examination, and works like Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and The Broken Column (1944) express her struggles with illness throughout her life.
The exhibition includes loans from over 30 private and institutional collections in the United States, Mexico, France, and Japan, several of which have never been on public view in the United States. Frida Kahlo also features a selection of nearly 100 photographs of Kahlo and her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, by preeminent international photographers of the period, such as Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti, and Nickolas Muray. Personal snapshots of the artist with family and friends, including such cultural and political luminaries as André Breton and Leon Trotsky, are also on view. These photographs—several of which Kahlo inscribed with dedications, effaced with self-deprecating marks, or kissed, leaving a lipstick trace—pose fascinating questions about an artist who was both the consummate manufacturer of her own image and a captivating and willing photographic subject. On loan from the collection of designer and photographer Vicente Wolf, many of these photographs have never been published or exhibited. Major lenders to the exhibition also include the Museo Dolores Olmedo and the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art. Presenting an extraordinary combination of paintings and photographs, Frida Kahlo offers a unique perspective of one of the twentieth century's most important and revered artists.
In conjunction with this exhibition, Walker Art Center is publishing a richly illustrated catalogue featuring more than 100 color plates as well as critical essays by Hayden Herrera, Elizabeth Carpenter, and Latin American art curator and critic Victor Zamudio Taylor. A separate plate section is devoted to works from the Vicente Wolf Photography Collection. The catalogue also includes an extensive illustrated timeline of related sociopolitical world events, artistic and cultural developments, and significant personal experiences that took place during Kahlo's lifetime, as well as a selected bibliography, exhibition history, and index.
Lee Miller
One of the most original and ambitious photographic artists of the twentieth century, Lee Miller (1907–1977) performed with unique success on both sides of the camera. Chronicling the diverse periods of her career, this exhibition begins with Miller's days as a model in the late 1920s and early '30s, continuing through her studio photography years in Paris and New York, her travels in Egypt and Eastern Europe, her days as a war correspondent, and finally to the relative tranquility of the post-war years at home in England.
A selection of more than 140 images, mainly vintage photographs, celebrate Miller's remarkable life and her art—and how each reflected and influenced the other. Organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum on the occasion of the 2007 centenary of her birth, the exhibition spans her extraordinary career as a photographer and is the first complete retrospective, exploring her transformation from artist's muse to ground-breaking artist.
The exhibition features extensive loans from the Lee Miller Archives in East Sussex, England, directed by Miller’s son Antony Penrose, among other sources. Ten photographs from the Museum’s collection are included in the traveling exhibition. Additional selections from the collection are featured in the Philadelphia venue, as are two photographs by Miller on loan from the Museum of Modern Art and one work from a private collection in New York.
Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico, 1935–1950
Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico, 1935–1950, the first exhibition of its kind in a major U.S. museum, examines the early work of one of modern Mexico’s most intriguing artists. Although Juan Soriano (1920–2006) holds a critical position within the history of Mexican painting and sculpture from the 1930s until his recent death, his art is curiously almost unknown outside of Mexico. While recent exhibitions on Soriano have examined his paintings and sculpture from 1950 onward, very few have focused on the artist's exceptional paintings from the 1930s and 1940s. These works—portraits of friends and family, images of children, still-lifes, and landscapes—offer a distinctive variation on the themes and artistic styles that preoccupied Soriano's contemporaries. When Soriano moved to Mexico City in 1935 he entered into a lively visual and personal dialogue with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, among others. In addition to responding to the work of these prominent Mexican artists, he drew upon his deep interest in popular and indigenous arts, as well as Cubism, German Expressionism, Fauvism, and Surrealism, creating his own personal style of romantic realism.
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