Marrying art and life: Kahlo and Rivera in Detroit

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Janet Tyson reports on ‘Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit’, an exciting and thought-provoking show at the Detroit Institute of Arts

 ‘Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit’, on view through mid-summer at the Detroit Institute of Arts, was some ten years in the making, and would be exciting and thought-provoking under any circumstances. It presents the two artists at pivotal points in their respective careers. Rivera, internationally renowned, was at his apogee as an artist. Kahlo, conversely, discovered in Detroit the artistic identity that has allowed her reputation to now overshadow his.

Yet there is another narrative – one about the museum, itself – which provides the exhibition with additional resonance. ‘Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit’ comes on the heels of the DIA’s near death due to the city’s notorious bankruptcy and the threatened loss of its (until recently) city-owned art collection. Hence, the display of iconic works by both artists, organized around Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescoes, becomes a splendid celebration of rebirth.

As if any further significance were needed, the recent financial meltdown, which came to a head in 2013, uncannily echoed the circumstances surrounding the artists’ arrival in Detroit in 1932. It was then the height of the Great Depression, thousands of automotive workers had lost their jobs and the city, after slashing its portion of the museum’s budget by almost 80 per cent, was tempted to shutter the museum permanently and sell off the art. Not only was the museum imperilled; there was no money for such an ambitious project.

Nonetheless, DIA’s founding director William (Wilhelm) Valentiner was convinced that it would be a coup for his institution to be the first US museum to commission the internationally acclaimed muralist, and that such a work potentially could make the museum too famous to be forsaken. He persuaded Edsel Ford, a devoted museum patron and the son of automotive pioneer Henry Ford, to support the project. So Rivera and his then little-known wife were brought to Detroit.

Despite the reservations one might expect the Communist Rivera to have had about working for an important capitalist, the artist quickly plunged into his work, forged numerous friendly acquaintances, and was generally happily engaged. In contrast, Kahlo was lonely and bored. She also was pregnant. Her physical disabilities – having been stricken as a child with polio and suffering a horrendous childhood traffic accident, as well as possibly suffering from congenital spina bifida – were the source of painful uncertainty about how to proceed with a potentially dangerous pregnancy. In the end, she had an abortion, which occurred on 4 July 1932.

The painting she produced afterwards, titled simplyHenry Ford Hospital, focused Kahlo as never before. Her work had stylistic affinities to Surrealism as well as being influenced by indigenous Mexican art. Kahlo became a painter of the personal as piercingly political and cultural. As such, her artistic identity evolved in counterpoint to Rivera’s ideologically inspired, intensely public persona, creating a palpable tension between the two bodies of work.

Scale, too, plays a telling role in this beautifully staged presentation. Although several of Rivera’s works, including eight gigantic preparatory drawings that he gave to the museum, are of overpowering proportions, their monumentality is matched by the intense intimacy of Kahlo’s small pictures. And both artists are represented by small paintings throughout the exhibition, which is laid out in chronological sections that present their works before, during, and after their sojourn to Detroit.

The ‘before’ section shows several icon easel paintings by Rivera, including his Flower Day (1925) and Flowered Barge (1931), which exemplify his masterful combination of sturdily hieratic figures with indigenous decorative schemes. Kahlo’s impassive Portrait of Eva Frederick (1931) mimics Rivera’s figural style, but not his vivid palette. A tiny drawing, The Accident (1926), features graphic display of wreaked busses, prostrate figures (including her own), and other elements in an unanchored compositional style that suggests Surrealism. Also, a watercolour still life, titled Tiny Caballero (1928), reflects her love of folkloric objects.

An explicit indication of the influence on folk retables (altarpieces) is seen in Rivera’s full-length portrait of a child, Juanita Rosas (1930), with its overall flat, frontal composition and unfurled and inscribed banner. The same influence also appears in Kahlo’s Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931), with its rich colours, similarly compressed space, frontal figures and dove carrying a banner. Serving effectively to announce their marriage, it succinctly speaks to what Kahlo described as the marriage of a dove and an elephant. It is notable, however, that he holds a palette and brushes, while she simply holds his hand. A lithographic self-portrait by Rivera (1930) differs distinctly from another lithograph (1930), this of Kahlo, in that his picture of himself focuses on his broad face, with its penetrating eyes, while that of Kahlo depicts her as a full-figure nude, displaying a body that shows no traces of her disabilities.

The part of the display given to the couple’s time in Detroit includes historical documentation that provides context for artworks that are, at once, visual documents and objects in their right. Copies of newspaper articles provide glimpses of the social unrest that gripped Detroit, as well as of the high-society whirl into which the artists were drawn. There are photographs of Rivera at work with his assistants, and of Kahlo, either with friends or painting in her hotel room. Portraits by Rivera of Valentiner, Edsel Ford and Robert H. Tannahill, another important patron, remind viewers of the leadership that supported Rivera’s work.

But, in spite of the inclusion of Kahlo’s pivotal Henry Ford Hospital, this section belongs to Rivera. There is no denying the power, often literally mesmerizing, of the many intricately detailed cartoons for both primary and ancillary sections of the great fresco cycle. Rendered for the most part in vine charcoal on heavy paper, they demonstrate Rivera’s command of underlying form, as well as the documented accuracy of his representation of Ford’s massive River Rouge plant, then the world’s largest industrial complex. As Edsel Ford insisted, other types of industry are represented as well, including the manufacturing of chemicals that, as Rivera explicates, both nurtured life and could bring death.

Of these works, the one that I found most compelling was Figure Representing the Black Race (1932), measuring 263.5 by 581.7cm. Created as one of four allegorical female figures (the other three being of the white, red, and yellow races), she gracefully reclines while gripping a lump of coal with one hand. In the same drawing, three other hands protrude from a rocky outcropping, each holding a piece of coal, which was one of the four elements used in production of steel, along with lime, iron, and sulphur.

Yet, in spite of his pre-occupation with a realism that combined ideology with rhythmic decoration, Rivera recognized Kahlo’s tragic abortion by creating the most poetic panel in the scheme overall. This was painted in the upper register of the wall that Rivera wanted viewers to see first, which was Infant in the Bulb of a Plant (1932). Bundled securely inside its pod, the baby is flanked by flowing linear shapes that suggest veins, tissue strata and other organic layerings that contain microscopic-looking forms.

In the ‘after’ section of the exhibition, we are given to understand that Rivera received only two other mural commissions in the USA. These were a relatively minor work in San Francisco and one for Rockefeller Center that was destroyed after he painted an heroic likeness of Lenin and an unflattering portrayal of John D. Rockefeller Sr into the scheme. Rivera went on to fulfil important commissions in Mexico, but his days as an international artist were over. Kahlo, on the other hand, went on to paint numerous, small inward-focused pictures that slowly earned her mythic stature. The exhibition includes several of particular importance, among them A Few Small Nips (1935), Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1940), Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), Double-Portrait of Diego and I (1944), and Self-Portrait with Monkey (1945). 

Of course, all these words and pictures refer back to the frescos in what now is called the Rivera Court. It is a visually busy room, what with its marble-tile floors, ornate mouldings, various apertures, and a relatively prominent skylight, which casts graphic shadows upon the richly detailed murals. Planters around the base prevent viewers from approaching too closely and, when the room is filled with school children, the sense of vitality is overwhelming. Nothing seems to hold still in this seamless merging of two-dimensional art with public space.

Rivera’s murals first were opened for public viewing on 21 March, 1933, mere weeks after industrial layoffs and strikes in factories around Detroit, as well as a major local bank failure. Ironically,  Edsel Ford was president of this bank, the Guardian Trust, and its failure triggered a series of such collapses around the USA. Circumstances, alone, guaranteed a controversy and the immense artwork became what Valentiner described, even two years later, as ‘the greatest attraction in Detroit’. Or, as E.P. Richardson, the DIA’s assistant director, put it: ‘Detroit talked itself out of the recession by talking about the Rivera frescoes …’ .

Although space here does not permit it, the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition deserves its own, extensive review. It is a remarkably readable book, both in its design and in the visual and verbal content. My sole complaint is that none of its contributing authors is identified, apart from passing reference to Mark Rosenthal, who curated the exhibition and wrote the main essay on ‘Diego and Frida’. Yet each contributor writes from a solidly authoritative perspective.

Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera is Diego Rivera’s grandson and a distinguished curator and collector. Salomon Grimberg is a Dallas-based psychiatrist and pioneering authority on Kahlo’s life and oeuvre. Jerry Herron is a Michigan historian and founding dean of the Honors College at Wayne State University in Detroit. Former DIA curator of education, Linda Downs, is executive director of the College Art Association. John Dean is professor of American Studies at the University of Versailles. Nancy Sojka is the DIA’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs. Cathy Selvius DeRoo and Christopher Foster are conservation scientists and conservators of works on paper and photographs at the DIA. Each of these eminently informative contributors writes with a distinctive voice that makes reading the entire book a pleasure.

The catalogue Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit  by Mark Rosenthal et al. is published by the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2015. 248 pp., 55 mono and 125 colour illus. ISBN: 978-0-89558-77-8