Idle Chatter
Stare Master
Frida Kahlo of the paintings has The Look. Frida Kahlo of the photos does not. Why?

It's The Look that gets to you. Frida Kahlo took up a variety of subject matter and dabbled in a number of styles. All of it worth seeing. But in the end it is the self-portraits that endure and that fuel her ever-increasing stature in 20th century art. That's because in the portraits you get The Look. The Look is the Frida Kahlo stare. If you've seen any of her self-portraits then you have seen it. It is an expression that barely changes throughout a lifetime of paintings. Costumes change, parrots flutter into the frame, monkeys come and go. The Look never wavers. Walking through the major exhibit currently hanging at the Philadelphia Museum of Art or flipping through the catalog, it's clear that The Look starts in about 1930 with the Self-Portrait of that year and keeps right on going through the last great self-portrait, Self-Portrait with Medallion, in 1948.

Self-Portrait, 1930.

There's no Frida without The Look. In fact, as time goes on and her living memory recedes further into the distance all she will be is The Look, and The Look will be her. It's also nice that the show at the Philadelphia Museum contains a whole section of photographs taken of and by Frida over the years because it gives us something to contrast with The Look. The first and most obvious thing to note about The Look is that it is hard, harder than any version of Frida you see in the photographs. It is bold and it is uncompromising. The Look is even a little bit scary. The lips are invariably set together and sometimes slightly pursed. The face is set and without expression. The eyes look directly at the viewer, though, importantly, her head is almost always turned slightly to the left or to the right, as if she is looking away from something else and then has suddenly directed The Look straight out of the painting and into the world of the viewer.

The photographs of Frida are much softer, or more playful, or openly seductive. They are filled with the emotion and the personality that is so strikingly absent from the self-portraits. The closest thing to The Look in a photograph is probably Guillermo Kahlo's portrait from 1932, but even in that photograph there is a warmth and a rounding of the edges that isn't in the paintings. There is a vulnerability that comes out of the photograph, even though she is posed in the same way and has the same blank expression that she does in her self-portraits. A photograph from 1940 now titled Frida Kahlo With Cropped Hair has something close to the hardness of The Look, but there is a smile playing at the corners of her mouth and a twinkle in her eye. It isn't The Look.

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and    Hummingbird, 1940.

This brings up the intriguing possibility that, in fact, the self that Frida Kahlo captured in her paintings and portrayed to the world was something altogether manufactured and bearing little resemblance to the actual person who is both the author and subject of those paintings. The Look would be, then, a lie, a lie that she told to herself and then told to us. And that interpretation would fit with another aspect of The Look, let's call it the heroic aspect. The Look that Frida gives us in a painting like Self-Portrait Dedicated to Sigmund Firestone is that of a hero in the classical sense of the term, beyond human in capacity and resolve. And there's no doubt that the heroism of The Look is also related to her life story, the suffering she endured from the series of operations she underwent after surviving a near-fatal streetcar accident when she was 18. It is also the struggle of a woman in her time, from being Diego Rivera's wife during all the years of his philandering and success, a struggle with the difficult political and economic situation in Mexico in the early 20th century, a struggle with tradition and the modern world. Struggles, indeed, are everywhere, and she is the hero with the capacity to face them all. Or so she wanted to portray herself.

But then why are we so taken with her lies, even after all these years? I think our fascination is explained in something she once said about André Breton when he was visiting Mexico. She said, "I never knew I was a surrealist till André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was." There is a story of 10,000 levels of defiance in that sentence, and it is that same defiance that powers The Look. But it is particularly fascinating that the comment comes in reference to Breton. In Surrealism we have but one of a never-ending list of 20th century movements that dissolved the self into one thing or another. For Surrealism, the self dissolves into dreams and the irrationality of desires. Or, variously throughout the early 20th century, the self dissolves into history or the structure of society or into the grammar and syntax of language. The self, in short, has done a lot of dissolving over the past hundred years, and a glance at the painted canvasses over that time reflect that fact as much as anything. From formalism to the avant-garde, the self either performed a disappearing trick altogether or was forced to submit to every manner of fragmentation and dissipation.

Weathering it all, never going under for a second in the stormy seas of all the dissolution is The Look. There is no theory behind it, no counter claim about the essence of our being. There is simply Frida Kahlo's need to capture The Look again and again. Whatever drove it, whatever pains and sorrows, it became an aesthetic thing of its own, and that is how The Look comes down to us now. It comes down as a truth greater than the conditions that may have caused it for the simple reason that it doesn't fade one bit. It doesn't shy away from the basic — let us call it Cartesian certitude — that was the rock upon which Frida built her art. The Look says, "I am I and you are you." The Look is about the hardness of that fact, the impenetrable steely actuality of that fact. It is a look that suffers no fools, no bullshit. I am I, Frida Kahlo, I am I. • 21 February 2008

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Morgan Meis is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for The Believer, Harper’s, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily. Idle Chatter appears here weekly. Morgan can be reached at morgan@fluxfactory.org.

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Homepage image Self-Portrait, and Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust.
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