Alison Judd:
Hello and welcome. My name is Alison Judd. I'm a proud Brandeis alumna from the Class of 2004, and I serve on the Alumni Arts Network Leadership Committee. It is my pleasure to welcome you to today's program on behalf of the alumni association, featuring Gannit Ankori, the Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum and Professor of Fine Arts and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Today's program is sponsored by the Brandeis Alumni Arts Network. We are delighted to welcome you, our alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, and friends around the world. Thank you so much for joining us.
Alison Judd:
Now, to introduce Professor Ankori. Gannit Ankori is a critically acclaimed author, curator, and educator. Professor Ankori joined the Brandeis faculty in 2010 and was appointed the Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum earlier this year. She has published, lectured, and taught extensively about modern and contemporary art from a global perspective with emphasis on issues pertaining to gender, nationalism, identity, religion, trauma, exile, hybridity, disability, and their manifestations in the creative arts. Her geographical regions of expertise include the Middle East and Mexico.
Alison Judd:
Dr. Ankori is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking scholarship on Frida Kahlo. Her books include "Frida Kahlo in San Francisco," "Frida Kahlo (Critical Lives)," Frida Kahlo: Art, Life, Diary," and "Imaging Herself: Frida Kahlo's Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation." She has published numerous books, catalogs, and articles about modern and contemporary art viewed from a global perspective and her books and essays have been published in 10 languages. Her most recent show, "Frida Kahlo: Appearances can be Deceiving," just closed at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. Iterations of the show appeared at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. Additional exhibitions are scheduled for Holland this fall and Paris in 2023.
Alison Judd:
Here at Brandeis, we are delighted to share the opening of "Frida Kahlo: POSE" co-curated by Dr Ankori and Cersei Hinestrosa. Before coming to Brandeis, she served as the Heniah Sharif Professor of Humanities and chair of the Department of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was also a visiting associate professor at Harvard divinity school, Harvard University, and at Tufts University School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Welcome, Professor Ankori.
Gannit Ankori:
Wow. Thank you, Alison, for such a beautiful introduction, and I'm going to just start by sharing my screen and talking to you all. Thanks for joining us and braving yet another Zoom meeting. I know that it's not easy, but I'm really, really delighted that you're here with us, and I'm honored to be here to share some thoughts and images on Frida Kahlo in conjunction with the upcoming exhibition at the Rose Art Museum titled "Frida Kahlo: POSE." I'm also thrilled to invite all of you to come and see the show when we re-open the museum next month. Can't give you an exact date, but we're working on it right now. I just took a break to talk to you, but we're all installing at the Rose.
Gannit Ankori:
There is of course, so much to say about the path breaking Mexican artist and cultural icon, Frida Kahlo. Although we have some time together, I will need to curb my ambitions and focus on just one or two themes. I want to make sure to do at least two things to address the title of the talk "Appearances can be Deceiving" and to outline the sections of the Rose exhibition at the end.
Gannit Ankori:
"Appearances can be Deceiving" is a direct quote scribed by Frida Kahlo in an undated drawing. This is the drawing. In 2004, half a century after Kahlo's untimely death at the age of 47. Several rooms and closets that had remained under lock and seal were opened at La Casa Azul—the blue house—that is now the Frida Kahlo Museum. It is the site where Kahlo was born, where she died, and where she spent most of her life. This previously unknown drawing titled by the artist as you see at the bottom, "Appearances can be Deceiving," was found among Kahlo's papers. Papers, photographs, some paintings, drawings, letters, a whole trove of exceptional things that ...
Gannit Ankori:
This, I need to give credit to my dear dear friend and colleague and thought partner and co-curator in all things, Frida Kahlo, Circe Henestrosa, who is also co-curating the exhibition at the Rose. Kahlo's flamboyant self-styling and distinct sartorial choices creatively composed from a sumptuous palette of indigenous costumes, flower bedecked, braided hairdos, and an elaborate assortment of colors, textures, accessories, and jewelries, were employed by the artist to construct her self-image as "La Méxicana," the paradigmatic Mexican woman or specifically "La Tijuana," the woman from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec where a matriarchal society that was thought to be in the '30s when it was rediscovered was thought to be untouched and untarnished by colonialism.
Gannit Ankori:
The colorful costume that you see outlined here hides Kahlo's disabilities and diverted attention away from them. Kahlo contracted polio at the age of six, and her right leg became very thin, withered, and eventually was amputated. Her spine and multiple other injuries she endured when she was 18 and was in a near fatal accident. When we look at this, we see the behind this facade of the appearance, we have mismatched legs, one thin, the other healthy, and the butterflies often speak to health and the imagination. We have a broken spinal column and we see that Kahlo is wearing a corset that lifts her up. Her column always gave her problems. I believe this pubic triangle alludes to the reproductive organs that were also injured in the accident. The handrail from the bus on which she was traveling penetrated her body from the back, exiting through the vagina. With her sense of humor, Kahlo used to say, "I lost my virginity."
Gannit Ankori:
This selection of photographs, all of which will be at the Rose Art Museum, display the appearance, the iconic Kahlo. You see, as my dear thought partner Circe Henestrosa showed, the huipil, not only is beautiful, but it also doesn't crease when Kahlo was sitting and also was capacious enough to accommodate her various corsets, medical corsets. Everything about the way she fashioned herself draws attention away from the disabled parts of her body.
Gannit Ankori:
This is the way we showed it in the Brooklyn Museum, where you have the costume itself and the photographs by Nicholas Morais of this iconic Frida Kahlo, and her appearance, if you will, her facade. The first part I want to talk about, I want to show you Circe. This is at the opening of our London show with Salma Hayek who channeled Kahlo in the most strange way, wonderful way. This year is the idea of the drawing from 2012 in the Frida Kahlo Museum, a very, very tight and, and condensed show that Circe put together where you see the appearance, all the costumes. You begin to see here, one of the corsets, but then in another part, all of the materials that are underneath the beautiful costume, the corsets, the prosthetic leg that she needed after her leg was amputated, her crutches.
Gannit Ankori:
This is the way it was shown in the show at the VNA. We had the final room. We have all the costumes together in this wonderful composition, but in contrast, we had this room of what was hidden underneath. You see the drawing "Appearances can be Deceiving" here, and you see all the elements that were there. I want to just say something about the curatorial position, which is an ethical one. We always had Frida Kahlo gazing at us. We weren't just peering into her life and underneath her garments. We also always showed only what Frida Kahlo showed us. What she decided to show was what we are showing in our exhibitions, never things that she didn't decide to display. There is an ethical curatorial stance there.
Gannit Ankori:
How did this facade ... How did Kahlo create this facade? Thanks to some letters that I found in an archive in D.C., I was able to recreate, based on Kahlo's own words, how she began to create her facade. She obtained her initial celebrity in 1929, after marrying the famous and infamous Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist. She was 22. He was 43. She was just barely beginning to paint after the accident. She had wanted to be a doctor, but all those dreams crashed together with the automobile crash. He was an internationally reknown artist known as an artist of genius, a peer in front of Picasso, outrageous personality, and a reckless womanizer. Their 1929 marriage certificate actually identifies him as an artist/painter, and she is called a housewife, but newly discovered letters illuminate her process of self creation, which took place in San Francisco.
Gannit Ankori:
Rivera and Kahlo sailed to San Francisco shortly after their marriage, since Rivera was invited to paint murals there. He was already a seasoned traveler, but Kahlo, this was her very first trip away from her native Mexico. Basically Tehuacán, México City, maybe Cuernavaca, but she really did not travel. She was enthralled by the adventures that awaited her in the United States. She penned lengthy letters to her family that reflected a wide-eyed eagerness to embrace new sights, sounds, and experiences. Reading the letters is quite exhilarating, as well. She's very childlike and especially moving are her letters to her father, her "papacito lindo", describing the first time she ever saw the ocean, the first time she ever saw, and then in New York, the Empire State Building. She's just enthralled by this new world.
Gannit Ankori:
The voluminous correspondence indicates how quickly the young Kahlo became cognizant of the power of clothes to fashion identity. She wrote, "The gringas really like me a lot and pay close attention to all the dresses and rebozos that I brought with me. Their jaws drop at the sight of my jade necklaces." She wrote this to her Mamacita Linda in November of 1930, a week after her arrival. Here you see her with the shawl, the rebozo, and the jade necklaces, probably Aztec jade necklaces. She resided on Montgomery Street, just a few blocks from San Francisco's bustling Chinatown, where she discovered and re-affirmed her predilection for exuberant fabrics, handmade embroideries, and ethnic crafts. Quote, "Imagine," she wrote her father, "there are 10,000 Chinese here. In their shops. They sell beautiful things, clothing and handmade fabrics of very fine silk. When I get back, I'll tell you all about it in detail" end of quote. I just want to say that in the trove that was found in 2004 at the Frida Kahlo Museum, we found these Chinese fabrics, some of which she incorporated into her costumes.
Gannit Ankori:
Her costumes like the palette as Circe says, is the Tijuana dress, but she adds and hybridizes it with additional things she picks up here and there. Increasingly aware of the sway of the impact of her indigenous Mexican costumes, her what was called exotic appearance, and within the US, a foreign and unique sense of style, she thrived. Kahlo wrote her mother with delight, quote, "All the painters want me to pose for them." Kahlo indeed, posed for artists in San Francisco and then throughout her life. Mostly, she posed for photographers, not painters. The image that has attained fame as the iconic Frida, or the appearance in the title "Appearances can be Deceiving," may be viewed as a close artistic collaboration between Kahlo and a host of exceptional photographers, among them, Edward Weston, Peter Julie, Imogene Cunningham, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nickolas Muray, Bernice Kolko, Gisèle Freund, and others. All of these will be on view. All these photographers' images of Kahlo will be on view at the Rose Art Museum.
Gannit Ankori:
Kahlo's multivalent affinities with photography as a medium and her intimate, personal, and professional relationships with photographers are addressed throughout the Rose exhibition, and it all began with her beloved photographer father, Wilhelm Guillermo Kahlo. She posed for him with her intense, by now recognizable, gaze ever since she was a toddler. He also taught her how to take pictures, frame compositions, and throughout her life and her oeuvre, we see the impact of photography on her art making.
Gannit Ankori:
One of the earliest paintings that Kahlo seriously painted in San Francisco is a 1931 double portrait celebrating her marriage to Diego Rivera. It is a good place to start, first of all, because it was a first major painting, and second of all, because this is one of the first times that she poses as "La Méxicana," the paradigmatic Mexican woman, a process that started with fashion, moved to photography, and only later penetrated her art. She shows herself as the demure Mexican wife, which was a role she initially wanted to play. In this work, Rivera is portrayed as the great artist who holds the attributes of the painter, the palette and the brushes, in his right hand. Kahlo on the other hand, holds onto her husband, thus defining herself not as a painter, but as his spouse.
Gannit Ankori:
Adorned with a red rebozo and jade Aztec beads, she displays herself as "La Méxicana." Moreover, her manner of painting in this work, note the stiff pose, awkward rendering of the feet, affinity with colonial portraiture, it all emulates the style of an amateur painter. Kahlo conceals her sophistication behind a mask of naivete. She camouflages her position as a really sophisticated artist by espousing the subordinate role of the painter's doting wife. Ironically, even this pseudo naive work is based on a well-known European precedent, Jan Van Eyck's "Portrait of the Arnolfini Marriage" from the 15th century. Kahlo kept a reproduction of this work in her studio among numerous other books and documents that reflect her vast knowledge and erudition.
Gannit Ankori:
One of the first things I did when I was writing a dissertation about Frida Kahlo was to look through all the books in her library and saw that she pretended to be naive. She pretended and people bought it. People said she painted whatever passes through her mind, but actually thinking about marriage, she went directly to art historical precedent, but then she subverted it and made it Mexican. She Mexicanized it and personalized it. We see a triple facade. She shows herself as the demure Mexican wife of a great painter while she is the painter. She shows herself as naive while she's really very, very sophisticated.
Gannit Ankori:
Just one year after she signed and dated her marriage portrait, just imagine, from 1931 to 1932, Kahlo experienced a series of events that transformed her life and her art significantly. Neither would ever follow a traditional path thereafter. Between the end of May and mid-September of 1932, within a period of less than four months, she went through a succession of dramatic losses. Late in May, she found out that she was pregnant. Contrary to popular myths, which claimed that color's deepest desire was to have Rivera's child, her initial reaction was to try to abort the fetus, which she immediately tried to do with the aid of her doctor. We have her own letters testifying to this.
Gannit Ankori:
The attempted abortion was unsuccessful, and Kahlo reluctantly began to consider, tentatively, the possibility of having a baby in spite of many fears, hesitations and deep ambivalence. On July 4th, however, a traumatic miscarriage brought both her pregnancy and her budding, if ambivalent, thoughts about having a child to an abrupt halt. The miscarriage was also a near death experience as Kahlo almost bled to death. Barely out of Henry Ford hospital in Detroit, the exhausted artist traveled to Mexico, where her mother Matilda Calderon laid dying in hospital. Soon after Kahlo's arrival on September 15th of 1932, her mother died.
Gannit Ankori:
I just wanted to explain that what you see here is a panel or a very, very small portion of the panel of Rivera's murals. He was invited to paint murals in New York, have a solo exhibition at MoMA, murals in Detroit, murals in San Francisco. She was just his spouse who was very, very patronizingly called "Little Frida," and sometimes even we see symptoms of what is called misogynoir.
Gannit Ankori:
"Little Frida her brown throat," a lot of references to her indigenous background in a patronizing way. But I want to also show you the next slide. This is Kahlo's work and this is a detail of Rivera's mural and the size discrepancy that I'm trying to show here relates not just to the difference in their art, but also to a difference in the way they were perceived. He was supposedly the grand master who paints for the millions and she was considered his wife and at a certain point, a very kind of eccentric, self-absorbed, interesting painter or something like that. And she could never ever sell her work. She could never make a living. And this is one of the ironies and tragedies of her current iconic status.
Gannit Ankori:
It's tragic when we compare it to her sense of failure during her lifetime. So the unmediated and dramatic encounters with the forces of life and death, maternity and mortality experienced viscerally through the body, the arches own fragile body, the ailing and moribund body of her mother, and the disintegrated body of her unborn child determined the course that Kahlo's art was to follow. She made two drawings, two paintings, and one lithograph, her only known lithograph, and the latter will be at the Rose Art Museum. We will be able to see it. They allow us to follow her process of coping with the compounded trauma of 1932 and to observe her manner of transforming lived experiences into works of art. I just want to point out the huge jump from portraiture to kind of symbolic taboo-breaking, radical self-representation.
Gannit Ankori:
Just six days after she almost bled to death on June 10th, 1932, Kahlo signed and dated this drawing. The sketch became the basis for the oil painting Henry Ford hospital completed shortly thereafter. The drawing shows a naked Kahlo upon a bed. Her face almost expressionless, her eyelid sockets blank, and her hair neatly combed back. Her left hand touches, but does not grip five strings, which are attached to a corresponding number of elements symbolizing the body parts that Kahlo believed were responsible for her miscarriage. Of these, the images of a snail, a pelvic bone, and a female abdomen, the orchard are all based on obstetric illustrations of internal parts of the female anatomy. And these are books that I actually found in her library and saw how she copied these images of internal organs, specifically female organs, into her art. Lucienne Bloch who was the artist close friend at the time and an eye witness to the events.
Gannit Ankori:
She actually lived with Rivera and Kahlo. She recalled that when Kahlo was in hospital, she asked to see the fetus she had lost. When this proved impossible, she requested illustrated medical books that would provide her with some understanding of what had happened to her body. So images from these books continued to influence Kahlo's art for the rest of her life. The fifth object included in the drawing and later in the painting was a machine that Dr. Solomon Greenberg identified as an autoclave contraption used to sterilize medical utensils. The autoclaves link to sterility probably relates to Kahlo's conceptualization of her own infertility. So Kahlo transferred the drawing into a painting. And I want to just say, again, the idea that she's naive and just very, very spontaneous is ridiculous because you see that there are preparatory sketches and then she works on them. Very deliberate, very meticulous in her choices.
Gannit Ankori:
So she made significant changes as she transformed the preparatory drawing into an oil painting, title "Henry Ford Hospital." She altered the scene's industrial background, its spatial setting, color scheme, its scale. She also appended intentional art historical illusions. Some of you may see like Charles Sheeler, Raoul Hausmann, Francis Picabia. We can see their influence throughout. She also used a lot of the medical sources that we discussed earlier. However, the most prominent elements that Kahlo introduced into the oil painting are the oversize and centrally positioned fetus attached to a sixth string.
Gannit Ankori:
The copious uterine blood that profusely stains the white sheet, and Kahlo's disheveled black hair and messy tears, which completely alter her original vacuous demeanor. Thus, in the final version of "Henry Ford Hospital," Kahlo deliberately and significantly endows herself with the attributes of "La Llorona," the weeping woman, and notice the hair and the tears. It actually looks like her face is so dirty and smudgy from these tears. Mexican folklore constructs "La Llorona" as an archetypal evil woman, antithetical to the normative wife and mother. Like them she is sexual and maternal, but hers is a deviant sexual energy and a moribund motherhood, which threatened the very foundation of the patriarchal order.
Gannit Ankori:
There are numerous versions of the story of "La Llorona," but several key elements dominate all the tales. She is first and foremost an unwed mother, abandoned by her lover, loss of love leads her to the brutal act of killing her own children in a frenzy of rage. A Mexican Medea, she becomes the epitome of uncontrolled, non-conjugal sexuality, childlessness and madness, a social outcast denounced and feared by normative society. So you must remember that the miscarriage happened a little bit after Kahlo tried to abort her own child and feelings of guilt and remorse accompanied that. So identifying with "La Llorona," the weeping woman, was a complex act for her.
Gannit Ankori:
Clearly then "Henry Ford Hospital" is not simply a biographical account of Kahlo's miscarriage. The work evokes broader cultural and social ramifications through its innovative and revolutionary art historical reversals and rupturing of taboos. It is constructed deliberately as an anti-nativity scene. Indeed, Kahlo's naked body is decidedly not immaculate. Moreover unlike the chaste and virginal Madonna, Kahlo does not produce a child, but rather the taboo uterine blood of "La Llorona." "Henry Ford Hospital" is also original in its bold rejection of traditional female roles. Kahlo's painting reflects her personal understanding that she cannot fit into the roles of wife and mother, but her attempt to explore other options of being through the espousal of the identity of the marginalized "La Llorona" engages in a broader protofeminist discourse pertaining to the oppressive nature of gender roles in Mexican society. So she knew art history really well. She knew how birth was depicted as a nativity scenes.
Gannit Ankori:
She knew how naked women on a bed reclining were usually like the Odalisque tradition, and she completely subverted it. She completely changed it to reflect her experience, but also female experiences at-large. Although it is possible that Kahlo never fully recovered from the trauma of her miscarriage, a lithograph that she completed on August 11th exhibits the beginning of a healing process and a transformation. And this is her only lithograph. She never produced another one. No longer passively lying in an alienated hospital bed, Kahlo literally and figuratively stands on her own two feet, no longer grieving with the wild tresses of the tearful "La Llorona," Kahlo has her hair carefully gathered in a net. Even her blood flows in an orderly controlled fashion. In fact, the blood drops and the tears become a stylized visual pattern as opposed to the unruly or taboo body fluids, just like she takes these intense experiences and transmutes them into art.
Gannit Ankori:
Both the composition and Kahlo, its protagonist, are split in half. The left side of the work shows the fertile promise that did not materialize from the fetus in Kahlo's uterus, which is the time when she tried to abort. A delicate line evoking an umbilical cord circles her right leg and is attached to the navel of—this is the mirror image of her right leg—of the navel of a three month old male fetus. So that one is when she tried to abort, the other one is when she had the miscarriage. Above the latter fetus, two images of ovular cell divisions copied carefully from book illustrations in her library are delineated in detail.
Gannit Ankori:
On the right side of the composition an alternate scene of productivity is presented. Blood drops fall from Kahlo's vagina and fertilize the soil. They coagulated to strange phallic looking subterranean forms. Plants that resemble the human organs of the fetus, particularly his eyes, hands, and genitals sprout from this source. With their visible roots they are based on images of Aztec depictions of medicine or herbs that Kahlo had in her studio library. Hence, they symbolize both fertility and healing. Sperm like worms wriggle as Kahlo's blood contributes to the regeneration of the earth. Above the realm of nature's fecundity, a third arm rose from Kahlo's left shoulder, reminiscent of Hindu or Buddhist imagery. In her newly acquired hand Kahlo holds a painter heart-shaped palette. Some of my students say that the palette actually looks more like the fetus that she lost.
Gannit Ankori:
This is the very same palette that Rivera had held in his hand in Kahlo's aforementioned marriage portrait. So in the 1931 painting Kahlo presented herself as the doting wife of the great artist. Just one year later—a failed mother—she identifies herself as an artist in her own right. In the top right corner of the work of weeping one weeps, the moon, a symbol of female menses and fertility weeps for Kahlo's infertility. Kahlo too is weeping, but the two large symmetrical teardrops on her cheeks are stylized in a way as to express a moderate sadness, no longer the frenzied grief of "La Llorona." As she dons her bead necklace, necklaces actually there are two rows, Kahlo is on her way to recovery. Acknowledging that part of her has failed, the other part, the part that could not produce a human offspring, she constructs the other portion of her being as a productive entity who participates in two realms of creativity, the fecundity of nature and the fertility of art.
Gannit Ankori:
Finally, Kahlo's lithograph is based on a genre of anatomical cosmologies called flap anatomies that insert medical illustrations of the male and female bodies within cosmological settings. These elaborate compositions, which like the lithograph, display internal and external aspects of the body. So again, appearances can be deceiving. There is the facade and then there's whatever is happening inside, which is what Kahlo's art is so good at conveying. But usually they include the sun and the moon, botanical illustrations, and additional images derived from scientific and mythical realms of human knowledge.
Gannit Ankori:
But Kahlo takes this, she rejects the standard cosmology in which woman is subordinate to man, and said she meticulously reconfigures an alternative scene in which the male partner and the son that is his symbol is both conspicuously absent, and Kahlo images herself as an autonomous creative being reborn as an artist. To sum up, 1932 marked a pivotal turning point in the development of Kahlo's art. And after this, she started to really, really produce the art for which she is so venerated today. She produced "My Birth." She completely reconfigured the Madonna and child motif in this, "My Nurse and I." And again, you see facades masking and unmasking.
Gannit Ankori:
And "What The Water Gave Me" is really a total revisioning of the female bather. Instead of seeing the body of the woman bather as an object of desire, she is showing herself in the bathtub as the subject, the Cartesian thinking and imagining head. But I think that at this point, I want to turn to this idea that Kahlo understood, in 1932, that her desire to be the conventional wife and mother, the wife of the great muralist, was not going to happen and through her art and in her life as well, but I want to focus on the art, she started to explore alternative identities. And again, this idea that she went in public as the "la Méxicana," as Diego's Mexicanista wife, but underneath through her art she was exploring other identities, other selves.
Gannit Ankori:
And one of these alternative identities that she espoused was that of "La Malinche." "La Malinche," the Indian translator and mistress of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, is one of the most notorious characters of Mexican lore. She is viewed as a Mexican Eve, the sensuous woman who is responsible for the fall, in Mexican terms, the conquest. In her role as the mother of Cortés mestizo son. She is considered a primary maternal being, the mother of all Mexicans, but she is considered a traitor and also is sometimes linked with "La Llorona. "In The Dream" of 1940 Kahlo links herself to "la Malinche" by connoting Antonio Luiz's 1932 painting titled "The Dream of the Malinche."
Gannit Ankori:
Like Luiz's protagonist, Kahlo portrays herself in passive slumber upon a bed. Both women have dark trusses that fall similarly around their faces, both rest their heads on two pillows, and both are covered by a blanket that metamorphosis into nature, evoking the archetypal link between woman and the natural order, but also suggesting an analogy between the conquest of the land and the sexual violation of the Indian woman. Whereas Luiz's is transformed into a Mexican village, Kahlo's body is associated with a thorny vine. The thorns denote the general theme of pain suffering as well as a specific Christian illusion. But the leaves that she painted, each composed of five elongated pointed segments, are based on a particular Mexican plan popularly known as Tripias de Judas or Judas's Entrails.
Gannit Ankori:
The name relates to the story of Judases betrayal and then suicide that caused his intestines to spill out and was viewed as fitting punishment for his betrayal of Christ. Through this intentional and kind of covert botanical illusion, Kahlo links her Malinche self to the skeletal Judas figure on top of the canopy. She actually had a papier-mache skeletal Judas figure on top of her bed. And these are two infamous characters that are associated with betrayal, suffering, and death. And she associates herself with this evil character that again is the opposite of the Tehuana Mexican wife.
Gannit Ankori:
In 1943, Kahlo painted "Roots" closely related also to "The Dream" and to Luiz's "Dream of La Malinche," but in "Roots" Kahlo's connection with nature is even more pronounced. Rather than being covered with a blanket that turns into nature Kahlo literally metamorphosis into a plant self. The uneven hole that perforates her body surrounded by the red fabric of her huipil resembles an open wound. In the context of Kahlo's art, this image of an open wound relates to the vulgar Mexican term la chingada, an epithet for "la Malinche" and Octavio Paz tells us it's not just a violated or ravaged woman, it's someone who's forced open, screwed, and she shows herself in that way as well. The plant here also has relevance because it relates to it's a specific plant that was used for suicide.
Gannit Ankori:
1945, "The Mask," once again, expresses Kahlo's emphatic by now obsessive identification with "La Malinche." In this unusual self-portrait, rather than depicting her features, Kahlo completely conceals her face with a bright red Malinche mask. But again, this masking and uncovering, this appearances can be deceiving, these facades and what lies underneath. Popular Malinche masks, which you see here as a comparison, were traditionally scarlet symbolizing and I quote from Cadre who's the expert. They symbolize, "Sexuality, lasciviousness that led la Malinche to become Cortés' mistress and the violence and bloodshed that Malinche brought upon her own people with the conquest."
Gannit Ankori:
But the masked Kahlo Malinche does not seem to be either sensuous, nor treacherous. Both she and the mask are crying. At the bottom left-hand corner of the painting at cactus plant sheds tears as well. The cactus and the leaves that serve as a backdrop for this image have a brownish green color that makes them look dry and lifeless. Behind these plants dark shadows reinforce the somber mood. Kahlo's self-depictions as the "la Malinche" probably relate to her personal experiences of multiple betrayals. And I won't go into her tumultuous marriage and the multiple affairs both she and her husband had, but they also recast "La Malinche," a central character of Mexican culture as a tragic victim rather than an evil traitor.
Gannit Ankori:
Indeed, Kahlo's revisionist view of the Indian woman seems to be more in keeping with the historical facts of "Laa Malinche's" life. And I thank my Mexican feminist scholar friends for all of this information. "La Malinche" was born into an Aztec family of chiefs. Her father died when she was a small child, and her mother remarried and had a son. Consequently, her mother sold her off to a group of traders. She was repeatedly sold and resold from tribe to tribe, until she was finally given as a gift to the Spanish Cortés. She was 14 years old at the time. Her fluency in several Indian languages, as well as Spanish, her vast intelligence and her proficient knowledge of the Native cultures, were clearly a great asset for the Spanish expedition. She was used and abused in other ways as well. After becoming Cortés' mistress and bearing him a child, he married her off to another Spanish man. She died at the age of 24.
Gannit Ankori:
So a victim, or someone who was betrayed, rather than a betrayer. The unbridled passions of "La Llorona and the sexual availability and hybrid fertility of "l Malinche were constructed as destabilizing forces that threatened the patriarchal order in Mexican society. At the other end of the social spectrum stood the non-sexual nun. Secluded and independent for men, she was considered another form of deviation from the wife and mother norm. In several self-portraits from the 1940s, Kahlo attempts to image herself as a Mexican nun. In this self-portrait dedicated to Dr. Eloesser, she wears the dull brown habit of a nun. The color symbolizes mortification, mourning, and humility. You see how different it is from her typical Tehuana costumes? A crown of thorns encircles her neck and punctures her skin, making her bleed. Kahlo portrays herself from the neck down as an ascetic, engaged in Imitatio Christi, self-mortification.
Gannit Ankori:
The artist's head is crowned with flowers, whose voluptuousness contrasts with the asceticism of her lower half. As Emmanuel Pernoud has suggested, this type of self-portrayal is modeled after well-known portraits of crowned nuns, a Mexican genre that was famous in viceregal times. The nun is usually portrayed bedecked with flowers on the day she takes the veil. The sensuousness of her apparel contrasts with her future life in the convent. By adopting the symbolism of this genre, Kahlo constructs herself as a deeply divided—being split between sensuality and asceticism.
Gannit Ankori:
Just to say that she continued with these Christian images here, a work that is now lost, but we will have this wonderful photograph of her painting it, called "The Wounded Table." Kahlo shows herself as if she's the Christ figure in the Last Supper. And here, she shows herself in "The Broken Column," like Christ, or Saint Sebastian. This is the way it will be displayed in our exhibition, which is called "Viva la Frida!" in Holland, that opens in October, where we have two corsets, the one she's wearing, and the one that shows "The Broken Column," as well as this incredible painting.
Gannit Ankori:
But showing herself as Christ is only one way that she identifies with non-female roles. Her art reveals both subversion of conventional gender divisions as well. And here, I must say, way before her time, in general, Kahlo's work is really pathbreaking. In "Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair," Kahlo depicts herself as an androgynous creature, so she is neither a man nor a woman. And we see that this is not new. When she was 19, long before she married Rivera, she was 19. This is just one year after the accident, she cross-dressed in this very conventional family photograph, taken by her father. She wears a three-piece man suit, and here, I love this, because she needed a cane, but she transforms it into an accessory. She poses a little like a dandy, or something like that.
Gannit Ankori:
But by cropping her hair and displaying the evidence of her actions, Kahlo creates a complex symbolic image. We see three distinct references to hair. First of all, we see two braids, one here, and one in her lap. And here, I think she's cutting off the braided ribbon decorated hair that is a central feature of the exotic coiffeurs that helped construct her identity as La Méxicana, or the Tehuana woman. So she's saying goodbye that to that traditional role. In addition, we have a lot of loose strands of wild hair, and they refer to the loose hair of "La Llorona," and there's also the top, we see her writing. This is a fictive stanza that she wrote for the famous song that was one of her favorites, the song, "La Llorona," and it just says, "If I loved you, it was for your hair. Now that you are hairless, I don't love you anymore."
Gannit Ankori:
So I think that another thing that's really beautiful, this painting by the way, is at MoMA and on view now, but the there's an ambiguity of indoor and outdoor, and that echoes the gender fluidity. She's neither male nor female, she's both. She's still wearing her pearl earring. She still has the dainty hands, and we see that she took on, so behind that facade is also this gender fluid personality.
Gannit Ankori:
And she also kind of investigated non-Western ontological concepts. So seeing herself as Mexican was one thing, using Catholic imagery for a Mexican artist is also quite reasonable, quite logical, but she also was a student since 1944 of Hinduism, and Daoism, and we see her idea of moving from depicting herself with animals as in this, this is the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, or "Itzcuintli Dog and Me," this was in San Francisco and will also be at The Rose. She shows herself with her animals, who are symbols of... They're her surrogate family, they can be ancestors, they can be friends, they can be many, many, many things.
Gannit Ankori:
But eventually, she becomes a hybrid creature, and they become part of her. "The Little Deer," from 1946, is perhaps the most striking depiction of this aspect of herself. We see the head is Kahlo's head, same earrings that she's wearing, by the way, in "Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair," but it's a male deer, you can see that very clearly. And so, again, it's a hybrid in terms of gender, but also, it's animal and human. It's also a hybrid thing because you have Christian, the arrows of suffering allude to Saint Sebastian's martyrdom. The selection of a deer specifically relates to its symbolism in Aztec mythology, and at the bottom, the word "karma" refers to the idea of reincarnation. And at that point, in Kahlo's diary, she has many, many drawings that she calls The Karma Drawings, where she shows herself trying to be part of everything, everything animals, nature, and other people as well.
Gannit Ankori:
I want to end this part, and then I only have like three minutes to talk about The Rose. Alejandro Gómez Arias was Kahlo's childhood sweetheart, and was with her on the bus when she had her accident when she was 18, and he remained a lifelong friend. And I had the honor of meeting him when I was a teenager, and he was still alive, in México City at his home, and he said, "Who was Frida Kahlo? It is impossible to find an exact answer. So contradictory and multiple was the personality of this woman, that it may be said that many Fridas existed. Perhaps none of them was the one she wanted to be."
Gannit Ankori:
So for me, when we say "Appearances can be Deceiving," I think people usually think of the iconic Frida Kahlo as the photographs that I showed, the Nickolas Muray photographs, the facade, that persona, the colorful Méxicana, but underneath, she was exploring alternative identities and many other selves, and going inside as well as thinking about identity as not a static given, but something that shifts and changes, and that we may have many, many different selves. And again, today we talk about intersectional identities, and we talk about gender fluidity, and we talk about hybridity, but those terms were really not available to Frida Kahlo. It's through her art that she was presciently exploring these ideas.
Gannit Ankori:
So if I could take just another few minutes to talk about the exhibition that Circe and I are curating at the Rose—very, very briefly—because I hope I'll get a chance to host you all there. Circe is again, an Indigenous Mexican fashion curator and scholar, and as you know, I'm an art historian and Kahlo expert. So together, we kind of have a way, we've been working together for nine years now, and it's always such a pleasure.
Gannit Ankori:
So briefly, the show will include photographs, films, paintings, drawings, two prints, and all range from very early on from she was born in 1907, I think the first photograph we have is 1908. But here you see from her childhood photographs taken by her father, through the photographs by Nickolas Muray that show that appearance, the most famous, the Kahlo that she wanted all of us to remember. And then we also have the last photograph ever taken by her friend, Lola Álvarez Bravo.
Gannit Ankori:
We have one of her very first works before she was an artist in 1925, the year just before she had the accident. She made this illustration of two women for a book. We have "Itzcuintli Dog and Me," one of the most... A painting of Kahlo in her prime, and we have two of her latest works, this very tragic self-portrait that she painted the year she died, just before she died.
Gannit Ankori:
So the exhibition is organized in five sections. The first section is called "Posing," and it really runs through the entire show. These are photographs. This photograph we have, Kahlo posed even as a toddler. Before she contracted polio, she smiles after that. She really does not smile, but we have the photographs that her father took of her, and she learned how to pose for photographs, and did so throughout her life.
Gannit Ankori:
We also have this drawing that shows the connection between photography, and her posing for photographs and self-portraiture. This is an unfinished preparatory drawing from 1931, so very early on, just before she left for San Francisco, and we see that she actually used her father's photographs to try to compose something that discusses her process of becoming, her growing up—very reflective. I would say that what's between here are the traumas. This is where she had polio, and this is where she had the accident.
Gannit Ankori:
And we go to later in life, this is 1933, a fresco that she did, her only fresco, and photographs of her from a similar time when she was visiting "Gringolandia," as she called the United States. So these are also the type of materials that we will have in this exhibition.
Gannit Ankori:
The second section is called "Composing, "and it relates to Kahlo's deliberate construction of her identity. Here, you see a photograph by Julien Levy, where she's braiding and unbraiding her hair, and preparing herself. Partially exposed, but exposing her process of composing her look or appearance. And this, one of my favorite drawings, we see her revealing that she composes her hair, her face. She's posing for a drawing, perhaps a self-portraiture, so exposing the fact that she's constructing this facade.
Gannit Ankori:
The other thing, we have a section that is one of my favorites, is devoted to Frida Kahlo is an artist. In the scholarship, in the popular imagination, there's a lot of talk about Kahlo's dramatic life story, specifically attached to Rivera and her affairs. There's a lot of talk about her fashion, which I learned from Circe is really significant, and parallels her art making practices in a fascinating way. But I really wanted to focus on her composition of artworks, and here you see her painting one of her most famous works, "The Two Fridas." She shows herself as not unwhole, trying to fit into, conform into the role of wife and mother. But here, you see her at the very end of her life, already bedridden, still continuing to paint, and this is the quote that will be on the wall: "I'm not sick, I'm broken, but happy to be alive as long as I can paint."
Gannit Ankori:
The third... Sorry, this is supposed to be three. The third section is "Exposing," and this amazing photograph by Florence Arquin, kind of links with our idea of appearances can be deceiving. We see her lifting her huipil, and showing the corset that also is supposed to help her medically, but is also revealing and kind of alludes to another form of interiority. Here she reveals her communism, and her, I would say plight with reproduction, her reproductive history. And there will be a small section related to her politics. Again, something that for me, is really important, because the popular image is that she's self-absorbed, et cetera, but that's not true. She was always politically active. And this is an image that we have of her, just like a week before her death, where against doctor's orders, she left the hospital and went to protest. And she was always, always active politically. And by the way, women only got the right to vote the year she died. So she was disenfranchised, but still very, very active politically.
Gannit Ankori:
And the other thing we will have to show you is this real exposition exposing not just without her clothes, but what is happening inside, but also what is happening in her imagination, in her mind.
Gannit Ankori:
The next section is called "Queering," and we will have many, many images that show Kahlo's non-binary and kind of, I would say her love and intimacy with men and women. This is interesting, because André Breton, and Jacqueline Lamba, his wife, visited Kahlo, and then she visited them in France for three months, but she and Jacqueline remained in touch and had an affair. And the "Queering" section also includes these photographs, and another one where we see her spanning from age 19, through the end of her life, exploring non-binary identities.
Gannit Ankori:
And a feature that we will have is several Rose collection artists who also explore non-binary identities, decades after Kahlo, but this speaks to her legacy, and there will be connections between the Rose collection and some of Frida Kahlo's themes.
Gannit Ankori:
And the last section is Self-Fashioning, where we will have many of these photographs and depictions of how Kahlo fashioned her identity from the beginning, from San Francisco, all the way until her death, really.
Gannit Ankori:
So thank you, and I think I finished here, and we have time for questions that I'm hoping you will ask, and I'll ask Alison to help us.
Alison Judd:
Wow, Gannit, thank you so much. What an amazing presentation. I feel like I got so much out of that listening. I knew about Frida, but it's always amazing to kind of get to know her from an expert like you. I can start, I was really drawn to that kind of pivotal turning point in 1932 with the miscarriage, and I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that litho, especially kind of that divide between the two forms of creativity, right? Of creating humans, and then creating art, and I really loved seeing that piece, as it really speaks to that. And maybe you could just talk a little bit more. I was especially drawn to the tears in her eyes, and how they're almost facing one direction, and is that intentional? I'm curious what you think about that.
Gannit Ankori:
I want to get there so that when we talk about it, everyone can see it, and then you get to see a little bit of... Okay. So thank you for the question, Alison.
Gannit Ankori:
I really, really found a 1932 and the transformation to be such a radical transformation. If you look at her double portrait with Rivera and you see some of the other portraits she does of others in San Francisco. I mean, they're very interesting, but only 1932 does she become Frida Kahlo. She would have been an interesting portraitist, but here she really kind of invented a visual vocabulary that didn't exist before to convey these things.
Gannit Ankori:
I think that the split and the human... She knew she was not going to have a child. She actually had two abortions. She had abortions before this miscarriage, not only the one that she tried to abort the child here, but she also had an abortion afterwards. She knew for various reasons, her health, her relationship with Rivera, she was not able to have a child. I don't think it was medically only.
Gannit Ankori:
And it's sad. It's tragic because it wasn't a valid choice in Mexico of her time. But her finding other ways to love, other ways to connect, her involvement with nature, we see that in the way she built her house. Her garden, for example. It's not just that in her paintings she paints. And look behind me, we see a detail. She actually, because she was housebound for much of her life in La Casa Azul, she transformed it into a microcosmos of Mexico with flowers and trees and fruit trees and animals.
Gannit Ankori:
She had not just the famous pet monkeys and the itzcuintli dogs, she had parrots, she had a pet fawn, Granizo. She actually had a pet fawn. And we have two beautiful photographs by Nicholas Murray of her with her pet fawn. So she lived that way. And there was a very, very interesting friend of hers and he gave an interview to filmmakers Karen and David Cromey in the sixties. And he said, "Love for the little animals, for art, for the earth, for Mexicans, love is the basis of everything that Frida Kahlo does." And I think we see that in that turning point. It's not only that she gives up being a mother and she's failing as a mother. She adopts art. There's a positive thing there. She adopts the art and being involved and integrated into nature. Yeah.
Alison Judd:
Someone asked on that same one though, if you could just remind us what the circular images on the left side were. I think you mentioned it in the presentation.
Gannit Ankori:
It was cellular divisions. So Frida Kahlo, when she went to the National Preparatory School and she wanted to be a doctor. And she actually was very much interested in science. And when she had the accident at the beginning, she thought she might be able to do medical illustrations because she had a propensity for drawing. So these cellular division were actually copied from a book on microscopes. And she had several gynecological obstetrics books in her library that she used. They also appear in various paintings where you see cell divisions or cells. You see ova and sperms in the background of her father's portrait, for example, that she painted in 1951. So yeah.
Alison Judd:
Great. Herrilyn asks her attitudes toward her disability, ie to hide it, reflect the cultural attitudes. How do you think she might have responded currently when disability activism and disability culture are more prevalent? Would she have been able to embrace disability?
Gannit Ankori:
Okay. So I think she did embrace disability. And I won't share my screen because there's not enough time. That's a great question. And there's a lot of focus in our exhibitions about disability, and disability studies is something both Susie and I studied at length. I think that she began with that attitude. So when you think about disability and visuality, usually people either stare and then it's like a freak show and it's the wrong kind of looking. It's something that the disabled person feels terrible because of that staring. Or people look away or disregard the disabled person. And Frida Kahlo, when she had polio and her right leg withered, her first response was to put on several pairs of socks and try to hide her withered right leg and to hide her limp.
Gannit Ankori:
And we see the first photographs and we have some of them at the Rose of her a year after the accident. And of course, she's trying to hide it with either wearing the three-piece suit with the long pants or the long tehuana dresses. But the whole section at the Rose called "Exposing" reveals that Kahlo began to expose the disabilities. Even the drawing. She's the one who's showing us that her legs are not symmetrical. She's the one who's actually displaying her wounds. And I think that she is a precursor to many of the disabled people.
Gannit Ankori:
I want to just share an anecdote. Well, two anecdotes. One is that at the opening of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, they had influencers who were disabled, especially people who were interested in her prosthetic leg. And the prosthetic leg is quite interesting because the story goes that she got one that was just a plain brown one. And she said, "No, no, I need one that is beautiful." So she actually asked for red boots. She put bells on and she took a Chinese embroidery that she got in San Francisco of a dragon and kind of decorated the boots. So I think that what she was trying to do intuitively because there wasn't anyone around her who was doing it, was to hide it, but also to own up to it.
Gannit Ankori:
And so the second thing I wanted to say was that one of my "aha" moments was when we received a beautiful necklace from the La Casa Azul in Mexico, and it was of coral beads and in-between there were these long metal beads. They looked like beads. When I looked at it closely, I had the opportunity to study it before we put it in the case, I saw that it was leg shaped Milagros. So Milagros are little emulates shaped in the shape of an organ or the limb that is wounded or injured. So she actually even wore her disability around her neck and transformed it into art.
Gannit Ankori:
So I think that's an excellent question. And I think that for me, I was very much influenced by Elaine Scarry's book "Of The Body in Pain" and she talks about the fact that there are no words to describe pain. People in pain revert to pre-verbal sighs and ahs and ohs. And I think that's usually right, there are no words, but there is visual art. And I think one of the main contributions of Frida Kahlo is that she invented a visual vocabulary to talk and to expose and to share disability and what it is like to live in a disabled body. So thank you so much for the question. I would love to come back and talk just about disability and visuality and disability in Frida Kahlo's art.
Alison Judd:
Yeah. I mean, that was really great to hear. What was the cause of her death? Lois was asking that.
Gannit Ankori:
Yeah. It's very interesting to be a Kahlo scholar because the sources are very contradictory. So I have a copy of her death certificate and it says embolism, but there are several tales. One was that it was suicide. She had tried to kill herself, but that was probably not true. Some people say an accidental overdose because at the end of her life, as you will see in the late paintings, she can barely hold the brush, she's so medicated. That she's in so much pain, she's just begging for demerol. And so that it was an accidental overdose.
Gannit Ankori:
Some people say that it was just an inevitable result of all those medical problems throughout her life. Her nurse, Judith Fermento said that after her leg was amputated, she lost the desire to live. But the biggest surprise is in a book by her niece, Isolda Pinedo Kahlo, and she says that at the funeral, Diego Rivera told her that he's the one who gave Kahlo the overdose because he couldn't bear to see her suffer. The New York Times, by the way says cancer, which is absolutely false.
Gannit Ankori:
But I don't know. It was almost inevitable that her body could not cope with so many, she went through dozens of operations in the hope of feeling better. She was in constant pain. But I would say that for me, it was the contradictions that were really interesting because the story of her life is being told still today in so many different ways. And I think she promoted that kind of fabrication. She called herself "la gran ocultadora," the great concealer. That was her name nickname. That was the nickname that she and Rivera used for her. And she used to conceal and reveal and kind of make up her own story.
Gannit Ankori:
By the way, she even changed the date of her birth from 1907 to 1910. And people say it's to align herself with the Mexican revolution, but who knows? So if you ask me how she died, I can say she died in La Casa Azul and what she wrote in her diary just before she died, she wrote, "I hope for a joyful exit and hope never to return."
Alison Judd:
So Gannit there's a couple of questions about her relationship with Diego Rivera. So Louis had mentioned, thank you for complicating the typical idea of Kahlo's identity. Isn't the oversized suit and cropped hair usually said to Diego's suit? What are the implications that might be around that? And then someone else also wanted to know if Frida's art is more popular than Rivera's in Mexico today?
Gannit Ankori:
I would say, I'll start with the later one, because just to say that when I started my research in the '80s before the film, before she became a household name.
Alison Judd:
Well, someone also wanted to know how accurate or inaccurate the movie is. So you can talk to that as well.
Gannit Ankori:
Okay. Okay. So there's a lot there. So let me just start with the fact that people would use to say Frida who? And then, "Oh, Diego Rivera's wife." Or third wife who also dabbles in art. Those were the headlines in the newspapers in the U.S. Today when I teach my Frida Kahlo: Art, Life, Legacy at Brandeis University, the students don't know who Diego Rivera is, but most of them know who Frida Kahlo is. So I would say she's more popular, not just in Mexico, but here as well. In Mexico, I think Diego Rivera's still revered because also his murals are all over the place. You can't avoid him, whereas Kahlo. But yeah, it's true. It's true.
Gannit Ankori:
The relationship was, again, there are a lot of myths that Rivera loved to promote. He loved to tell tall tales. And I would say that they had an unusual relationship, but from reading all of what she has written in her diary and elsewhere, she was very committed to the relationship and she loved him. She was obsessed with him. And in the diary, you see she's writing, "Diego, the universe, the world, my mother and my father, myself," she really was obsessed with him. And they were both devoted to the marriage in different ways. The film is not accurate, but I love that it brought attention to Kahlo And I think Selma Hayek is very good. Especially as the young Frida. I think Julie Taymor's use of art, like scenes where she has the puppeteers or things like that, the artistic parts are really brilliant. I would suggest reading another book if you want historical accuracy.
Gannit Ankori:
Yeah. I mean, just to say that in his autobiography Rivera writes, "The more I loved a woman, the more cruel I was to her. Frida's only an example of this horrible trait." He writes that about himself. So again, I don't think we can know everything. We can read all their letters. We can look at it. We can try to understand. Kahlo was very in love with Rivera, very devoted to him. He appreciated her as an artist. And yeah. I think our time is up and I could talk forever about Kahlo, as you probably could tell.
Alison Judd:
Great. There's lots of questions still coming in. Lots of interesting thoughts. So I don't know if you have time for maybe one more or two more questions, but we can also wrap up.
Gannit Ankori:
All right.
Alison Judd:
I thought an interesting question from Caroline was Frida's family must've been well to do maybe, to have access to all the extensive medical procedures and treatments, is this correct or not?
Gannit Ankori:
It's not correct. It's not correct. So Frida Kahlo's father was born in Germany and he immigrated to Mexico when he was 18 and became a photographer. And it was part of a wave of immigrants who came when the government was actually interested in European culture. And he became a national photographer, especially of architecture, both modernist architecture and colonial architecture. But after Kahlo was born at 1910, the revolution, he did not get any more commissions and they were very, very, very, how shall I say? Not well off. Not well off at all. And Kahlo was very eager to get a job to help pay for everything. In fact, there are some scholars who think she did not get the best medical attention because they could not afford it. And there are some scholars who write, and I have no way of knowing if this is correct, that one of the things that Kahlo's parents were interested in the marriage with Rivera was that he could help financially. They were not well off.
Gannit Ankori:
I remember talking to Alejandro Gomez Arias, her boyfriend who knew the Kahlo family when they were teenagers, like 14, 15. And he was saying that Herr Kahlo, that's how they called him, was a man who had about him an air of a has been. Someone who could not do anything. And when they were in San Francisco, I know from the letters that she'd often send money back home and was trying to devise ways for them to make more money by maybe subletting a room. So yeah, I love that question because the class and economics is never talked about and I find it fascinating Kahlo vis-a-vis and her situation.
Alison Judd:
I think the last question is, are there any works by Kahlo in the Rose collection?
Gannit Ankori:
I wish. No, no. There might be a gift of a photograph by Nicholas Murray of her, but Kahlo produced between 1925 and her death in 1954, maybe less than 200 paintings and they're very rare. And right now they're way beyond anything that any of us could think about in terms of acquiring them. So if there's anyone out there among the alums who would like to give the Rose a painting by Kahlo, I would like to talk.
Alison Judd:
Many thanks to Professor Ankori for this fascinating discussion and special thanks to all of you for joining us today. We're delighted to see so many of our Brandeis alumni and friends coming together to explore topics with our Brandeis faculty and alumni experts. We invite you to join us again on Friday, June 11th at 12:00 PM for transparency, oversight and accountability in the post-Watergate era, a conversation with Michael Horowitz, Class of '84, US Inspector General for the Department of Justice and Bob Woodward, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and bestselling author. Professor Maura Fairley will moderate the program. We greatly appreciate your participation and continued support at Brandeis university. Thank you. And again, thank you to Gannit Ankori for a really wonderful presentation.
Gannit Ankori:
Thank you everyone for participating and I look forward to seeing you at the Rose Art Museum next month.