Frida Kahlo: Inventor of the Selfie
Apr. 10th, 2019 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI walked from Sunset Park to the Brooklyn Museum.
This is how you get the most out of NYC: You walk, you look at things.
I added to my ongoing photo essay about the 25¢ rides of Sunset Park:
(I would so go to that Spanish American Halal all-you-can-eat place if only I could remember what street it was on!)
Park Slope used to have an enormous number of late 19th century brownstones that looked exactly like miniature Museums of Natural History. Most of them (alas!) have been torn down to make room for utilitarian-looking apartment buildings. What would you call this architecture style? Gothic? Romanesque?
Then we get to the six-way intersection that looms large in my childhood memories and adult creative imagination: Grand Army Plaza! (Click on the picture for the blown-up view.)
It looms large because my mother was constantly shipping me off for extended stays at my grandfather’s house. He lived in a neighborhood just to the east that’s now called Prospect Lefferts Gardens. His mother, my great-grandmother, was supposed to be taking care of me, but since she was in her 80s and completely demented, I mostly spent my time cutting elementary school, wandering instead between the Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the Brooklyn Museum.
Those doors, right? Whoa! Word on the street is that the architectural design of the library was supposed to resemble an open book.
To my mind, the Brooklyn Museum itself has been practically ruined by the addition of a modern atelier thingy in front of the 19th century façade. I simply do not understand why modern developers insist upon ruining perfectly wonderful neoclassical kitsch.
The Brooklyn Museum’s Frida Kahlo exhibit is surprisingly satisfying.
Because I am at heart such a shallow creature, I find myself less and less interested in people’s art and more and more in what they have to do to themselves to keep on producing art.
In Frida’s case, she had to become monumentally obsessed with herself, and that is essentially what this exhibit is about: Frida’s self-obsession. Thus, we see a lot of Frida’s clothes and discover why even though she never ventured south of Mexico City, she was so obsessed with huipils! We learn about her makeup habits: She loved Revlon. We see her empty perfume bottles: Shalimar! Chanel #5! We see old movies of her. We even hear Trotsky—with whom Frida had an affair—ranting about communism while she gazes on tenderly.
We see very, very few of her paintings.
Don’t get me wrong! I love Frida’s paintings. Aslifeinroseland sagely observes, Frida was the inventor of the selfie.
But I preferred these glimpses into the life that went on between the strokes of the paintbrush.
Maybe it was the mood I was in.
This is how you get the most out of NYC: You walk, you look at things.
I added to my ongoing photo essay about the 25¢ rides of Sunset Park:
(I would so go to that Spanish American Halal all-you-can-eat place if only I could remember what street it was on!)
Park Slope used to have an enormous number of late 19th century brownstones that looked exactly like miniature Museums of Natural History. Most of them (alas!) have been torn down to make room for utilitarian-looking apartment buildings. What would you call this architecture style? Gothic? Romanesque?
Then we get to the six-way intersection that looms large in my childhood memories and adult creative imagination: Grand Army Plaza! (Click on the picture for the blown-up view.)
It looms large because my mother was constantly shipping me off for extended stays at my grandfather’s house. He lived in a neighborhood just to the east that’s now called Prospect Lefferts Gardens. His mother, my great-grandmother, was supposed to be taking care of me, but since she was in her 80s and completely demented, I mostly spent my time cutting elementary school, wandering instead between the Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the Brooklyn Museum.
Those doors, right? Whoa! Word on the street is that the architectural design of the library was supposed to resemble an open book.
To my mind, the Brooklyn Museum itself has been practically ruined by the addition of a modern atelier thingy in front of the 19th century façade. I simply do not understand why modern developers insist upon ruining perfectly wonderful neoclassical kitsch.
The Brooklyn Museum’s Frida Kahlo exhibit is surprisingly satisfying.
Because I am at heart such a shallow creature, I find myself less and less interested in people’s art and more and more in what they have to do to themselves to keep on producing art.
In Frida’s case, she had to become monumentally obsessed with herself, and that is essentially what this exhibit is about: Frida’s self-obsession. Thus, we see a lot of Frida’s clothes and discover why even though she never ventured south of Mexico City, she was so obsessed with huipils! We learn about her makeup habits: She loved Revlon. We see her empty perfume bottles: Shalimar! Chanel #5! We see old movies of her. We even hear Trotsky—with whom Frida had an affair—ranting about communism while she gazes on tenderly.
We see very, very few of her paintings.
Don’t get me wrong! I love Frida’s paintings. As
lifeinroseland sagely observes, Frida was the inventor of the selfie.But I preferred these glimpses into the life that went on between the strokes of the paintbrush.
Maybe it was the mood I was in.
