Less than six months after narrowly avoiding a fire sale of art to help pay down city debt, the Detroit Institute of Arts has opened a major exhibit on Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
The exhibit, which opened on Sunday and will show through July, took DIA Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art Mark Rosenthal three years to put together, using original to-scale mural sketches by Rivera already at the DIA along with around 50 drawings and paintings on loan from private and public collections in the United States and Mexico.
Since the sketches of the Rivera Murals on display in the exhibit are so fragile, this is the first time they have been publically displayed in 30 years.
Lisa Rezin, Director of Group Reservations at the DIA, called it a “once-in-a-lifetime” exhibit.
“When a museum has a major work of art, like having the Rivera Murals — and I’m talking any museum — there’s a feeling that they want to celebrate it, they want to bring attention to it,” Rosenthal said. “People come from all over the world to see it, but it becomes taken for granted in its hometown.”
“The popularity is going to be through the roof,” said volunteer docent Harriet Brown.
The exhibit follows Rivera and Kahlo’s year in Detroit, during which Rivera designed and painted the DIA’s now famous “American Industry Murals.” Although a banner year for Rivera, this time was potentially even more important for Kahlo, who had a failed pregnancy while simultaneously coming into her own as an artist.
Although Rivera was the more acclaimed of the two artists during their time in Detroit, in many ways Kahlo is attracting more attention in the exhibit.
“Frida will be the star; she’s always the star because of her personality,” Rosenthal said.
Before coming to Detroit, one art critic called Kahlo a “dabbler,” but after the year in Detroit Kahlo began gaining fame apart from her husband. Even today, Kahlo’s work is popular.
The first portion of the exhibit focuses on Rivera and Kahlo’s lives before coming to Detroit. This part of the exhibit includes a painting by Rivera called “Emillio Zapato,” which comes from a mural Rivera created before painting his murals at the DIA. Although the “American Industry Murals” are Rivera’s most famous murals, he painted numerous others.
The section also has art by Kahlo. Her painting “Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera” is noteworthy: in this work, Kahlo seems very small next to her husband, who holds prominently displayed painting tools. In this painting Kahlo makes the artistic choice of showing her husband as an artist and not showing herself as one too.
The next portion of the exhibit covers Rivera and Kahlo’s time in Detroit.
This section includes the original to-scale sketches of the mural panels that Rivera referenced when creating his frescos. Some sketches didn’t make it into the mural, such as one featuring manufacturing and beets (Michigan’s original industries, according to Rivera) that was replaced by a painting of a baby after Kahlo’s failed pregnancy.
Rosenthal called the sketches the cornerstone of the exhibit.
The next portion of the exhibit focuses on Rivera and Kahlo’s lives after they left Detroit. In this section of the exhibit, the emphasis is more on Kahlo’s growth as an artist.
A number of Kahlo’s paintings are distraught and cover traumatic subjects. Her painting “A Few Small Nips,” for example, depicts a naked women covered in bleeding wounds. But Kahlo’s growth as an artist is also depicted in her painting “Double-Portrait of Diego and I,” in which she shows herself to be one with Rivera instead of small and separate as she had in her earlier painting.
Although the exhibit is unique to Detroit, people around the art world in the United States and Mexico are taking notice of the exhibit.
“They recognize how significant the exhibition is, particularly in Mexico where many of the works came from, among the real specialists in this field; they knew that the Detroit year was extraordinary and they realized that nobody had ever focused on it,” Rosenthal said.
Not only has an exhibit like this never been done before at another institution, but since Rivera’s murals and the accompanying to-scale sketches of the murals can’t travel, the exhibit couldn’t happen at any other art museum.
The reaction to the exhibit has been very positive in the media. Rosenthal described local media coverage as “tremendous.” Additionally, the exhibit has been covered nationally in publications like the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
The DIA’s Exhibit “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit” will remain open until July 12. More information on musuem times and ticket information is available at dia.org.
