Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950

Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 25, 2016 – January 8, 2017 

Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, February 3 – April 30, 2017

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950, is a tale of two struggles. The new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents a definitive retelling of the story of the Mexican Revolution and its brilliant artistic aftermath.

On December 1, 1920, a one-armed general named Álvaro Obregón  was elected President of Mexico. Obregón was a chickpea farmer turned military tactician. In 1915, his astute generalship won the bloody battle of Celaya, turning point of the Mexican Revolution. 

Obregón was also the "last man standing." He had survived the slaughter that had claimed the lives of over one million Mexicans, including more famous rivals like Emiliano Zapata.

Obregón's election brought the military phase of Mexico's revolutionary conflict to a close. A second, cultural revolution began as soon as the gunfire ceased. The time had arrived, as a perceptive U.S. journalist, John Dos Passos, observed, to "paint the Revolution."          

The Mexican Revolution was a vast, sprawling event, of "Russian novel" dimensions and a bewildering cast of protagonists. The second phase was no different. The sheer number of major artists of the Mexican Renaissance, as it is often called, is staggering: José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo,Tina Modotti, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and many more.

Paint the Revolution at the Philadelphia Museum of Art somehow encompasses this vast cast, giving due recognition to all. This is a major, insight-packed reappraisal of a hugely significant event.

Digital version of Ballad of the Proletarian Revolution (detail) by Diego River,1928-29

This brilliant exhibit also manages the seemingly impossible task of recreating the vast public murals that figured so prominently during Mexico's revolutionary era.Three major mural cycles are depicted using digital technology in a way that enables the scale and scope of these mighty works of art to be grasped.

The Mexican Revolution began in November 1910. Simmering rage over the expropriation of communal land erupted into revolt. The long-time dictator, Porfirio Diaz, was swiftly toppled from power. A succession of leaders beginning with Francisco I. Madero, however, failed to create a stable and equitable new government. Madero's assassination in 1913 detonated a brutal civil war.

A number of works of art are displayed that show the efforts to create a heroic myth for the Mexican Revolution. These are "after-the-fact" images, much like nineteenth century representations of the American Revolution. These present history as contending political factions wished it had happened - not necessarily as it did occur. 

David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) was an avowed Marxist, co-founder of El Machete, the newspaper that became the mouthpiece of the Mexican Communist Party. Siqueiros depicts Emiliano Zapata as a Proletarian hero in two works displayed in the exhibit. Zapata was indeed a champion for land reforms for Mexico's peasant class. But close scrutiny of these two works by Siqueiros raises red flags of a different sort.

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Zapata, 1931

This 1931 lithograph of Zapata presents him as a hard-riding guerrilla leader. It is the very image of a commander during the Mexican Revolution. Look closer at Zapata's features - and even more so at the portrait painted the same year, part of the Hirshorn Museum collection - and we see a different character altogether. Here is a Stalinist reworking of Zapata's image by Siqueiros. Apart from the carefully-groomed mustache (Zapata was rather vain about his mostacho), the resemblance is far closer to Stalin than to Zapata.                                                                                  
Siqueiros was such a staunch supporter of Stalin that he helped plan a botched-assassination of Leon Trotsky who had fled to Mexico to escape Stalin's agents. The eventual murder of Trotsky in 1940 was carried out by a professional Communist hit man. Siqueiros was a far better artist than an assassin.

A much more  convincing work of art related to the Mexican Revolution is Diego Rivera's searing depiction of the rescue of a peasant who had been brutally lashed and left to die in the desert. Revolutionary troops, having set fire to a rural estate, are tending to the wounds of their tortured compadre.

Diego Rivera, Liberation of the Peon, 1931

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) painted this "portable" mural in 1931, using the fresco technique popular during the Italian Renaissance. This profoundly moving work is in many ways a worthy successor to Renaissance painting. It conveys the same compassion and empathy expressed in Giotto's Lamentation. The horses in Liberation of the Peon express the almost surreal intensity of the war horses in the Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello.

Anne Lloyd, detail of Liberation of the Peon, 1931, by Diego Rivera

Rivera's Liberation of the Peon is a link between the Italian Renaissance and the Mexican Renaissance. However, the version of Rivera's Liberation of the Peon on view in the Philadelphia exhibit is an extremely significant work in its own right. Rivera painted it in 1931 in New York City, for the exhibition of his work organised by the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit - and Liberation of the Peon  -  later traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Liberation of the Peon and its companion piece, Sugarcane, remained unsold after the MOMA show. When the Philadelphia Museum of Art sponsored a major exhibition, Mexican Art Today, in 1943, Liberation of the Peon and Sugarcane played a starring role and were purchased for the Philadelphia Museum of Art's permanent collection.

Rivera's Liberation of the Peon is based upon a much larger fresco, approx. 14' 4 3/8" x 11' 5", which he painted in the courtyard of the Education ministry in Mexico City. This brings us to one of the central protagonists of the Mexican cultural revolution, José Vasconcelos, appointed by President Obregón to head the Secretaría de Educación Pública.

In a bold move, Vasconcelos encouraged Rivera to return from Europe, where he had spent most of the years of the Mexican Revolution. Vasconcelos pressured Rivera and other artists awarded government contracts to paint in a style reflecting the lives and aspirations of Mexico's long-suffering peasants and growing urban work force.

Rivera responded with murals that obeyed Vasconcelos' guiding principle, "Action surpasses destiny. Conquer!" Like the stained glass depictions of religious scenes in Medieval cathedrals, Rivera's epic works were readily understandable to Mexicans of all social classes. 

Along with the digitized versions of classic murals by Rivera, Siqueiros  and Orozco, an actual mural, painted by Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, is displayed in the exhibit.

Anne Lloyd, gallery view of Pieta in the Desert by Manuel Rodriguez Lozano

Pieta in the Desert was originally painted on a prison wall, while Lozano was incarcerated in 1942. The mural  was later removed by the rather alarming technique called strappo. The mural is covered with resin, glue, fabric and tape and then pounded with a jackhammer which cracks the concrete on which it is painted enabling the mural to be lifted clear of the debris and remounted.

The Tres Grandes - Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros - went on to produce mural cycles in  the United States which influenced public art in New Deal America during the Great Depression. They also created controversy, Rivera's ill-fated mural in Rockefeller Center being the most notorious example, and confusion.

Almost all of the great themes of Mexican art during this revolutionary era were first exhibited in traditional easel paintings. The wonderful Futurist Portrait of Nahui Olin, by Gerardo Murillo, (1875–1964) who styled himself as Dr. Atl, was painted in 1921.

Anne Lloyd, gallery view of Futurist Portrait of Nahui Olin (1921) by Dr. Atl

Incredibly, easel paintings like this were dismissed by a radical 1924 manifesto as lacking in heroic vision. Easel paintings, the most easily transported art form, were declared to be unsuited to instruct the Mexican masses. 

However, government-sponsored mural projects paid poorly. Rich foreign patrons bought smaller scale works that supplied infusions of cash. Rivera and others painted "unheroic" easel paintings for sale to the "bourgeois individualists" they denounced.

It was Rivera's wife, the now celebrated Frida Kahlo, who would "square the circle" and use easel painting to create socially conscious works of art. Undeniable "heroism" was in her shattered, suffering body and soul. This courage she painted on easel-sized canvases.

There are five works by Kahlo in Paint the Revolution. The exhibition curators chose wisely, selecting paintings that exemplify Kahlo's focus on  social issues and Mexico's problematic relationship with the United States. 

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the U.S.,1932

Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States, painted in 1932, brilliantly juxtaposes the industrial pipelines and electric wires of the smog-shrouded United States with symbols of "eternal" Mexico, rooted in the natural world.

The career of Maria Izquierdo (1902-1955) reveals the mural-easel, male-female fault lines running through Mexican Modernism. Izquierdo seemed an almost unstoppable artistic force during the late 1920's and 1930's. In 1930, Izquierdo had the first solo exhibit of a Mexican woman artist in the U.S. 

Izquierdo's work, combining religious and folk art themes was praised by the Surrealists and during the early 1940's she exerted a powerful presence throughout Latin America. However, her design submissions for a major mural commission which she received in 1944 were rejected. Rivera and Siqueiros, often at odds, united to sabotage Izquierdo's attempt to achieve the ultimate level of recognition in Mexican art, mural painting. 

When Izquierdo tried to regain the commission, the male-dominated art establishment thwarted her efforts. Her career and health went into a downward spiral. 

María Izquierdo, Our Lady of Sorrows, 1943 

Izquierdo bitterly declared that "it is a crime to be born a woman and have talent."

The same could be said for the brilliant photographic work of Tina Modotti - though she would not have said so herself. 

The Italian-born Modotti came to Mexico with the noted American photographer, Edward Weston, who was for a time her lover and teacher. Modotti revealed superlative gifts in photography, documenting the lives of Mexico's peoples with incredible artistic vision.

Modotti's career took a radical slant when she joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927. She became entangled in the violent internal struggles of Leftist groups in Mexico and she was a prime-suspect in the murder of her new lover, the Cuban-born radical, Julio Antonio Mella, in 1929. Though cleared of the charges, Modotti left Mexico under clouds of suspicion. 

Tina Modotti, Woman of Tehuantepec, c. 1929

Modotti's subsequent fate was tragic. All her talents became subsumed in Marxist politics, especially related to the Spanish Civil War. She gave up photography in 1931 and her amazing body of work was only rediscovered in the late 1970's with the dawn of the Feminist movement.

The political radicalization of Modotti and almost all of the leading Mexican artists is symbolized by the wood engraving, Proletarian Hand, by Leopoldo Méndez. The finger bones are hanged prisoners and the wrist bomes are portraits of political martyrs, including Mella. It is a brilliant, unforgettable work, evoking the  great nineteenth century printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada (1852 – 1913), whose prints of demonic skeletons helped bring down Porfirio Diaz.

Leopoldo Méndez, Proletarian Hand, 1932

Proletarian Hand is very much  a work of the 1930's. It ignores the sacrifices and suffering of women. Likewise, it focuses on the international scene at the expense of Mexico. Two of the "martyrs" named in the print were Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists who were executed for murder in the U.S. in 1927. While the artistic elite of Mexico may have been radicalized by such political imagery, the impact on Mexico's workers was negligible. 

Mexican Modernism grew increasingly remote from the realities of Mexican life. The economy of Mexico strengthened, especially as Mexico's oil industry was needed by the Allied war effort in World War II. Many Mexicans, loyal to conservative traditions and the Catholic religion, deeply resented the Marxist ethos of the "Modernists."

There was also the inconvenient fact that many Mexican artists, including strident Marxists, depended on sales and commissions from "El Norte." Frida Kahlo's first big success was a sale of four paintings to the American actor, Edward G. Robinson, in 1938.

By 1950, the two-fold Mexican Revolution and Mexican Renaissance had run their course. But these events had entered into the heart and soul of the Mexican people. It is no surprise that whenever social ferment arises in Mexico, the vivid images displayed in Paint the Revolution are revived, coaxed back to life and action like the beaten prisoner in Liberation of the Peon. 

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 
Images courtesy of the  Philadelphia Museum of Art

Introductory Image:                                                                                                         Anne Lloyd, Detail of Liberation of the Peon, 1931, by Diego Rivera (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1943-46-1) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Anne Lloyd (2016), Detail of the digital version of Ballad of the Proletarian Revolution by Diego River, 1928-29, mural painted at the Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City. 

David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) Zapata, 1931, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund from the Carl and Laura Zigrosser Collection, 1976-97-122) © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City

Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886-1957) Liberation of the Peon, 1931. Fresco on reinforced cement in a galvanized steel framework, 73 x 94 1/4 inches (185.4 x 239.4 cm) (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1943-46-1) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Anne Lloyd (2016), Gallery view of Pieta in the Desert by Manuel Rodriguez Lozano. Fresco (removed by strappo from Lecumberri Prison) 6 ' 6 3/8" x 7'  9/16" (2.6 x 2.3 m) Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, INBA, Mexico City

Anne Lloyd (2016), Gallery view of Futurist Portrait of Nahui Olin (1921) by Dr. Atl. Oil and Atl color on cardboard, 39 3/8 x 55 7/8 inches (100 x 142 cm) collection of Maria and Manuel Reyero.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States, 1932. (Colección Maria y Manuel Reyero, New York) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

María Izquierdo (Mexican,1902 -1955) Our Lady of Sorrows, 1943. Oil on board, 23 1/4  x 19 5/8 inches  (59.1 x 49.8 cm ) Private collection

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896–1942) Woman of Tehuantepec, c. 1929, (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Zigrosser

Leopoldo Méndez (Mexican,1902–1969) Proletarian Hand, 1932, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Anne d’Harnoncourt in memory of Sarah Carr d'Harnoncourt), ©Leopoldo Mendez/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City

Frida Kahlo's Garden

Frida Kahlo's Garden 

By  Adriana Zavala and others

                                                                                                                                        DelMonico Books-Prestel Publishing/$34.95/136 pages

Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life at the New York Botanical Garden

May 16, 2015 - November 1, 2015     

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Frida Kahlo was no stranger to suffering and misfortune. Her destiny was shaped by a shattering traffic injury in 1925 and by her tempestuous marriage to fellow artist, Diego Rivera.

"There have been two great accidents in my life," Kahlo reflected. "One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst."

Despite her travail, Kahlo (1907-1954) could always find a refuge in which to handle her pain, a place of inspiration, a private sanctuary. It was her childhood home in a suburb of Mexico City and the place where she died. It is called La Casa Azul. The Blue House.

The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) is featuring a remarkable recreation of the garden and art studio of the Casa Azul in their major exhibit of 2015, Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life.

A splendid companion book to the exhibition, Frida Kahlo's Garden, has been published by DelMonico Books and Prestel Publishing. The curator of the NYBG exhibit, Adriana Zavala, an expert on Mexican art from Tufts University, is the chief author of this book. Zavala and a team of art scholars explore Kahlo's fascination with the flora and fauna of her native Mexico.

This insightful and beautifully illustrated volume also details the process by which the curators of the New York Botanical Garden evoked the Casa Azul in the exhibition space of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.

The scale version of the Casa Azul Pyramid at Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life

 
Rather than aiming to duplicate Frida Kahlo’s garden and studio, the NYBG exhibition is a “reimagined” version of Kahlo's living space and her imaginative realm. This includes a scale version of the colorful Aztec-style pyramid in the garden and a recreation of Kahlo’s studio. The wonderful preliminary designs by Scott Pask reveal both the meticulous attention to detail and the  artistic vision that enabled the NYBG staff to "bring the essence of the Casa Azul to the Bronx."

Scott Pask, Preliminary study for courtyard with pyramid, 2014

Special attention in the NYBG exhibit is given to the natural surroundings of Mexico which Kahlo closely studied as a young person. She had been planning a scientific career rather than one in the arts. An early work, Small Life (II) from 1928 reveals Kahlo's fascination with the diversity of nature around her. After her injury-battered body would no longer allow her to venture far afield, Kahlo and Diego Rivera created a courtyard version of the natural environment of Mexico at the Casa Azul. 

Kahlo's life and art were influenced by her living arrangements due to the long periods she spent at the Casa Azul. These periods of convalescence grew longer and longer as her health declined. But the courageous and stubborn Kahlo never allowed physical disability to define her life. The Casa Azul became - and remains - a testament to the passion and vitality of Frida Kahlo's life.

To an extraordinary degree, the Casa Azul reflected Kahlo's interior and exterior worlds. Kahlo's embrace of Mexican folk culture and love for the spectacular botanical setting of her native country infused her artistic life. Many of the details of Kahlo's paintings and the design of the garden of the Casa Azul are filled with symbolic references to fertility that reach back to the Aztec, Olmec and Mayan cultures of Mexico's past - and to her own personal history. 

Nickolas Muray, Frida with Olmeca Figurine, Coyoacán, 1939

Denied by the tragic circumstances of her health from bearing children, Kahlo created a realm of potent life force in her painting and in her garden.

The Casa Azul, which the New York Botanical Garden so brilliantly evokes, has a design history that conveys a real sense of the social transformation experienced by Mexico during the 20th century. 

The Casa Azul was built in what was then a suburb of Mexico City, Coyoacán, and was purchased in 1904 by Kahlo's father. The original design of the house was influenced by classical French architecture, then in vogue in pre-Revolution Mexico. During the 1940's, the dwelling was redesigned by architect, Juan O'Gorman, to reflect the appreciation of Mexican culture shared by Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera, re-united after earlier marital disputes.

O'Gorman (1905-1982) is a fascinating figure in his own right. He was born, like Kahlo, of a European father and a Mexican mother in Coyoacán. He was influenced by Rivera to become a distinguished muralist in his later career.

In a very enlightening essay, art historian Kathryn O'Rourke notes that Coyoacán figured prominently in the rediscovery of Mexico's botanical identity during the childhood years of Kahlo and O'Gorman. An important tree nursery was established early in the 20th century, the Viveros de Coyoacán, and a private garden was created there around the same time, decorated with art work evoking the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mexico. These elements would feature prominently in the redesigned Casa Azul.

Nickolas Muray, Frida in Front of the Cactus Fence, San Ángel, 1938

There is a magnificent color photo of Frida Kahlo, taken by Nickolas Muray in 1938. It shows Kahlo posing before a fence of tall cactus plants which form a wall around Rivera's house in the San Angel neighborhood of Mexico City which O'Gorman designed for him in 1931. Later, when the Casa Azul was redesigned, a wall of soaring Organ Pipe cacti was planted there as well. The European flowers, planted earlier by Kahlo's father, were largely replaced by a "flowering of Mexico."  

A flower display at Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life, New York Botanical Garden

It is fascinating to scan the lists of native plants and flowers which were planted in the garden of the Casa Azul during the 1940's. Many can be documented in the vintage photographs taken by Muray, Gisèle Freund and others. These range from the silvery, shaggy (but sharp) "Old Man" cactus and floripondio or angel's trumpet to sunflowers and poinsettia.

Red angel's trumpet and poinsettia were merged by Kahlo in an explosively erotic 1944 painting, Flower of Life. Mia D'Avanzaa, the Exhibitions Coordinator at the New York Botanical Garden Library, writes that this is "a fantastic image that combines both male and female reproductive organs..."

Frida Kahlo, Flower of Life, 1944

Even a quick glance at Flower of Life will detect the powerful currents of sexual energy infusing this painting. But there is much more to this work than explicit sexuality, as Ms. D'Avanzaa astutely notes. 

Angel's trumpet contains pain-dulling alkaloids. The poinsettia also had reputed medicinal qualities, which were described in the famous Florentine Codex, compiled in Mexico during the 1500's. It was believed to help lactating mothers produce milk for their infants. For Kahlo, the hidden symbolism in this forceful, disturbing work would have spoken of her recurrent bouts of physical pain and of her anguish at not being able to give birth.

It is interesting to note that the number of still life paintings and flower paintings increased during Kahlo's later years. While the earlier series of Kahlo's self-portraits denotes her attempt to find and express her identity, Kahlo's still life paintings show that she had reached a point of self-realization.

"I paint myself because I am so often alone," Kahlo declared, "and because I am the subject I know best."

During the years when the Mexican garden bloomed at the Casa Azul, Kahlo was now free to explore the roots of her Mesoamerican heritage. In Still Life (For Samuel Fastlicht), Kahlo placed a ceramic votive piece depicting a xoloitzcuintle dog, a breed of hairless dog native to ancient Mexico. This clay-fired statuette came from Rivera's extensive collection of Olmec and Aztec art works which he displayed on the Casa Azul's pyramid.

Frida Kahlo, Still Life (For Samuel Fastlicht), 1951

Xoloitzcuintle dogs figured as Mesoamerican mythology as the escorts of kings and warriors on the journey to the next world. They were also sacrificed and eaten in religious feasts. Native Americans, unlike Europeans, had no aversion to eating dogs.

Frida Kahlo kept several "Xolo" dogs as pets and one particular favorite, Señor Xolotl, figured in her 1949 masterpiece, The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xolotl. Surrounded by a superabundance of symbols of life and death, the Xolo sleeps blissfully on the wrist of a goddess figure.

With the ceramic Xolo dog, the Aztecs' companion to the next world, surrounded by an array ripe fruits, Still Life (For Samuel Fastlicht) may be interpreted as a meditation on life and death. This of course is a theme at the heart of Mexican culture and Kahlo increasingly addressed universal and cosmological themes in her painting.

As with all Frida Kahlo's art, there is a personal aspect here as well. Samuel Fastlicht was Kahlo’s dentist and this was one of two still life paintings that she gave him. Kahlo was deeply grateful to the doctors who tried to ease her suffering. The beads of liquid leaking from the melon where it has been pierced by the staff of the banner, however, raise the question of whether these droplets symbolize tears of gratitude or of suffering. 

In 1950, Kahlo endured seven spinal operations and was bed-ridden for much of that year and 1951, the year she painted Still Life (For Samuel Fastlicht). Given her constant pain, it is hard  not to view the still life paintings of her final years as an acknowledgment of human mortality - including her own.

Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait inside a Sunflower, 1954

In 1954, Kahlo painted a final self-portrait, notable for its rough brush strokes and uncompleted feel. Self-Portrait inside a Sunflower hardly invites comparison with her highly finished works like the Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) also on view. Yet, Self-Portrait inside a Sunflower is a profoundly moving work. The sunflower, known in Mexico as maiz de teja is a native species. Here, Kahlo is not so much wearing petals from the sunflower as she is becoming one herself.

Self-Portrait inside a Sunflower calls to mind the story of Apollo and Daphne from Greek mythology and memorably sculpted by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1625. Daphne, fleeing from the lustful advances of Apollo, turns into a laurel tree. Although no chaste nymph herself, Frida Kahlo evaded the misfortunes of life by identifying herself with the natural world of her native country.

Denied by a cruel fate of being able to travel throughout Mexico, Frida Kahlo brought Mexico home to Coyoacán. With the help and  financial support of Diego Rivera, the garden of the  Casa Azul was turned into a microcosm, in the true sense of the word. The Casa Azul became a "small world" reflecting the greater world.

Gisèle Freund, Frida in the Garden, Casa Azul, 1951

This was the world that Frida Kahlo embraced artistically and emotionally. Thanks to the New York Botanical Garden exhibit and the exceptionally well-done companion volume from Delmonico/Prestel, we can go there too.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Images of the Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life exhibition, courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden. Images of art by Frida Kahlo, Nikolas Murray and Gisèle Freund, courtesy of Delmonico Books  and Prestel Publishing . 

Introductory Image                                                                                                           Cover Image - Courtesy of Prestel, showing Frida Kahlo's Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940 Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin © 2015 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico,D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Scott Pask, Preliminary study for courtyard with pyramid, 2014.(Designed for the New York Botanical Garden exhibit Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life, May 16, 2015 - November 1, 2015 Courtesy of Scott Pask Studio.

Nickolas Muray (American, born in Hungary, 1892-1965), Frida with Olmeca Figurine, Coyoacán, 1939. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives

Nickolas Muray (American, born in Hungary, 1892-1965), Frida in Front of the Cactus Fence, San Ángel, 1938. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954), Flower of Life, 1944. Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico © 2015 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954), Still Life (For Samuel Fastlicht), 1951. Private Collection, Courtesy of Caleria Arvil, Mexico. ©2015 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954), Self Portrait inside a Sunflower, 1954. Private collection © 2015 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Gisèle Freund (French, born in Germany, 1908-2000) Frida in the Garden, Casa Azul, 1951. Throckmorton Fine Arts. Photo: Gisèle Freund/IMEC/Fonds MCC