The Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny is celebrating its 20th anniversary by putting on a double exhibition which will be devoted to the famous Mexican couple of painters.
This is quite some event because, to date, neither Diego Rivera nor Frida Kahlo have ever been shown in Switzerland and so far these two artists have never been exhibited together.
This will be the first exhibition of these artists in Switzerland. Quite an event it will be, as we said, for their works, considered a national treasure in Mexico, are those of a politically and artistically committed couple and it embodies all the ardour of the modern post-revolutionary age, illuminated by the Communist ideal, the return to national awareness and the struggle for Mexican and Amerindian culture.
The purpose of the exhibition is to provide "something to be seen" through the eyes of these two leading artists in the cultural panorama of the XX century and to follow the chronological development of two strong, creative temperaments that opposed and set one another off through their conflictual and complex life. Diego Rivera, a mural painter, designer, graphic artist, illustrator, architect and sculptor is certainly the best-known but not the least contested of Latin-American artists.
After a classical education, at the age of 20, he set forth for Europe, settled in Paris - in Montparnasse, to be precise - where he met Modigliani, Mondrian, Picasso, Breton as well as Ehrenbourg and Trotsky. Through Angelina Beloff, his first mistress, and then Merevna Vorobiev, he penetrated the Russian community. During a trip to Spain, he discovered the works of Goya and El Greco which affected him deeply.
Back in Paris in 1913, he practised cubism, of which he produced a version of his own causing such a frenzy of criticism and dispute that he broke off relations with his friends. He then turned to figurative painting and discovered the works of Cezanne while Ingres and Renoir also influenced his approach to portraits. In 1921, he returned home and, encouraged by the political and social turn of events in Mexico, he was drawn by the vast popular education programme for which he, through commissions for his murals, was to become the prime instrument of propagation. It was while working on his first fresco that he met her.
Frida Kahlo, who was to become his wife, his inspiration, his "backbone". At the time she was a student, 20 years his junior, a budding artist whose physical and psychological suffering was to inspire as many works as legends.
Contrary to Diego, the cosmopolitan traveller, the social painter, the spokesman and adored character of the social set, little Frida was staid, an "internal militant" who had never set foot outside her country, a one-time medical student who was entirely concentrated on the human being as an individual. She was the daughter of a photographer who spent her life trying to perfect her self-portrait and she once admitted that, "I paint my reality. I paint what I see, that's all I know.
" When Diego Rivera said of Frida Kahlo "Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality." He just about summed up the extent of her talents. Two viewpoints from a couple that left a heritage that reflects all the upheavals of this century.
So we are offering a retrospective of what these two artists have left us - paintings, drawings and water-colours as well as the works of some of the greatest photographers of the day, illuminated by the light of their age.
Catalogue of the Rivera Kahlo exhibition extensively documented by descriptive texts, biography, bibliography as well as the colour reproductions of all the works exhibited (SFr. 45.-, euro 31.50).
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