Postscript: The Big Man and The Little Woman

   Postscript: The Big Man and The Little Woman



    To-day in the world of the fine arts, Frida Kahlo is seen by many women as a secular saint. A woman who grew up in a sexist country, endured disability, pain, abuse from her husband and his faithfulness, as well as obscurity - what woman cannot admire Frida Kahlo? Yet was she a great artist?
      First off, Diego rivera was a better artist, technically speaking than his wife. "Men have more opportunities than women," a feminist writer told me years ago. This was true for Rivera.
    He won art scholarships, spent years in Europe, studying there and so learned artistic skills that Frida never could. Anyone who's seen just reproductions of Rivera's famous mural, 'Detroit Industry' in the Detroit Institute of Arts, can see its a great work of art. Rivera's communist politics are now history. Yet mush of his art work will last.
     "They endured,"novelist William Faulkner said about his famous creation, the Snopes family. And the same is true of many of Rivera's works. They exude power. They will endure.
     Then look at a reproduction of Kahlo's 'Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States'. Kahlo did this in the United States about the same time as Rivera was working on 'Detroit Industry'.
      Kahlo's work is very good, but her overall art doesn't match Rivera's. Sometimes her paintings descend into pure schmaltz and self-pity. "I am the subject I know best," Kahlo once said. This is true and it's good that she immortalized her sufferings in oils on canvass.Yet sometimes her pain overwhelms her art.
    Kahlo has been rediscovered and that's fine. Yet Rivera's art still moves me more than hers does. He was simply a more accomplished artist.