Beyond Biography

Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe are two of the twentieth century’s most revered female artists. Books have been written about them, shows mounted, movies made, posters and T-shirts sold. The question is, are there any new insights to be gleaned from another exhibition of their work?

The short answer is yes, and two major exhibitions opening this month—Frida Kahlo at the Walker Art Center and Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts—promise to show us what we may have been overlooking all these years.

In the canon of twentieth-century painting, Kahlo and O’Keeffe coexist in the popular imagination as “great female artists” of the period. They had much in common. They were contemporaries who admired each other’s work, they were friends, and they may even have shared a bed for a while. For better or worse, these women have also become icons whose life stories loom almost as large as their art. It’s difficult to look at the unwavering gaze of a Kahlo self-portrait or one of her surrealist family trees without getting caught up in biography. O’Keeffe’s vivid abstractions offer more room between art and persona, but her iconoclastic status in American social history has affected how we see her work as well. The MIA and Walker shows aim to nudge us back in the direction of evaluating the artists based on their technical mastery and artistic intent.

Walker curator Elizabeth Carpenter points out that many people come to Kahlo’s work with preconceived notions of her as an artist whose skill is largely intuitive, even primitive, and whose subject matter is narrow, if enthralling. Carpenter considers this a mistake. “She was an extremely sophisticated painter and was well versed in art history and the art of her moment.” What’s more, Kahlo helped move art in radical new directions. Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital is a prime example, says Carpenter. The painting shows the artist laying on a floating hospital bed holding umbilical cords connected to, among other things, a fetus, a snail, and a model of a uterus. Adds Carpenter: “The work in the exhibition that deals with Kahlo’s miscarriage is a first in Western art history in terms of subject matter and iconography.” These are graphic autobiographical paintings that allude to disturbing—sometimes frightening—episodes in the artist’s life.

O’Keeffe’s work isn’t as personal as Kahlo’s, but she insists on the same authenticity. “I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me,” O’Keeffe once said. O’Keeffe describes the foundation for her unique brand of abstraction as a gradual recognition of “shapes and ideas so near to me, so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.” Circling Around Abstraction focuses on one of those shapes, the circular motif—a recurring theme that runs through O’Keeffe’s work. Curator Sue Canterbury thinks circles, ovals, and other rounded shapes are critical yet overlooked elements in her paintings. O’Keeffe used the circular form “to simplify and organize her compositions,” says Canterbury, “to focus attention on details or underlying concepts of the subject matter she portrayed.” A flower is never just a flower.

Frida Kahlo explores similar terrain in fifty paintings spanning the artist’s career, many of them self-portraits. “The peculiar tension between the intimacy of Kahlo’s subject matter and her insistence on a mask of reserve give Kahlo’s self-portraits the impact of icons,” says Carpenter. That quality may well be the strongest connection of all between the work of Kahlo and O’Keeffe. Both produce art that focuses the mind, eliminates the extraneous, offers only what is essential to a shared, if abstract, truth—whether it’s about the nature of life or the psychology of pain. Frida Kahlo opens Oct. 27. Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Ave., 612-375-7600; Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction o pens Oct. 7. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2400 3rd Ave. S., 612-870-3131