watch two surrealism film and answer questions

GESM 110 Nov 17

Surrealism and Mexico

Frida Kahlo

Grimberg, Salomon. “Frida Kahlo, The Self as an End”

in Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation, edited by

Whitney Chadwick

Explored in the book: issues of identity through self-representation.

Foreword: “Women artists associated with the Surrealist movement during the

1930’s and 1940’s produced a body of self-portraits that are unique in twentieth-

century modernism and have no equivalent among the works of their male

colleagues. While male Surrealists rooted the disruptive and creative potential of

erotic desire in the masculine libido and exalted woman as muse in fetishized

images that celebrate her as Other, women artists turned to their own reality. They

located the sources of Surrealism’s disruption of rational boundaries within their

own subjectivity, and gave it concrete form in works that explore the female body

as a site of conflicting desires and femininity as a taut web of social expectations,

historical assumptions, and ideological constructions.”

These artists explored: constructions of gender, sexuality, nature and culture.

Some strategies: Displacement, doubling, fragmentation, and fetishizing the

body or its parts.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

Rejected the label Surrealist. However, her works display many of the elements

present in Surrealist works, such as the juxtaposition and/or fusing of opposites or

opposing forces, fragmentation, mythical elements and portrayal of the

inner/psychological world.

1) What do you know already about Frida? (ancestry, cultural heritage,

childhood)

2) What kinds of physical trauma did she suffer in her life? (accident with

streetcar)

3) What do you know about her relationship with Diego Rivera? (marriage,

adultery, miscarriages, divorce, remarriage)

4) What new information did you learn from the article about Frida’s

relationship with her mother? What influence did nannies play in her

childhood?

5) What new information did you learn about her relationship with Diego

Rivera?

6) In what ways do these physical and psychological events/experiences

manifest in her work? Give examples.

7) Which of the following pieces to you like the most? Please note its title,

year and medium here, and explain some of the imagery that you find

striking. How do you interpret it?