The Ransom Center recently loaned Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for the exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States.
Co-organized by LACMA and the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Mexico City, In Wonderland is the first large-scale international survey of women surrealist artists in North America. On view at LACMA through May 6, In Wonderland features about 175 works by 47 artists, including Kahlo, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Louise Bourgeois, and more.
Vogue highlights some of the works of the “beautiful dreamers” that can be seen in the exhibition.
Co-curated by Dr. Ilene Susan Fort, LACMA’s Gail and John Liebes Curator of American Art, and Tere Arcq, MAM’s Adjunct Curator, the exhibition will also travel to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, from June 7 to September 3; and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, from September 27 through January 13, 2013.
Kahlo (1907 – 1954) taught herself how to paint after she was severely injured in an accident at the age of 18. For Kahlo, painting became an act of cathartic ritual, and her symbolic images portray a cycle of pain, death, and rebirth.
Kahlo’s affair in New York City with Hungarian-born photographer Nickolas Muray (1892 – 1965), which ended in 1939, and her divorce from artist Diego Rivera at the end of the year, left her heartbroken and lonely. She produced some of her most powerful and compelling paintings and self-portraits during this time.
Muray purchased Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird from Kahlo to help her during a difficult financial period. It is part of the Ransom Center’s Nickolas Muray collection of more than 100 works of modern Mexican art, which was acquired by the Center in 1966. The collection also includes Still Life with Parrott and Fruit (1951) and the drawing Diego y Yo (1930) by Kahlo.
Kahlo scholar and biographer Hayden Herrera spoke about “Frida Kahlo: Her Life and Art” at the Ransom Center in June 2009, referencing sources of inspiration for Kahlo’s art.