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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
Sanctity of Truth
MONDAY, APRIL 27, 2015
ARTS & DESIGN
Frescoes by Diego Rivera and, right, an image of his wife Frida Kahlo in an exhibit of their works in Detroit.
Made in Detroit, But Not From There DETROIT — “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit” is the story of two artists, two countries and one city. Filling several galleries at the Detroit Institute of Arts, it is also a celebration of this exemplary museum’s hard-won independence after ART REVIEW facing down bankruptcy in a city that has struggled. The show’s opening follows the conclusion of a tense 20 months during which the city, which owned the museum’s art collection and was facing bankruptcy, explored selling valuable masterpieces. A deal in which the museum pledged $100 million over 20 years to the city’s pension costs transferred the collection’s ownership from the city to the museum. The Rivera-Kahlo exhibition revisits the creation of a masterpiece made in Detroit, for Detroit. “Detroit Industry” is an
ROBERTA SMITH
idealized ode to the city in 27 frescoes. These formed the project that brought Diego Rivera, best known of the Mexican muralists, to Detroit in April 1932, accompanied by his much younger wife, Frida Kahlo, also an artist. Over the next 11 months, Rivera painted the frescoes that cover the four vaulting walls of the museum’s courtyard, now known as the Rivera Court. It features heroic scenes of muscular workers and even more idealized earth mothers grasping sheaths of wheat or armloads of fruit. The frescoes form an unusually explicit, site-specific expression of the reciprocal bond between an art museum and its urban setting, and Rivera considered them one of the pinnacles of his career. Kahlo’s time in Detroit was perhaps even more important, even though she did not enjoy her stay. When she arrived, she was well along in synthesizing the influences of Mexican folk art and Surrealism into a ma-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY FABRIZIO COSTANTINI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ture vision. But in many ways, the miscarriage she suffered while in Detroit spurred the searing form of self-representation that is her contribution to art history. This miscarriage was the second physical trauma of her fraught, intensely creative life, the first being a near-fatal traffic accident in Mexico City in 1925, which caused her pain for the remainder of her life. The show is studded with key loans, rarely seen works and surprises. It contains four of the immense actual-size charcoal drawings that Rivera made for individual fresco panels. Also on hand: four of the five paintings Kahlo made while in the city, starting with “Henry Ford Hospital” (1932), her reprise of the miscarriage, which shows her lying naked on a bloody bed set in an arid landscape with Ford’s River Rouge plant shimmering in the distance. And there are
three superb little exquisite corpse drawings that Kahlo made when she escaped Detroit for a visit to New York City. The frescoes depicted Ford Motor Company blast furnaces and assembly lines; research scientists in their laboratories at Parke-Davis (later Pfizer) and workers trudging to and from factories. Nature is conjured not only by the robust female nudes but also in geological strata showing iron-ore formation and, in one of the best small panels, as black chunks of disease destroying crepuscular living cells. Rivera renders a tanker carrying South American rubber as if it were a bronze relief. Perhaps the most arresting expressions of Rivera’s subversive instinct are the narrow panels in the courtyard. Each features two large figures; the four represent what Rivera saw as the world’s four races. Rising
between each pair is a jagged mound of deep red earth from which protrude sturdy hands of various colors. Many hold clumps of dirt or rocks, suggesting an angry mob working its way to the surface. Kahlo’s development is a small vivid sidebar of more than equal weight. Her work is everything Rivera’s art is not: small in size and suffused with personal emotion and existential torment. If Rivera’s frescoes are a kind of cathedral, Kahlo’s small paintings are portable altarpieces for private devotion and a high point of Surrealism that speaks to us still. No surprise, among the ephemera reproduced here is an article about Kahlo that appeared in The Detroit News. In it she said of her husband, “Of course, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.”
Scenes From the Advent of Cinema, Now Showing in Paris By RACHEL DONADIO
PARIS — Long before the obsessive documentation and online sharing of every moment of our waking lives, there were two brothers from Lyon whose innovations opened the door to the future. A new exhibition at the Grand Palais here celebrates the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, whose last name means light and who helped invent cinema as we know it — as well as color photography and 3-D technology. The show coincides with the 120th anniversary of the first screening for a paying audience, a grainy black and white film showing workers leaving the Lumière factory, which manufactured photographic equipment. The exhibition “Lumière! Inventing Cinema” showcases early films by the brothers, restored by the Institut Lumière in Lyon; along with examples of early cinema technology — kinetoscopes, zoetropes — and documentation about the rapid spread of the medium at the turn of the 20th centu-
ry. It runs through June 14. The show captures a time of optimism when viewers first had access to footage from around the world, before the carnage of World War I. It also seeks to put the Lumière brothers in context. Many innovators, including Thomas Edison in the United States, were experimenting with images. But it was Louis Lumière who in 1894 invented the cinematograph, a device that captured 17-meter films (each about 50 seconds long) on 35-millimeter strips and projected them. He patented it in 1895. “He’s the last of the inventors but he’s the first of the filmmakers,” said Thierry Frémaux, director of the Institut Lumière. “Lumière was a great filmmaker,” Mr. Frémaux added. “There’s something extremely cinematographic in the films that Louis Lumière and his cameramen made.” Both brothers were inventors, but Auguste focused more on the science, while Louis enjoyed filmmaking. As soon as the technology took hold, they dispatched
INSTITUT LUMIÈRE
The Lumière brothers patented a device in 1895 called the cinematograph. Lumière factory workers at the time. a team of novice filmmakers across the globe to document the known world — street scenes in Japan and Budapest, oil drilling in Azerbaijan, opium smokers in Indochina, peasants in Mexico. Gabriel Veyre, a young pharmacist, became one of the most industrious and widely traveled of the Lumière cameramen. In 1896, he shot and screened the
first projections in Mexico. “Everyone was exclaiming: Muy bonito! How beautiful, how beautiful!” Veyre wrote from Mexico City to his mother in France in a letter quoted in the exhibition. The show also includes letters home by Constant Girel, another cameraman, who shot the first films in Polynesia and Japan, and Marius Chapuis, who left for Rus-
sia at age 18 in 1896 and screened the first film in Odessa that year. The 1,500 films made by the Lumières and their filmmakers include fiction films as well as reportage, such as “Pierrot and the Fly,” filmed by Louis Lumière in 1896. In the exhibition, all 1,500 films are being shown on a huge wall-size screen. The story of the Lumières is also a story of canny entrepreneurs. The brothers’ father, Antoine, was a sign painter turned portrait photographer. In 1881, at age 17, Louis discovered a way to capture images on dry plates with gelatin silver bromide. Antoine went into business to manufacture the product. The exhibition also has a model of the Salon Indien inside the elegant Hotel Scribe in Paris, where 10 Lumière films were on the program of the first public screening in 1895. “Lumière invented the movie theater,” Mr. Frémaux said. “Of course, you can watch films on watches, on iPhones, great. But the movie theater is incomparable.”