ART REVIEW : Her Dominant View

Frida Kahlo’s sober 1941 “Self-Portrait in a Red and Gold Dress” is nowhere near as flamboyant as most of the remarkable depictions that have made the Mexican painter such an extraordinary phenomenon in 20th century art. Nor is it as famous.

But the picture, which is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in a modest exhibition of Mexican Modernist painting from the collection of Natasha and the late Jacques Gelman, is a small gem nonetheless. It exerts a quiet but compelling pull, even among the other nine Kahlo paintings in a collection that includes some of the greatest self-portraits the artist made.

The star of the show is the magnificent and imposing “Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on My Mind)” (1943), which transforms Kahlo into a radiant, captive vision. Like a statue of the Madonna costumed in special raiments for a feast day, the three-quarter profile shows her face emerging from a Oaxacan shawl and ruff of white lace trimmed with pink ribbon, while her hair is crowned with luscious flowers. Jagged tendrils from the plants and threads from the lace swirl around her, like a charged web of electricity.

Appearing on Kahlo’s forehead, right between the eyes and held aloft by the famous flying arches of her single black eyebrow, is a shimmering small portrait of her notoriously unfaithful husband, the titanic painter Diego Rivera. The little image seems an uneasy cross between an ineradicable tattoo and secular stigmata, which merges with the soulful spiritual gravity of a third eye. Kahlo, like a magnificent prisoner, shows herself both blessed and cursed by her intimate attachment to Rivera.

Nearby is the beautiful and equally well-known “Self-Portrait With Monkeys,” painted the same year, in which the artist likens herself to the wild and impish jungle animals. “Self-Portrait With Braid” (1941) wraps the nude bust of the artist in sumptuous jungle flora, while her hair, braided with purplish-crimson cloth, is swept up and piled atop her head in a spectacular pretzel--Kahlo as a Mexican Eve beneath a bloody crown of thorns.

A small 1937 full-length self-portrait shows her seated on a crude bed in a spartan room, an abandoned porcelain doll by her side and tellingly echoing her pose. The wildly titled “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me and Sen~or Xolotl” packs into a modestly scaled format a self-absorbed, Surrealist-inspired mythic vision of a couple inseparably entwined with the past, the present and the future.

The collection’s earliest self-portrait, a picture from 1933 in which Kahlo is simply adorned with a necklace of what appears to be charcoal-gray clay beads, is closest to the one that offers just a glimpse of a red and gold dress. But it’s the latter that’s unusually compelling, giving an unexpected jolt to the show.

This painting isn’t large--just under 16 by 11 inches--but the intimacy of its scale contributes to its power as it pulls you in close. The unadorned artist is placed before a plain but richly variegated brown background. Her patterned dress is not elaborate, while her braided hair is wound in a simple coil atop her head.

Every feature of her face is carefully recorded--the black eyebrow, a prominent mustache, a small blemish on her chin. Her full lips are closed, her clear brown eyes riveted to yours.

Above her head her name is printed in bold black letters, together with the name of her country and the date in Roman numerals. Kahlo is looking hard at herself, and through the convention of portraiture, that steady gaze is transferred to the spectator.

James Oles, essayist for the show’s accompanying catalog, mentions the painting’s relationship to a strain of late 19th century Mexican portraiture, and I think he’s right on target. Kahlo’s other, costumed self-portraits make an elaborate, showy and provocative display of her commitment to traditions unique to Mexico, but the “Self-Portrait in Red and Gold Dress” is far more subtle in a similar embrace. This painting quietly recalls the great portraits painted by Guanajuato’s Hermenegildo Bustos (1832-1907), an exceptional regional master who died three years before Kahlo was born.

Bustos painted portraits of family, friends and neighbors; they’re characterized by an unflinching honesty and directness that neither flatters nor is cruel but instead commemorates the variegated fullness of humanity. In an era when Mexico’s national identity was being forged in the historic image of its diverse cultures, Bustos was committed to being el pintor del pueblo (painter of the people). Kahlo’s lovingly blunt self-portrait shows her convergence with that ideal.

The difference, of course, is that Kahlo invested that tradition into pictures of her own highly individuated personality. In part the fusion seems hugely ego-driven, as she merges herself with a popular image of all Mexico; in part it announces an unprecedented shift in which an individual psyche assumes new prominence.

These seven Kahlo self-portraits are joined by three other paintings of hers: a symbol-laden still life and jewel-like portraits of Rivera and their patroness, Natasha Gelman.

It’s not the largest collection of Kahlo’s work in one place. That distinction goes to the museum recently established by Dolores Olmedo, Rivera’s one-time paramour, in her extraordinary former home in what was once a Mexico City convent. But it does claim the most self-portraits, which comprise Kahlo’s greatest achievement.

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The late Jacques Gelman was a Russian-born movie distributor who moved to Mexico City in 1941. There he met and married Czech immigrant Natasha Zahalka. Gelman made a fortune producing films starring the comedic actor Cantinflas (Mario Moreno), and he and his wife began to collect Modern art.

Most of the European work is now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The 39 paintings and 15 drawings now visiting San Francisco (the show will also travel to Miami) remain in the Gelman collection. They are a decidedly mixed bag.

There are pictures of historical interest, including several by muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, as well as a lush example of Rivera’s iconic paintings of calla lily vendors, the first of which hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Also on view is Rivera’s amazing, Igres-like portrait of a reclining Natasha Gelman, her impossibly distended body wrapped in a calla lily-like dress from which her legs protrude like golden stamens.

The collection also features abstractions by lesser artists, including the Miro-esque designs of Carlos Merida and an abundance of the architectonic hard-edge paintings of set-designer Gunther Gerzso. In all, 15 artists are represented.

It’s the 10 Kahlos, though, that stand out in the collection, which is rarely shown in public. They represent her work at its most extravagant and its most reserved. At both ends of the spectrum, they’re knockouts.

* “Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism From the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., (415) 357-4000, through Sept. 8. Closed Mondays.