Exhibit Reveals Themes Common to O’Keeffe, Kahlo and Carr

If ever a show was ideal for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Places of Their Own: Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo” is it. The first exhibition to combine these three important 20th century artists, it has already broken attendance records in Toronto and Santa Fe.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts is hoping for big crowds here as well until the show closes May 12.

The 62 works on view, most of them rarely seen in the United States, explore the artistic and biographical links among these North American artists, all of whom blossomed between the two world wars: Carr (1871-1945) in Canada, O’Keeffe (1887-1986) in the United States and Kahlo (1907-1954) in Mexico. The most refreshing surprise here is that O’Keeffe is not the star of this show--in part because of relatively weak representation. The exhibition belongs to Carr, who is far too little known in the United States. Carr’s powerful, passionate paintings of lush Canadian rain forests will astound audiences unfamiliar with her work.

Kahlo is also revealed in unusual depth with 15 significant works, including rare, sometimes surreal still lifes.

The three shared a passion for the natural world, as well as an interest in and concern for the surrounding cultures. Carr’s earliest paintings are of indigenous Indian villages, totem poles and mythical beings in her native British Columbia. O’Keeffe painted Penitente crosses and kachina dolls, the most poetic of which, “Kokopelli With Snow” from 1942, hangs in this show.

College of Santa Fe art historian Sharyn Udall conceived the idea for this exhibition seven years ago, when she first noticed the remarkable resonance between O’Keeffe and Carr. Both had defined, through their art, the look of the places where they lived: “What O’Keeffe did for the colorful hills and high desert of Santa Fe, Carr had done for the west coast of Canada,” Udall says. Their interest in expressing a national identity through their art prompted Udall to add Kahlo to the mix.

“Kahlo was working with the same kind of idea,” Udall says, “trying to express what she called her Mexicanidad, or Mexican essence, roots and spirit.” Kahlo herself was a living example of the blended culture of Mexico: her mother was half indigenous Indian, half Spanish. With her husband, the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo was also deeply involved with the left-wing revolutionary politics that helped shape modern Mexico.

Udall’s subsequent research resulted in the recent book “Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own” (Yale University Press), as well as this traveling exhibition, which is organized according to the book’s three basic themes: nature, culture and public self.

Viewers accustomed to seeing an artist’s work separately, and in chronological sequence, may be frustrated by this show, which is meant to underscore the artists’ common ground.

So if you’re caught in the thrall of Carr’s glorious “Western Forest” (1931) and eager to learn more about her, you may instead find yourself rerouted to the nature-based paintings of O’Keeffe. And then to those of Kahlo, for whom nature served mainly as metaphorical connective tissue in her mostly autobiographical paintings.

Moving on to the “Culture” section, you pick up Carr’s trail in masterpieces like 1931’s “Big Raven,” produced, like “Western Forest,” once Carr had summoned the courage to paint again after a long hiatus. In these works, she returns to her earlier subjects--totems in particular--but with a newly mature and impassioned style that shows a thorough understanding of modernism.

Some of these later works rival and recall the landscapes of Marsden Hartley and the German Expressionists.

O’Keeffe and Kahlo both married famous, much older artists (respectively, photographer Alfred Stieglitz and Rivera) who vastly advanced their celebrity. Carr, who went it alone, had a much tougher time and attained modest recognition only 10 years before her death, as a result of a show of Canadian painters at the Tate Gallery in London. Soon thereafter, her paintings entered the National Gallery and the Art Gallery of Toronto. But she sounded a lot like O’Keeffe when she said: “I don’t care what people think of my work. Lots of people hate it. I can’t help that. I am trying to express something I feel, to satisfy myself.”

The final section of this show, “The Public Self,” sets out to demonstrate how these artists revealed themselves through their work. But it really says more about their private selves. There are some silly O’Keeffes, including “Dark Tree Trunks” (1946), which would be utterly meaningless here without the accompanying O’Keeffe quote: “When I paint trees I am trees.” But there are also some very good pictures here, including Carr’s unforgiving 1938 “Self-Portrait” with its riveting gaze. Carr paints herself as a mountain of a woman, which she apparently saw herself to be. The work hangs provocatively next to Carr’s darkly mysterious 1933 painting “The Mountain,” which Carr described as an “uncorseted woman.”

Kahlo’s striking 1946 portrait of herself as a wounded deer punctured by arrows is also telling. Like nearly everything she painted, “The Little Deer” is a metaphor for her physical suffering, which was apparently endless: A victim of childhood polio, she was then badly hurt in a bus accident that left her crippled for life. This painting, made shortly before her gangrenous foot had to be amputated, connects her suffering to that of the Christian martyr St. Sebastian, who was shot through with arrows. Just a few years later Kahlo was dead at age 47.

At some point in this show, you can’t help wondering what these three eccentric, highly independent thinkers would say about being lumped together in one exhibition. “O’Keeffe probably wouldn’t like it because she didn’t like showing with anyone but herself,” Udall says.

And Kahlo, unfortunately, might be too ill to know or care. As for Carr, Udall agreed that she’d probably be thrilled to be in the company of such legendary artists, wholly unaware that she had become one of them.