Frida-Mania Hits MoMA
A collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera’s costume designer, this exhibition is an irresistible marketing opportunity at best.
When El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego arrived at the San Francisco Opera in 2023, one critic suggested that its staging, with its arresting tableaux blending imagery from the work of both Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, would be fit for a museum exhibition. Taking the cue, the Museum of Modern Art has mounted just such a show.
Frida and Diego: The Last Dream, which opened this past weekend, coincides with a new production of the critically acclaimed opera scheduled for the Metropolitan Opera in May. It is billed as a “first-of-its-kind collaboration” between the two institutions, a modest, cross-disciplinary experiment of sorts for which MoMA invited renowned British stage and costume designer Jon Bausor to help transition his vision from the stage to the gallery. But whereas the original production of El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego was lauded for its fresh take on the tortured romance of the two artists, the accompanying exhibition for this new production is a clumsy interpolation.
A miniature set model from the opera’s stage design — an eerily lit tree of life emerging from cracked earth with vein-like branches framed by wooden scaffolding and blue tarp walls — greets visitors in the lobby. Coupled with a short promotional video featuring the award-winning production team, idling visitors are effectively marketed the opera before even entering the gallery. Once inside, however, the theatrical design feels misguided. The last thing we need to see in New York City is more cheap scaffolding, even if logically recontextualized as a makeshift memorial for the two artists, with accent lighting befitting an altar. Or to stare at ruffled blue tarp drapes reimagined as a framing device. In one instance, though, the rupture of the oil painting “Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair” (1940) — Kahlo’s post-divorce rebuke of Rivera in which she appears short-haired, wearing a suit rather than her traditional guise — briefly parts the curtained walls successfully for a dramatic effect.
The tree of life also becomes even more figurative in the gallery space, where we encounter a wooden bed frame, the site of Kahlo’s physical confinement after countless surgeries, and the ceiling mirror she used to paint herself. Both evoke Frida’s physical and emotional pain, while also inducing the desire to take selfies. Otherwise, the exhibition reshuffles works from the collection galleries to some effect. There is a seemingly appropriate pairing of overlapping political sensibilities where Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait On The Border Between Mexico And The United States” (1932) and Rivera’s “Agrarian Leader Zapata” (1931) meet — the former a self-referential, anti-imperialist sentiment in diminutive form and the latter heroically tinged with Mexican national pride, with a grander sense of scale. However, the creation of “Self-Portrait On The Border" coincides with Rivera’s work on the Detroit Industry Murals (1932–33) and clearly expresses her resistance to the modern industry that her husband venerated. It’s a false impression of political alignment. Similarly, Rivera’s costume and set design sketches for the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez’s ballet score Caballos de vapor (Horse-Power, 1926–32) are consistent with the exhibition’s interdisciplinary theme, but not much else.
Still, Frida-mania may not care for nuance unless it sells, which was very much the case at MoMA. When I visited on the afternoon of the public opening, the gallery was dutifully filled to capacity, at times forcing visitors to sign up for a waitlist. Overall, the exhibition struggles to convey an intense, complicated love affair while only dabbling in cultural specificity — like seating in the form of an Aztec pyramid, which is clean, minimalist, and a bit gimmicky. Frida and Diego: The Last Dream is, at best, an irresistible marketing opportunity.
That said, go see the opera. That is the point, after all.
Frida and Diego: The Last Dream continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan), through September 12. The exhibition was curated by Beverly Adams and Jon Bausor with Caitlin Chaisson and Rachel Remick.