Review: Frida Kahlo’s ‘Pose’ Exhibition at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, by Sue Katz

This article is reprinted with permission from Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

By Sue Katz

I’m on a mission to check out the many small museums in this area of Massachusetts. This rainy Saturday was the perfect timing for my first visit to the Rose Art Museum. Their modern and contemporary permanent collection is extraordinary – every piece of the highest quality. Stunners from one wall to another, with women and people of color now heavily represented.

Let’s talk first about the traveling exhibition of “POSE” which classifies it’s images by and about Frida Kahlo into these categories: “posing; composing; exposing; queering, and self-fashioning.” It includes a not inconsiderable array of photos and paintings, with captions that do an excellent job of contextualizing her courageous, if painful, life. It highlights her youthful cross-dressing, her bisexuality, and her radical politics. Available at Rose until December 19, 2021, it is sufficiently comprehensive to both introduce the uninitiated to Frida and to satisfy the hunger of her fans.

The rest of the surprisingly large exhibition halls are filled with a self-tribute on the occasion of the museum’s 60th anniversary. Although the original selection of work included only one woman six decades ago, the curators have used the juxtaposition of the best-known pieces with work by emerging artists. In their words: “Displaying well-known, iconic pieces from the Rose’s permanent collection alongside artworks created by emerging and historically underrepresented artists, this major, museum-wide exhibition recontextualizes the familiar while introducing the new. The show features a multigenerational, international cadre of stellar artists…”

The entrance floor, in particular, featured radical work by Black artists that was new to me, but blew me away. These were juxtaposed with select masterpieces by such artists as Louise Nevelson, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol, to name a few. The pedophiles among superstars were named clearly, including mention of the 14-year-old girl Gauguin called his “wife” and used as a muse.

Beauford Delaney got only a fraction of the attention received by his contemporaries Picasso and Gauguin. An admired member of the Harlem Renaissance whose mother was born into slavery, Delaney was a mentor to James Baldwin. Both were gay. I felt lucky to be able to see his jazzy, vibrant piece “Abstraction,” set aside and contrasting with Picasso’s “Reclining Nude.”

“I Gets a Thrill Too When I sees De Koo” is a big, exuberant work by Robert Colescott, a frequently satirical African-American artist who studied in Paris with one of my very favorite artists, the Cubist Fernand Léger. He returned to the States determined to put Black images into art history. Meant to mock the famous “Woman” by de Kooning, the title also contains a reference to an Arabic swear word for a woman’s vagina. Colescott had spent several years living in Egypt. His original introduction to art as a teenager was watching Diego Rivera, the muralist husband of Frida Kahlo, paint a mural in San Francisco. Which brings us full circle.

In 2009, when the Recession seemed like the end of capitalism and donations to Brandeis’ constricted, the then-President Jehuda Reinharz announced that he was going to sell off some of the 7,500-piece collection and close the Rose Museum. People associated with the University went nutters, not the least those who had donated art. Litigation halted any sale of the artwork and the Rose Museum has spent the time since then healing the wounds from that controversy.

Throughout my entire visit, I felt super-aware of the profound wealth this collection represents and how copious are the privileges of students and teachers at these elite private colleges. At a time when most higher education institutions are in a kerfuffle over reduced enrollment, dealing with Covid, keeping angry professors as “adjuncts” with little security, these universities with massive endowments are, ironically, offering us artistic delights.

About Sue Katz