Frida Kahlo in her studio, Irma Stern’s painting Watussi Woman in Red and Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting Three Girls.
Adjectives are important to an appreciation of Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern — Modernist Identities in the Global South, a landmark three-women exhibition on view at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) in Forest Town.
This is the first time paintings by Frida Kahlo and Amrita Sher-Gil, two painters representing innovations in earlier 20th-century Mexican and Indian art, have been publicly exhibited in South Africa, possibly on the continent too.
It took JCAF director Clive Kellner four years of negotiations and planning to secure the work. Many potential Kahlo lenders blanked him. The Indian state had to sign off on the loan of Sher-Gil’s painting. Difficulty and achievement aside, this exhibition, which presents one painting apiece by Kahlo, Sher-Gil and Irma Stern, invites a slew of other adjectives. Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern is ambitious, provocative, obsessive, insightful, affected and perhaps, ultimately, extraordinary. It is definitely unlike anything attempted by a South African art museum — public or private — in many years.
But I’m going to hitch my wagon to a made-up adjective. This exhibition, which unfolds in three movements, is Andersonian. It brings to mind the obsessive eccentricities of filmmaker Wes Anderson, whose films I enjoy and whose kooky doings as a curator I witnessed in Vienna’s grand Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2018.
Like an Anderson film or exhibition, the JCAF exhibition involves elaborate set designs and the wholesale embrace of theatricality.
Entering JCAF the viewer is introduced to the social context and material culture that shaped the practices of the three artists on view.
Three large photos taken in the earlier years of the past century locate the viewer in a sociopolitical world defined by faith and colonial bureaucracy. The photos depict Mexico City’s central Catholic cathedral; the Ajanta caves, a Buddhist site in western India; and a post office in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi) in former Belgian Congo.
Anderson’s storylines overlap and rely on inter-titles to hold the viewer’s hand and Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern do the same. A trained exhibition guide provides a voiceover. There is also stuff to read. And then there are the photos, films, journals and examples of folk art and classical sculpture that influenced the artists.
There is also a dress worn by Kahlo. It is installed on a museum-grade mannequin fitted by a costume expert flown in from London. In certain respects, this is all standard museological practice, scene setting, if you will. The journey culminates at three architecturally distinct containers, each housing a painting. There is a bench inside each. Sit. Look.
The combination of Kahlo, Sher-Gil and Stern is possibly strange. These larger-than-life artists never exhibited together in their lifetimes. Kahlo and Sher-Gil pretty much shunned Africa. (Kahlo did have an affair with Spanish artist and anti-Franco activist Josep Bartolí, who briefly lived in South Africa before settling in Mexico.)
Stern, a cultured and profligate collector, owned a sizable collection of pre-colonial Indian and Mexican artefacts that included a Zapotec jaguar mask and figure of Ganesha with an elephant head. But she never visited India or Mexico. The three artists were, in essence, strangers to one another — and yet.
Kahlo, Sher-Gil and Stern share many biographical affinities. All three painters were shaped by, and made their names during, the tumultuous interwar period that summarily ended in 1939. All three are in their own ways proto-feminists. This might account for the vague but determined allegations of lesbianism that swirl around them.
Gender, sexuality and identity are fertile subjects for engaging the work of these worldly and cosmopolitan artists, but this isn’t the focus of the JCAF exhibition. In Kellner’s words, it “explores ways in which these extraordinary artists were shaped by the histories that made them and how they too helped to shape history”.
Class privileges and a common Teutonic ancestry are part of that history. Kahlo was born to a German father and mother of Spanish-Mexican ancestry in Mexico City. When she was 22, she married Diego Rivera, a muralist serenaded as the “people’s painter” but also mocked for being “the painter of palaces” and a Mussolini-like dictator.
Kahlo initially looked to Italian renaissance painters before she found profit in synthesising her early influences with local Mexican folk art. The exhibition includes three examples of the Mexican votive paintings (retablos) that inspired Kahlo as well as decorated her home.
If Stern’s defining trauma was her weight, which proved a lifelong struggle and reason to locate beauty in otherness, for Kahlo it was her damaged body. Her right leg was deformed by polio at a young age. A car accident when she was 18 resulted in multiple injuries, notably to her spine. Kahlo’s adult life involved frequent surgical interventions and constricting corsets, which she disguised with flowing garments and sublimated in her fierce self-portraits.
Kahlo’s merging of “reverie, cruelty and sexuality”, to quote Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen from an important 1982 exhibition essay, saw her feted as surrealist.
“I detest surrealism,” Kahlo countered in a 1952 letter. “I wish to be worthy, with my paintings, of the people to whom I belong and to the ideas which strengthen me.”
A romantic nationalism informs Sher-Gil’s mature work, too. Although heralded as a pioneer of modern Indian art, Sher-Gil was born in Hungary and studied painting in Paris. Like Stern, she initially worked in a mannerist style influenced by her early European mentors before arriving at her style.
Sher-Gil’s father was an aristocratic Punjabi Sikh who met her mother, an opera diva from a wealthy Hungarian-Jewish family, in Budapest. In a flourish worthy of an Anderson film, the Sher-Gil family lodged for a time in the city’s Grand Hotel. Artists, poets and intellectuals frequented their hotel suite.
The artist’s biographer Yashodhara Dalmia tells how a psychologist, after conducting crackpot experiments on the young Sher-Gil, concluded she possessed “nascent high talents” but was “easily influenced”.
Stern, whose expressive paintings of black women from the 1920s caused shock and formed part of a transformative moment in South African painting, was also an easily persuaded rich kid. Born into a prosperous German-Jewish family living in Schweizer-Reneke, in what is now North West, the Sterns decamped for Germany in 1901.
Like Sher-Gil, Stern was naturalised to being around wealthy art patrons at a young age. The artist’s Berlin youth was spent in theatres, exhibitions and fashionable salons. World War I barely registers in her diaries. Stern’s political timidity contrasts with Kahlo’s membership of the Communist Party and carousing with Leon Trotsky.
These two artists differ in other ways too. Kahlo only produced about 200 paintings. Stern, a prolific maker, was a Foxconn factory by comparison. The extent of Stern’s archive, which was exhibited and traded across Africa and Europe during her lifetime, is yet to be adequately mapped. To be fair, Stern lived two decades longer than Kahlo, who died at 47, and four decades more than Sher-Gil, who died in Lahore aged 28.
One can endlessly compare and contrast the biographical circumstances of these three artists. What links them is their shared commitment to imaging women. Kahlo famously chose herself as subject. Stern never portrayed herself, at least not in any committed sense — a copy of her Paradise journal on view at JCAF contains sketchy pseudo self-portraits. Sher-Gil pursued the middle route, finding profit in recording both her own image as well as that of others.
“The exhibition asks how these three pioneering artists explore this multiplicity in portraits of themselves and others,” elaborates Kellner. “Kahlo, Sher-Gil and Stern all construct a self through an imagined identification with indigenous women. Drawing from aspects of traditional cultures, they created modern hybrid identities against the backdrop of evolving nationalisms across three continents in the global south.”
Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern functions as the closing bracket to a trilogy of feminist exhibitions at JCAF. Conceptually, it would have made better sense coming first, in effect laying the groundwork for the careers of the various contemporary women artists previously exhibited.
Joburg’s non-reputation as a global art centre stymied that possibility. Kellner struggled to find willing lenders of works by Kahlo and Sher-Gil. He hustled Kahlo’s 1940 self-portrait of her wearing a constricting necklace of thorns adorned with a hummingbird from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. This archive, library and museum in Austin is partial to South Africa. It holds original manuscripts and correspondence by, among others, Herman Charles Bosman, Roy Campbell, JM Coetzee and William Plomer.
The National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi loaned Sher-Gil’s Three Girls (1935). The work, which is discussed in the artist’s posthumous 2018 New York Times obituary, shows three demure young women wearing saris. They appear to be flooded with cinematic light.
This work could be judged as sentimental, or worse, but Sher-Gil’s interest in imaging ordinary Indian women was sincere. The artist said she wanted to record “images of infinite submission and patience” and render “angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness”.
Stern’s earlier work demonstrated similar wonder, even if complicated by her reach across the racial divide.
Stern’s Watussi Woman in Red (1946) dates from her later years of solo African travel and depicts Princess Emma Bakayishonga, daughter of Rwanda’s King Yuhi Musinga. It showcases Stern’s habit of concentrating on the face as the dramatic locus of her portraits, her abundant struggle to portray hands and — like Sher-Gil — zeal for colour.
Given the non-stop walking pace at which museums are typically navigated, there is provocation in organising an exhibition that culminates in a dead end. Sit down. Look. See how the female gaze operates, enigmatically and differently, but also not. Notice how class and its permissions inflect the meaning of each painting. Observe the play of cultural appropriation and affirmation. Discover the fullness of three Andersonian lives played out in just three paintings.
Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South is at Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation until 22 February