 Mingling among my books are an assortment of artifacts, curiosities, and novelties; I have always prized trinkets of art and history and nostalgia. Perched in my art book library: a cheap made-in-China Jeff Koons balloon dog knock off, a three-footed polka dot pottery bowl made by a dear friend, and my Vincent Price action figurine. Vincent nests atop a row of eclectic critical art writings: Robert Hughes, Robert Motherwell, Frank O’Hara. He is the guardian or perhaps the gargoyle of this treasure chest of the wonders of human creativity. Vincent Price is best known as a charismatic, handsome actor in dozens of horror films spanning the ‘30s through early ‘90s. His urbane, campy sophistication and the mellifluous, velvet, baritone qualities of his vocal delivery elevated the lowliest movies of the genre into artful dramas. Classic performances include House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and House of Wax. My own introduction to Price was his iconic narration of Rod Temperton’s rap in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” a genius performance that helped catapult Jackson’s album to become the world’s bestselling record of all time.
Like everyone else, I enjoyed Price’s witty, dramatic flare in fun films over the years. But in 2022, I was commissioned to create a small collage tribute to the Crown Prince of Terror. And that’s when I fell head over heels. Vincent’s voice, face, and genius for menace could make anyone swoon, but discovering his passion for art history and work to democratize access and exposure to that knowledge is what really sent shivers down my spine. When working on themed artworks, I like to immerse myself in my subject matter and learn as much as I can about the topic at hand. So I danced to “Thriller” in my library and spent a few cozy nights curled up with Vince and various bloodcurdling film flashbacks. But diving into some behind-the-scenes research, I found what was, for me, pure gold: not just a pretty face, Vincent’s first passion was art, and before he started acting, he studied for a degree in art history, from Yale, no less.  Vincent Price, commissioned mixed media artwork, Lorette C. Luzajic 2022 Vincent Price was born in St Louis, Missouri, with English and Welsh ancestry. His family was wealthy with a candy empire and a booming tooth powder company, and so he was fortunately able to afford prestigious higher education. But as it turned out, his access to that knowledge benefited the rest of us. Price developed an interest in theatre after graduation, even as he started working on his masters in art history at the Courtauld Institute, quickly securing acting roles at the Gate Theatre in London. With his stately intelligence and quick wit, his stage presence was formidable, and he landed a variety of roles, moving into character acting for films. His first horror movie was Boris Karloff’s Tower of London. The IMDb puts him in 190 films, from minor cameos to starring roles, and 69 television shows. Vincent’s acting work spanned sixty years from 1930 to 1990. With his good looks, cultured demeanor, and incisive wit, he was effortlessly popular with directors and a heart throb for the ladies…and for men. Vincent was married three times for ten plus years each, but it was an open secret that he was also gay, something his daughter confirmed posthumously. Throughout his entire career as an actor, Vincent had two other passions. One was cooking. Vincent was a formidable gourmet and he loved to dine on his world travels and share his discoveries and experiences with others, inviting the masses to the pleasures of world cuisine. With his second wife, Mary, he wrote a 500 page cookbook, A Treasury of Great Recipes, aimed at showing people how they could create their own “dastardly delights” and "travel around the world using your cooker." He even had a TV cooking series for budget gourmet, Cooking Price-Wise. His other passion was the one that preceded his involvement in theatre and film. Art was Vincent’s first love, his foundational interest, and perhaps even his raison d’etre. Price was an avid art collector, growing his collection with his film earnings. He was interested in an eclectic range of visual culture, from Rembrandt to Pollock. Vincent’s first acquisition was a Rembrandt drawing that he purchased on a payment plan with his own allowance when he was a young boy. He was especially interested in pre-Columbian art and artifacts and amassed hundreds of examples over the years. Price saw his position of privilege as an opportunity to democratize art and become a kind of art activist or advocate. He believed that art was not just for wealthy or elite people, but was something that everyone should experience and own. This conviction is what drove the extensive work he did to bring art education out of the scholarly and museum realms and encourage a wider populace to look, learn, and collect. “The indoctrination of art at Yale and the Courtauld really set my life’s pattern,” he said in a 1992 interview, “And I’ve probably kept up more study in the history of art than most people who are in it professionally. Because I’m not a professional at it. I’m an amateur — in the French sense of the word, a lover.”  Early in his acting career, Price saw the potential of well-paid, idolized Hollywood actors to contribute to a thriving marketplace for artists. In 1943, he opened a small gallery in Beverly Hills- The Little Gallery- showing his own collection as well as emphasizing little-known local talents to his movie friends. “Our openings consisted of anywhere from 50 to 400 people cammed into our little room, drinking the strongest, cheapest vodka martinis we could make. Everyone came…” Vincent wrote in his memoirs. “…Tallulah Bankhead, Fanny Brice, Katharine Hepburn, and other assorted actors, writers, directors, and just people.” Around 1950, Vincent and Mary visited a small college art gallery in Los Angeles. He saw the need to expose young people to art and donated ninety works from his personal repertory of paintings, drawings, and artifacts, establishing the first teaching collection at a community college. The East Los Angeles Junior College renamed themselves the Vincent Price Art Museum, eventually holding over 2000 works donated from the actor’s private collection. The museum is still active today, continuing Vincent’s legacy and his desire to expand access to art, broaden community participation and representation, and remedy historical erasures and omissions in the story art. In 1959, Vincent wrote his memoirs, I Like What I Know: a Visual Autobiography. The book tells the story of Vincent Price through his love of art, his childhood introduction to museums, and his world travels to view art everywhere. This rollicking adventure from one artwork to another is at once erudite and down-to-earth, extolling the magic to be found in diverse works like the Arnolfini Portrait, Modigliani, Oaxacan pottery, Titian, Veronese, Yoruba sculpture, and much more.  Double Day and Company, 1959 In 1962, Price established a monumental partnership with Sears to bring original art into everyday homes. He was given carte blanche to curate an ongoing collection of affordable works for the general public. Price travelled the globe, choosing works from historical and modern artists from a wide array of cultures to be sold through Sears. It was a major project that spanned nine years and brought original works into contemporary households. All in all, fifty thousand originals were sold through the initiative, empowering people from all walks to collect art. Prices ranged from $10 to $3000, with payment plans starting at $5 per month. Artworks were advertised widely and shown in Sears catalogues, with travelling exhibitions and displays in Sears retail stores. Price commissioned artists like Salvador Dali and Andrew Wyeth to create works specifically for the collection, and the partnership offered works by Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Peter Paul Rubens, James McNeill Whistler, Georgia O’Keeffe, and many more. Perhaps due to the typically corny aesthetic of ‘60s advertisements, the project was later criticized as a corporate cash grab. But Price’s visionary work with Sears afforded thousands of people the opportunity to experience art and empowered them to collect originals through reasonable pricing and payment plans, as well as giving thousands of artists paying work and exposure.
 In 1972, encouraging interest in American art history, Price wrote the book, The Vincent Price Treasury of American Art,published by the Country Beautiful Corporation. Here, Price brought his expertise and insights to the expansion of general knowledge for Americans on their own legacy of visual art, with brief essays and colour plates on Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Charles Sheeler, Elihu Vedder, Mary Cassatt, Horace Pippin, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, and beyond. He referred to his book in his foreword as a “biography of America” and suggested that readers visit the public galleries where the works resided to experience the pieces firsthand, saying, “the real thing will always come as a surprise.” In each short essay, Price highlighted interesting biographical snippets of the artist and background on the specific painting shown, with his trademark clever and conversational style.
Throughout these years, Price also served fourteen years on the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, for the advancement of Native American artists. He collected Native American art and included essays on indigenous artists in his American art book. He was invested in the promotion and visibility of contemporary Indigenous artists. He used his celebrity to bring attention to Native American artists like Oscar Howe and Fritz Scholder. He also established the first creative writing awards for Indigenous students at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, and he read their poetry on the Johnny Carson Show. He helped Indigenous artists discover economic opportunities and ways to sell their work. Another important art advisory role for Vincent was serving the White House Commission of Fine Arts by invitation from Jackie Kennedy! With the objective of making the White House a centre for American art, Vincent’s expertise and flare were invaluable. He gifted President Kennedy an Albert Bierstadt painting. Price never stopped evangelism for his cause. Somehow between a prolific schedule of filming, writing, and haunting, he found the time to deliver over 400 lectures to different colleges and universities on art history, igniting passion for visual art in countless inquiring minds. He also recorded a series of narrated tours of museum collections, called the Colorslide Tours, for the Columbia Records Club, taking people on tours of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Prado, and the Louvre. And he wrote a syndicated art column for the Chicago Tribune-New York News, published in the Washington Post, Allentown Morning Call, and numerous other papers throughout the States. Once again, Price’s objective was to empower people to look, explore, and learn more about visual art, rejecting scholarly elitism in favour of making his favourite subject accessible to everyone. In a 1985 interview for the Clockwatch Review, Price summed up his passion for James Plath: “Art lifts the spirit. It edifies. For me, it’s the great escape!” In a 1987 article for the Washington Post, Price wrote, “To my mind, museums do as much good as hospitals.” If Vincent is most remembered for his exquisitely sinister and sardonic performances in dramatic horror cinema, it is his forgotten advocacy work that has changed the world. “Art belongs to everyone,” he said often, and his efforts to democratize art and empower people to engage deeply with visual art profoundly impacted his audiences of millions to become passionate, knowledgeable participants in the art of looking, in museum-going, and in collecting. The extraordinary popularity of art among people of all walks of life in North American life today is due in part to Price’s tireless cheerleading and promotion. He inspired countless fans to explore, understand, and discover visual art from the past and present. He championed both historic and modern artwork, as well as showing a wide audience what it means to appreciate creativity from many cultures. “One thing is certain,” Vincent wrote in his autobiography. “The arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge…If at times I’ve been demanding…that you like this or that because I do…it’s because I believe this is a way to start seeing something you perhaps have missed…I hope that my life’s devotion to seeing may open a few eyes that have been shut by fear of seeing something new…Art is only another person’s way of seeing…it is, or can be, a way of seeing through another’s eyes the wonderful world of reality or imagination…of truth or fiction…of actuality or abstraction. The human mind and the human spirit are not, and never have been, one sided.” Vincent’s evangelical zeal for art is a mirror of my own. You have often heard me say that “art is everything” and my work to promote ekphrastic literature is partly driven by my conviction that writing is thinking, and that writing about art is an incredibly intimate way to look closer and engage deeply with images. For me, the power of images to connect us with other individuals and other cultures, and with our very soul, is unparalleled. Nestled among my library of enchanted pictures, the Vincent doll is a droll reminder of the everyday magic available to all of us through human creativity. “Life is short and art is long,” Vincent wrote. “A man’s art, a civilization’s art, are its immortality.” Lorette C. Luzajic 
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 Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez (Spain) 1656 Old Woman Poaching Eggs Las Meninas is one of those paintings that everyone who has ever opened their eyes has seen. If not in the flesh at the Prado, its home since the grand museum’s opening in 1819, then in textbooks and on postcards and mousepads and memes. Diego Velazquez’s 1656 masterpiece is widely considered one of the most important paintings in art history. Baroque era artist Luca Giorgano said it represents the “theology of painting.” Picasso painted 58 versions of his fellow Spaniard’s magnum opus. The massive canvas lets you walk right into the artist’s studio, and there he is, painting the picture before you, a shadowy, angled affair that draws the eye right to its centrepiece, King Philip the IV’s infanta daughter and her entourage, including her beloved bodyguard, a mastiff, and an attendant with dwarfism. By the time he created his masterpiece, Diego Velazquez was a few years shy of the finish line, after a long and illustrious career as court painter to the King of Spain. Las Meninas was his opus work. Before the Prado, it hung in the palace, where Diego lived and worked on site.  Old Woman Poaching Eggs, by Diego Velazquez (Spain) 1618 Nice work if you can get it. Few painters in history lived in palaces with guaranteed paycheques. And this was the Spanish Golden Age, no less. It was a rare life of privilege, a position deserved for Velazquez talent and determination. But perhaps I’m not the only one who laments a gift that seems squandered on dreary portraits of the court, of this count and that, for the Royal Collection? Velazquez works are pure mastery of technique. But what else? If Las Meninas is full of provocation, curiosity, complexity and innovation, many others are stalwart, standard, even dull portraiture. If I should feel awe or admiration looking at Pope Innocent X or another portrait of a court lady, I don’t. I feel nothing. Velazquez used tenebrism, a word from the Italian, tenebroso, which means “dark, murky, gloomy.” Artists like Velazquez and Caravaggio worked with tenebroso and chiaroscuro, painting inside this drama of dark and light for enigmatic effects and strong contrasts. Velazquez prepared his canvases with a deep ruddy brown and worked directly from there, seldom using separate drawings and sketches. But what do we feel of that moody approach? Where is the immediacy and the intimacy? Perhaps what could have been is best glimpsed in his early painting, Old Woman Poaching Eggs (housed today at the National Galleries of Scotland.) Diego was around eighteen or nineteen when he created this exceptional artwork, a bodegon painting featuring a haunted old woman making eggs for a young man. Before Velazquez moved to the royal palace of Madrid, he was a young man of modest background in Seville. He began a six-year apprenticeship with Francisco Pacheco at the tender age of ten, training rigorously in the techniques of art like proportion and perspective. Pacheco literally wrote the textbook of the era with The Art of Painting, a posthumous treatise on technical and thematic prowess for Christian painters that remains a classic in Spanish. As with Italy especially and European art history in general, art was a rich tradition of Catholicism, offering an array of dramatic themes, an integral part of the spiritual and community life of the Spanish. Diego of course painted religious works as had his teacher and all of his predecessors and peers. But paintings of everyday objects and scenes rather than religious or mythological stories were becoming widespread around this time, and Diego’s practice included pictures of citizens at the table, bread, leeks, bottles, and eggs. Paintings of peasants and merchants and foodstuffs came to be known as bodegon paintings (sometimes called tavern paintings) in the Spanish tradition, which were still life paintings of culinary objects and food, often featuring people and scenarios as well. Still life and genre paintings were historically on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy of art. Painting peasants in everyday life, or objects without people, did not match the lofty ideals of myth and meaning in religious, royal, and historical narrative painting. But even so, they were exceptionally popular and beloved. Art was an integral part of spiritual and community life, a staple of the Catholic churches. But after that, many more people visited taverns than royal corridors or the hallowed halls of academia. Bodegones showed off the prowess of the artists, enticing those with some means to commission a painting- look at the details here, the transparency of the glass carafe of dark wine, the metallic glint of the brass mortar and pestle, the glaze inside the cazuela. And they spoke to the people with representation of familiar objects and events, reflecting their world. Diego’s egg painting is extraordinary. Eggs in art history held layers of symbolism from ancient times, including essential nourishment, life itself, and regeneration and renewal. The artist contrasts the new potential of life in the eggs and the youth and the wine with the elderly woman near the closing of her chapter. Velazquez honours her with a dignified posture, elevating her life as a subject worthy of attention. Cooking and sharing food is exalted. The depicted characters could be our own family. The dignity afforded here to peasants turns up again later during Diego’s time in court, when he gives humanity and depth to the faces of people with differences and disabilities, such as his portrayal of a court jester, Portrait of Sebastián de Morra. The Spanish court had the regrettable practice of employing people with dwarfism or deformities in a similar spirit to their later employment in circuses and zoos. Under Diego’s brush, however, they were fully human. The tenebrism that defines much of Diego’s work is already present in Old Woman Poaching Eggs, but here, the shadows are alive, flickering with intrigue and possibility and bustle. The painting balances mastery and mystery, while offering common, everyday people a place at the table. Lorette C. Luzajic  Las Meninas, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1957  The Exhibition at Galería de Arte Mexicano, 1940 “Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world," said Andre Breton once. Anyone who has set foot in this strange and wonderful land of cacti and volcanoes, of luchador and matadors, of masks and micheladas, fierce stone gods, dancing calavera skeletons, cemeteries strewn with bones, nuns, and churches teeming with colourful and gory polychrome, has experienced this firsthand. “Mexico, half-awake of its mythological past keeps evolving under the protection of Xochipilli, God of the flowers and lyric poetry, and Coatlicue, Goddess of the Earth and of the violent death… This power of conciliation of life and death is without a doubt the principal attractive that Mexico offers. This keeps an open record of endless sensations, from the most benign to the most insidious,” Breton famously wrote. The French artist and writer was the founder of the surrealist movement, but on a visit to Mexico in 1938, he saw that surrealism was much older and deeper than he had ever imagined, thriving naturally outside of the confines of his own definitions. He was not the only European surrealist to have this jarring experience. Salvador Dali, the great genius of surrealist painting, visited only once. "Under no circumstances will I return to Mexico, as I cannot stand being in a country that is more surreal than my paintings." During his visit, Breton struck up a friendship with the most important artist in Mexico, Diego Rivera, and therefore, also, with Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Diego was of course the master muralist painter, but he dabbled constantly with new influences, pumping out a few cubist works after his time in Paris and a visit to Picasso’s studio, and now painting some winding mandrake roots and adding a spider web and skull to a portrait, expecting centre stage for Breton’s planned exhibition of surrealist art in his city at the Galería de Arte Mexicano.  Symbolic Landscape, by Diego Rivera (Mexico) 1940 Far more important to Breton’s Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo in Mexico City in 1940, organized along with Wolfgang Paalen and César Moro, was the contribution of Frida Kahlo. Breton was very interested in Frida’s work, describing it as “a ribbon around a bomb.” He also arranged her Paris debut the year before the big Mexican show. Kahlo rejected the label of surrealist artist. “I never knew I was a Surrealist until André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was,” she said. In a letter to Mexican-Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, who was one of her lovers, she said, “They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Nonetheless, she busied herself with the creation of two important paintings for the exhibition, which would feature work by major artists like Dali (The Persistence of Memory, no less), Rene Magritte (the seminal Treachery of Images painting), Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso, and May Ray, and cement Mexico as a recognized hub of surreal art. Frida seldom painted large-scale works, possibly because her intermittent health and mobility issues meant she often worked from her bed or a wheelchair. But both of the paintings in the show were uncharacteristically massive. Clearly she was savvy about positioning herself confidently and memorably in a way that would make an impact next to the mostly-male and European bigwigs of the exhibition, despite her disdain for the surrealist label, and for the surrealists, too. (In that letter to Nickolas, Frida continued, “They sit for hours in the cafés warming their precious behinds… thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsense, and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true… You don’t have even the slightest idea of what kind of old cockroach Breton is, along with almost all those in the Surrealists group.”)  The Two Fridas, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1939 The first of Fridas paintings created for the exhibition would become her most famous piece. I was lucky enough to see The Two Fridas at its home in the Museo de Arte Moderne in Mexico City. The painting was a larger-than-life double self-portrait of twin Fridas sitting with her upright trademark form, holding hands, against a roiling dark and cloudy sky. Frida took inspiration from a work she saw at the Louvre in Paris that same year, The Two Sisters, 1843, by Théodore Chassériau. Both Fridas have their anatomical hearts exposed for all to see. One Frida is dressed in white, holding surgical forceps to try to stop her own bleeding. The other is dressed in a traditional Mexican blouse and skirt, and holding a tiny photograph of Diego. The timing of the exhibition overlapped for Frida and Diego with a time of great personal turmoil. Their marriage was on the rocks in 1938, following his affair with her sister and Frida’s affair with Leon Trotsky. They divorced in 1939, but it didn’t stick, and they married again December of 1940, later in the same year as Breton’s show. The Two Fridas boldly addressed the artist’s inner turmoil and how love and pain, and Diego himself, were so integral to her identity.  But it is the second painting, The Wounded Table, or La Mesa Herida, a painting few today have heard of and none or few living people have seen, that is arguably the most important work of Frida’s career. The painting showed at a handful of world exhibitions, and was last seen en route to Russia as a gift to the government of the Soviet Union. It was politely rejected and ostensibly shipped to a museum in Poland for a show. The trail stops there. Dealers and scholars have been looking for the painting ever since, and imposters have been trying to sell fake copies on the black market, but the whereabouts of the artwork remain to this day unknown. Frida probably created The Wounded Table, a sprawling, eight foot wide oil painting, with the intention that it would be the wow centrepiece of the exhibition among giants like Dali and Picasso and her ex-husband and again fiancé, Diego. The impressive work was not simply grand in size, but in complexity, theme, and skill. In The Wounded Table, we see Frida’s trademark weaving together of subjects of self-portraiture and Mexican folklore and mythology. Frida unabashed declaration against surrealism was, “I painted my own reality.” In this remarkable depiction of that reality, then, she seats herself audaciously and quite literally at the head of the table of martyrdom, where Christ sat at the last supper, with her wounds on display for all to see.  Replica of The Wounded Table, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1940 To the profoundly Catholic society of Mexico, this painting would have been deeply sacrilegious. Yet Frida often incorporated Catholic-tinged images, along with older and indigenous Mexican motifs and beliefs, into her artwork. Frida and Diego were both well-known as Marxist atheists who rejected the colonial institution of the Catholic church, but they were both sympathetic to the vast array of folkloric and religious imagery that meant a great deal to the Mexican masses. They considered Catholicism problematic, but also understood the power of its imagery as a visual language that meant a great deal to Mexicans. They collected and promoted pre-Columbian art and artifacts, much of it used as part of Breton’s exhibition on surrealism, and they also collected exvoto paintings, popular works of devotion by the people that were left in churches and at shrines in gratitude to saints. These folk paintings were an essential influence of Kahlo’s work and style. Frida could paint as intricately and realistically as Diego, but the vast majority of her works have a flat, almost-cartoonish affect to them, an aesthetic that is often called “primitive” that was a direct style choice in homage to this folk art tradition. Very early on in her trajectory as an artist, Frida had come across an exvoto that depicted a scene similar to her experience in a trolley accident. She was still a teenager, recently enrolled in medical school, when she was impaled by a steel rod during a streetcar crash, a kind of crucifixion that changed her destiny completely. The accident that injured her back and speared her uterus was the source of her lifelong debilitating pain and struggle with her legs and spine, and it robbed her of her hopes of having children. Frida altered the folk painting to make it personal, including adding her infamous bushy unibrow. In that year that she was bedridden in a body cast, she entertained herself by painting, ultimately taking her work to show to Diego Rivera. And the rest is history.  There was only one other known Last Supper painting by a female artist before the time of The Wounded Table, an extraordinary 25-foot wide work by a self-taught painter and Italian nun, Sister Plautilla Nelli, completed in 1568. But it was also lost, rotting away in a forgotten storage, until its recovery and restoration in the 1990s, so Frida, along with the rest of the world, was unaware of its existence. From this perspective, this makes Frida the first known female painter to use this religious motif to fuel her art, and the first to give women a place at the table. There would be numerous female and feminist renditions later on. Irish painter Nora Kelly recreated the classic scene by adding women as present at the supper. Mary Beth Edelson famously collaged the work from a multitude of underrated women artists. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Table installation was much different but referenced the historic theme in its conception. There are just a few photos of Frida’s painting in existence, and from these black and white pictures, reproductions have been made, with and without colour. She holds her head defiantly, sitting straight-backed as always, wearing a traditional Tehuana dress. Under the dress, her dripping blood seeps into the floorboards. The table itself has human legs and feet. At either side of the table are two children to her right, and a baby deer to her left. Frida loved her pet animals, including a deer named Gambizo. She also painted herself later as The Wounded Deer, summoning St. Sebastian with a body pierced by arrows and her own face on the deer. The children shown in The Wounded Table are her niece and nephew, the offspring of her sister Cristina, whom she loved, but by whom she was betrayed in the recent affair with Diego. Perhaps these children represent an even deeper wound than that betrayal: the pain of her own inability to have children. Frida desperately wanted to have Diego’s children, and by this time had already had three miscarriages or medical terminations because of the internal damage from the trolley crash. The strange figures that flank her blend Mexican folklore with her own mythology. The large paper mache figure of Judas towers over her the way Diego does, in every way, physically and symbolically. The Judas motif figures into Mexican folk practices, with annual burning rituals of Judas effigies. Frida is enmeshed with this figure of betrayal, enveloped and unable to escape him. There is an odd Nayarit figurine beside her too, a pre-Columbian sculpture collected by the artist couple. The skeleton we see is a popular Mexican motif. In this case, there is a hole in its pelvis exactly where Frida was impaled. Its foot is also amputated, precisely where Frida herself had several toes removed. The face of the skeleton is not the same as the cartoonish calavera emblems seen everywhere. Rather, she resembles Mictlancíhuatl, the Aztec Goddess of the Dead who died herself in childbirth. These characters, Judas, the skeleton, the Nayarit statue, and Frida, all appear in her work from the previous year, Four Inhabitants of Mexico, showing that their representation, herself included, mean Mexicanidad to her. The Kunstmuseum Gehrke-Remund, Baden-Baden, of Germany, which displays a replica of The Wounded Table, interprets this work parallel to all of her works: the profoundly personal is blended with Mexicanidad. Frida and Diego were both committed to this idea, that the Mexican identity of the people was the essence of their liberation and salvation, the truth that would set them free. The loss of aspects of Mexicanidad was the symbol of their dissolution and oppression. It's a powerful, magnificent painting. Frida wrote to Nickolas in late 1939 to say she was “working like hell” to have it ready for the big exhibition. The work was shown a few times and then in 1943, Frida decided she would donate it to the Soviet Union. This was a gesture of goodwill: Frida and Diego were staunch Marxists, but they had been supporters of anti-Stalinist deserter Leon Trotsky, harbouring him and his wife in the Casa Azul. While the couple stayed with them, Frida had a passionate affair with Trotsky, possibly as revenge for Diego sleeping with her sister Cristina. (Trotsky was assassinated several months after the surrealist exhibition.) Frida and Diego wanted to assert their commitment to communism in the aftermath of these complications. While Russia accepted the painting, they didn’t exhibit it. “It is necessary to bear in mind that we are interested in the works of the realist movement,” a Soviet official wrote in 1948. Kahlo’s work was “alien to the principles of Soviet Realist art…the possibility of displaying such artworks in the Soviet Union is excluded.” The painting was sent to be stored at the Pushkin Museum. Rivera convinced the Soviets to show the painting in an exhibition in Warsaw, Poland, the year after Frida’s death in 1947. This was the last time that the work was seen. Experts say it is unlikely it was returned to Russia, which didn’t really want it. But where it ended up is mystery. In 2020, a Spanish art dealer claimed he was in communication with an anonymous source in possession of the lost masterpiece. They were asking $45 million for the work, stating that the buyer could choose to work with historians to validate its origins after purchase. But art experts expressed concern about the painting’s substrate, suggesting that the original had been painted on wood panels, not canvas. The dealer maintains his conviction of its authenticity, saying that Frida used wood panels only for small paintings, and for her larger works, canvas. Canvas can be removed from its stretchers and more easily shipped to international destinations for display. It is true that the vast majority of her works were on canvas, and relatively few on wood. The Two Fridas, which was also painted for the surrealist exhibition, was on canvas. The Soviets dismissed Frida’s painting as, "Bourgeois, formalist and decadent." This leaves me scratching my head, wondering if I quite understand the meaning of these words correctly or need to revisit my definitions. Unconcerned with, or oblivious to, Frida’s feelings towards him, Breton himself stated that her work was “pure surreality, despite the fact that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of Surrealism.” The Wounded Table went on to exhibition at the Palace des Bellas Artes, a prestigious and, yes, bourgeois museum in Mexico City. Then it was sent to Russia, and on to Poland, and from there the trail goes cold. It might be said that Frida’s reality personified surrealism: the dominant voice inside us that is the unconscious, the one that ultimately speaks louder than the mundane and real. The Wounded Table is a self-portrait, after all. And Mexicanidad is, arguably, itself, surreal: ancient, mythic, contradictory, colourful, and theatrical, rippling with ancient spirits and the everlasting battle between the worlds of beauty and terror, between life and death. Lorette C. Luzaic   The Last Supper, by Plautilla Nelli (Italy) 1560s |
Lorette C. LuzajicLooking at art and learning about it has been my lifelong passion, and it fuels everything I do: art creation, publishing, writing, and teaching. Visit this blog for occasional essays and musings on visual art. Categories
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