I don’t really have the words to describe how excited Janie was about this exhibition, ever since the V&A pre-announced it about a year ago. Then, when we learnt that we could see a preview of the exhibition and take in a talk by the curators of the exhibition that day, we booked out the Friday afternoon and Janie got even more excited about it.
So perhaps in some ways the afternoon was destined to be an anti-climax for us.
Here is a link to the V&A resource on the exhibition.
We chose to book our timed tickets to view the exhibition after the talk. We got to the V&A early enough to have a lite bite there before the talk.
The new members’ cafe was heaving with people and a queue, so we went instead to the new public cafe at the new Exhibition Road entrance, which did not have a queue and did have outdoor seating available – a bonus on a glorious sunny June afternoon.
Then to the talk. Here is a link to the V&A resource for the talk. It was a bit folksy and disorganised, as V&A talks tend to be, but in this instance it seemed especially so. The curators, Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa seemed unfamiliar with the microphones, making it hard to hear them at times. Circe in particular moved around a lot, which is fine, but surely the V&A has clip-on mics for roving speakers – I’m sure I’ve seen those used there before.
Frida Kahlo is such an interesting character; the intersection between her life, her personal tragedies and her art work is a fascinating topic. It was intriguing to learn, for example that her photographer father, Guillermo Kahlo, took so many self portraits – he might be seen as the founding father of the modern selfie craze.
In the context of Frida’s work, though, given that so many of her pictures were self-portraits, it seemed an insightful point about her father and his work.
Yet much of the complexity and confusion between the truth about Frida Kahlo and the cultural icon she has become (to some extent through her own design, to some extent through cultural appropriation) was glossed over in the talk.
The central conceit of the exhibition is that it is displaying a large selection of Frida Kahlo’s personal artefacts, which were kept locked away at La Casa Azul for fifty years after her death. The reason for this lengthy secretion was not well explained by the curators. Diego Rivera’s will stipulated that they should remain unseen for 15 years after his death, but they were not uncovered for a further 30.
We tried but didn’t get a chance to ask that question during question time, whereas a Mexican woman with verbal diarrhoea was allowed to waffle on for five or ten minutes raising about half-a-dozen obscure points without pausing for breath or answers from the curators.
In truth, the Wikipedia entries for Frida Kahlo and for La Casa Azul explain matters better than the talk. I guess the truth of the matter is quite mundane. The cult of Frida Kahlo didn’t really get going until after the 2002 movie “Frida” – which Janie and I loved at the time btw. So although La Casa Azul became a museum immediately after Diego Rivera’s death, it was a very low key (and probably low budget) one until this century.
Never mind – then on to the exhibition itself.
At the entrance they hadn’t yet differentiated between those who had acquired timed entry tickets and members who had just turned up, so everyone had to join the same lengthy queue. Unaware of this, we walked past the queue and walked up to the ticket dude who we imagined to be our timed ticket dude.
“We have timed tickets”, I said.
“Certainly”, he said, scanning the tickets. We then realised that he was actually the entrance for the Ocean Liners exhibition, so how our tickets scanned for that goodness only knows.
He tried to get us in to the Frida Kahlo, but we were sent to the back of the queue, there to wonder whether our tickets would now scan for Frida Kahlo having been scanned for Ocean Liners.
Somehow we got in. Perhaps those scanners merely go “bleep” without really doing anything.
Above video (or click here) from FashionUnited TV.
It was pretty crowded in the exhibition and we found some of the preview members rather too pushy and elbowy for our taste. I’m not sure that members’ preview days at the V&A are such a good idea for us in future, unless we can find a less crazy-busy slot. In any case, the V&A should do something about the lighting of the Frida Kahlo show – some of the exhibits were hard to see and the explanatory rubric hard to read. Hopefully they put that right on the back of feedback from members like us.
Still, many of the exhibits are truly stunning and fascinating. Don’t let my rant about how disorganised the V&A can be put you off seeing the exhibition; it really is worth it. You get to see a lot of Frida Kahlo’s paintings as well as the artefacts and some superb films and photographs taken during her lifetime, providing a great deal of visual context to Frida Kahlo’s life and work.
But don’t ask about the leaflet that explains the artefacts and exhibits in each room, which we strove so hard to obtain but failed in the end to secure. Different members of staff told us that:
- the leaflets had all run out (on preview day?),
- they had simply run out of leaflets at the desk and they’d have some more for us shortly,
- a leaflet would be brought to us once we were inside the exhibition (some hope, despite chasing),
- the leaflets weren’t ready yet but would be available in a few days’ time,
- there wasn’t to be a leaflet for this exhibition at all…
…I think staff are “trained” (to the extent that the word “training” applies in that place) to make up whatever comes into their heads at the time and say it kindly but with an authoritative tone to mollify the unsuspecting punter.
No doubt Rebecca, who promised to get back to us by e-mail with a definitive answer (and hopefully a copy of the leaflet) will come up trumps for us, if trumps there are to be had. While we were engaging Rebecca in this task, one of the elbowy blue-rinse members elbowed me away from the corner of the members information desk (upon which I was merely leaning to support my aching back) without a please or a thank you. I don’t approve of manspreading, but femshoving of that kind is even more overtly aggressive.
It’s a shame, really, but by the end we couldn’t wait to get out of the V&A that day. Yes, the Frida Kahlo is a fascinating exhibition, but the place seemed so disorganised and we just felt the V&A could have done better with this one.
