OLD NEWS

TODAY'S ARTIST WITHOUT A KNOWN BIRTHDAY: PISANELLO,
painter & medallist from Pisa.
Here, his fab profile portrait
of Leonello d'Este, Marquis of Ferrara, 1442.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ps9s4y6>
Medal of Leonello d'Este, by Pisanello .
Did I mention he was also a medallist?
<https://tinyurl.com/37sm58tp>
Pisanello's nature studies can be so engaging.
I'm liking this dormouse a lot. As did he.
<https://tinyurl.com/4e4jm4wc>
Saint Eustace, excellently clad
for a day's hunting,
encounters a talking stag
with crucifix between its antlers.
Miracle!
Only one of his dogs
growls at this apparition,
which seems unlikely.
<https://tinyurl.com/mu6azarp>
The dogs of Saint Eustace.
A worthy bunch,
even if interrupted in their earnest pursuit.
<https://tinyurl.com/yeetjvc2>
Hare tries to make a break for it
while others are distracted by unfolding miracle.
Smart!
<https://tinyurl.com/2of4m94k>
Hooded falcon on a falconer's glove,
<https://tinyurl.com/4c33p72n>
Birds.
Not on same page as the falcon!
But also drawn by Pisanello.
<https://tinyurl.com/55efse5h>
Luxuria, w/ A+ hair styling
and also a rabbit.
Drawn in 1426
(believe it or not)
<https://tinyurl.com/4b38jzjx>
Metalpoint drawing of an African man,
early/mid 15th century, by Pisanello.
<https://tinyurl.com/ykbymcsf>
Study in concentration:
a child, drawn by Pisanello.
<https://tinyurl.com/3cse4dmz>
Ginevra d'Este, among the flowers & butterflies, 1440.
Back when feminine beauty included a HIGH forehead.
<https://tinyurl.com/4wm29k76>
Man in profile,
rather beautifully painted
by Pisanello in 1433.
<https://tinyurl.com/3e67szsr>
Holy Roman Emperor
Sigismund of Luxembourg in 1433,
baring his teeth and looking very fierce
in his portrait by Pisanello.
<https://tinyurl.com/3hsw9zd8>
Cecilia Gonzaga in 1447,
also looking very fine
and also by Pisanello,
because he was also a medallist.
<https://tinyurl.com/4fv53sfn>
Madonna appearing to Saints Anthony & George,
although they are not paying a lot of attention to this miracle.
George's dashing hat may prevent him from seeing it!
By Pisanello, 1445.
<https://tinyurl.com/va8eapbb>
Ready to be a vision,
although bored with the wait:
enthroned Madonna by Pisanello,
<https://tinyurl.com/4wv5pwbw>
Three studies of dogs hunting hares
yet another dog-loving artist.
Not quite as sympathetic to hares.
<https://tinyurl.com/mw9uh4x9>
Dog, now with muzzle & collar.
<https://tinyurl.com/44fhh8ny>
Three studies of a titmouse or a bearded reedling
<https://tinyurl.com/5yx8f4ch>
Heads of 3 men,
one wearing fab collapsible spectacles.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdhy7mnc>
Saying farewell to rescued princess at Trebizond:
Saint George, and (natch) his dogs.
Fresco from church of Sant'Anastasia, Verona,
<https://tinyurl.com/5xak4thp> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

>>>

ARTIST — OR BRAND? HOW FRIDA KAHLO’S FAMILY LOST CONTROL
<https://tinyurl.com/myke6jdf>
As a child growing up in Mexico in the Sixties, hardly anybody recognised Cristina Kahlo’s surname. “They would say, ‘Calvo?’ And I’d say, ‘No, no: Kahlo. K-A-H-L-O.’ I had to spell out my surname.”
That changed in 1983 with the publication of Hayden Herrera’s Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. “People started asking me, ‘Are you linked to Frida Kahlo?’” recalls Cristina, 65, a photographer and the artist’s great-niece. “Especially women, feminists, started to identify with this Mexican woman.” Now her image is so well known that sometimes when Cristina talks to journalists they “come dressed like Frida Kahlo” or, she says, “they are waiting for me to come dressed like Frida Kahlo”.
Frida, who died in 1954, is the most famous female artist in the canon. Last November her painting El sueño (La cama), aka The Dream (The Bed), sold for £41.8 million at auction at Sotheby’s in New York, far exceeding the previous record for the most expensive work by a woman (£28.8 million for Georgia O’Keefe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 in 2014). Her influence extends far beyond the art gallery, however. In 2003 Salma Hayek became the first Mexican woman to be nominated for the best actress Oscar, receiving the nod for her portrayal of the artist in Frida, a film based on Herrera’s book. In the Nineties Madonna developed an obsession with Frida, dressing like her before starting to collect her work. For the Mexico City leg of her Celebration tour in 2024 the pop star brought Hayek out on stage, dressed as the artist. “It’s really madness,” says Herrera, 85, with a baffled laugh. “I’m still very astonished at her fame.”
<https://tinyurl.com/ywamz5mv>
Today Kahlo’s beautiful, angular, monobrowed face is ubiquitous, not only in galleries across the world but on every possible permutation of tat — there are Frida watches (£96), scented candles (£44) and branded tequila, trainers from Vans, clothes from the Chinese fast-fashion brand Shein, cushions and phone holders (£17) decorated with “FridaMojis”.
Behind much of this lies the Frida Kahlo Corporation (FKC). Last month this organisation unveiled a Frida-themed luxury apartment block in Miami. Prices range from $500,000 to $1.6 million. “The design ethos at Frida Kahlo Wynwood Residences draws inspiration from Frida’s unmistakable strength and spirit, shaping spaces that feel both expressive and intentional,” the website says. “Luminous interiors, balanced by moments of contrast, create a refined interplay of light throughout the residences, revealing her influence in subtle, expressive ways.” There are even Frida sanitary pads. And a controversial Barbie, of course, of which more later. And don’t forget the Frida bracelet Theresa May wore in 2017 when she was prime minister.
This year a Tate Modern exhibition, Frida: The Making of an Icon, will display her art, of course — though it will include none of the pieces owned by Madonna as they were not available — as well as exploring Fridamania and her “transformation into a global brand”. More than 200 objects, including the tequila bottles and sanitary pads, will be on display. This section will lead straight into the gift shop.
Which means even more merchandise. In 2005, during its last Kahlo retrospective, the gallery made £737,000 in gift shop sales. The Tate told me it is “quite confident” it can exceed that number this time. But what would the artist herself make of all this stuff? Is there a limit to how much an artist should be commercialised? And who is benefiting from it?
Frida was one of the photographer Guillermo Kahlo’s six daughters — the third of the four from his second marriage. Only one of them became a mother: Frida’s younger sister Cristina, who had two children, Isolda and Antonio. Antonio’s daughter Cristina never met the artist but tells me on a video call from Mexico City that her father told her “loving” anecdotes about his aunt Frida “that made me laugh a lot”.
<https://tinyurl.com/4btusd4y>
“She had a very strong personality,” she says. “My father would often tell me a story of when they went to the cinema in Mexico City. Frida was dressed in her Tehuana costume you see in photos. That wasn’t common in Mexico City — it’s a costume used in Oaxaca on festive days. They were in the queue to buy the cinema tickets and a woman and her friend were making fun of her. Frida went up to the woman, slapped her and said: ‘Whatever you have to tell me, say it to my face.’”
Antonio and Isolda fell out at some point after their mother died, and Cristina and her brother and sister have no relationship with their cousins. They also have no association with the FKC, a company set up in 2004 by Isolda and her daughter, Maria Cristina Romeo Pinedo, in association with a Venezuelan businessman, Carlos Dorado, which has since registered dozens of trademarks and turned Kahlo into a global brand.
Visit the FKC website and you will be directed to its partnership with Amazon, which has a whole section dedicated to Frida merchandise, including the FridaMoji range, phone cases (£24) and a new collection of T-shirts for International Women’s Day with the caption “I’m my own muse” (£26).
Cristina has mixed feelings about these developments. “It’s been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, commercialisation means Frida Kahlo’s image is better known. But it’s better known in the wrong light sometimes because if you don’t know Frida Kahlo’s story then you are buying a figure you really don’t know anything about. It’s an image, nothing more. I think this in some way distorts what she really was: a great artist… You have to study her by looking at her art.” When you put someone’s face on objects there is “an ethical question”, Cristina says. “[Frida] can’t give her opinion and say, ‘I like this, I don’t like that.’”
I contacted the FKC to talk about the brand but no one was available for comment.
A prominent bone of contention has been the Frida Kahlo Barbie ($30), a collaboration between Mattel and the FKC that was launched in 2018 to uproar from fans who said it went against the artist’s feminist and leftist principles — she was Trotsky’s lover, after all. Plus, the Barbie didn’t look like her. It didn’t even have a monobrow. “She wouldn’t have liked it at all,” Cristina says.
<https://tinyurl.com/3p8pwxrv>
It also marked the beginning of internal trouble in the FKC as the family members on the board objected to the doll’s appearance and sued the FKC. Sales in Mexico were banned after a court granted an injunction. But the FKC countersued, claiming Maria “sought to attack the validity of FKC’s ownership of ‘Frida Kahlo’ related trademarks and to misappropriate such trademarks”. In 2021 Mexico’s Superior Court of Justice ruled in favour of the FKC, allowing Mattel to sell their Barbies.
Ultimately the family has lost control of the brand, because Dorado owns 51 per cent of the FKC. “What I find very sad about all this is that in the end the name Frida Kahlo as a brand, as a trademark, no longer belongs either to the family — or to Mexico,” Cristina says.
The rules around which content can and cannot be used are complicated. Jon Sharples, a lawyer at Howard Kennedy who specialises in art disputes, says that the copyright for Kahlo’s artwork lapsed in the UK in 1975, 20 years after her death, because when she was alive that was the length of copyright in Mexico (the duration of copyright in Mexican law has since been extended to 100 years but does not apply retrospectively). But if you want to use her name or likeness, the FKC has a number of trademarks registered in the UK and many more in the US, including some of her paintings.
<https://tinyurl.com/25yvuefw>
Sharples believes “selling Frida tat is pretty low-risk in the UK because it’s so ubiquitous as a kind of fan art that consumers are unlikely to be misled into believing that it has been licensed or otherwise endorsed by the estate”. Search “Frida Kahlo” on Etsy and you’ll find thousands upon thousands of items. The FKC filed two lawsuits against Amazon merchants in an Illinois district court in 2024, alleging that they were selling products in an unauthorised capacity, and demanding all associated profits or $2 million for each trademark infringement, but it does not appear from public records that FKC has ever achieved a positive court judgment outside Mexico.
Her biographer, Herrera, believes Frida wouldn’t have minded the merch. “I think she would have loved it because a lot of her life was about getting attention,” she says. “She would have probably used the word ‘cursi’, which is a Spanish word for ‘corny’. She would have thought some of them are pretty hackneyed and silly but she would have been amused. She had a great, great sense of humour.”
There are limits. “Maybe the Barbie doll was a bit too much,” she adds. I also tell her about the Amazon partnership. “That’s a bit disgusting,” she says. “She was very leftist. She wouldn’t have approved of becoming a corporation and making a lot of money. She doesn’t need Amazon to be any more famous.”
Herrera first heard about Frida in 1973 when her mother’s friend, who was an editor at Artforum, told her she should go to see an exhibition in Mexico City. “I was just blown away by seeing the actual painting, including The Two Fridas, which is probably the only existing large painting. I realised there was something there and decided to write my dissertation for a PhD about Frida Kahlo.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3mhvwwsv>
She spent a lot of time in Mexico interviewing people who knew Frida and who were surprised that this “gringa” wanted to write about her. At the time Frida was still mainly known as “Diego [Rivera’s] fabulous wife. And a lot of people thought her paintings were pretty odd.” Isolda even tried to sell her a painting of her mother, Cristina, by Frida but Herrera didn’t go for it. “She wanted $2,000 and I didn’t really like the portrait very much… I regret it.”
Herrera’s book became a word-of-mouth sensation in New York feminist circles and then blew up, selling in 25 different countries. It changed Herrera’s life financially and continues to provide her with a “little income”. She was also paid $100,000 for the Frida film rights. Why does she think the artist had and continues to have such an appeal?
“The central thing is her expression of pain and her need to communicate it,” she says. “Everybody has pain, and they’re very attracted to knowing about other people’s pain. She was also incredibly strong. A lot of sick people, depressed people, have taken Frida Kahlo as a talisman.”
A talisman available in the form of extraordinary million-dollar artworks and… sanitary pads.
_Blanca Schofield_TimesUK

>>>

THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/yc7caz4m> _LisaAnneAuerbach

>>>

NEW BIOGRAPHY OF LOUISE BOURGEOIS
<https://tinyurl.com/38bm3rh8>
A famous portrait of the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) shows her outside her home in New York City, wearing one of her latex sculptures, Avenza (1968-69), named after a village in Tuscany. Wrapped in a cocoon of breast-like half-cups, she looks like a rumpled mother goddess who has been accidentally teleported to Chelsea in New York: the Ephesian Artemis, for example, usually portrayed with similar appendages covering her upper torso. Strikingly, Bourgeois, her hair pulled back, looks away from the camera, as if hoping to distance herself from her own daring: a schoolmarm pushed to play the role of iconoclast. In her richly detailed Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois, wonderfully translated from the French by Lauren Elkin, the art historian and curator Marie-Laure Bernadac suggests that such ambivalence is in fact characteristic of her subject’s work as a whole.
Born in Paris on Christmas Day three years before the outbreak of the First World War, Bourgeois spent a lifetime revisiting the traumas of her childhood. Her father Louis, the owner of a gallery of fine tapestries, came back from war an enthusiastic philanderer and incorrigible bully. For years he carried on an affair with his children’s British nanny. Monsieur Bourgeois’s favourite after-dinner entertainment was to cut the peel of an orange into the shape of a girl, leaving the fruit’s pith in place to simulate a penis. “Louise has nothing there,” he exclaimed, according to Bernadac.
Avenging her father
Little did Louis know that his daughter would go on to wield the knife herself, but in a far grander fashion, creating a complex gallery of sexually ambiguous figures and installations that were eventually shown all over the world. If Louise Bourgeois thus avenged herself on her father, she celebrated her beloved mother Joséphine, a weaver and seamstress who died when Louise was 20, in a series of gigantic spider sculptures such as Maman (1999, in the collection of the Tate).
As Bernadac reports, it was Fernand Léger (1881-1955) who encouraged his student to try her hand at sculpture. Dangling a piece of wood before her, he said: “Louise, you are not a painter, but a sculptor.” But was she? Over her remarkable, six-decade career, Bourgeois adamantly refused to be defined by neat categories, denying that she was a feminist, even though her work, with its focus on birth, pain, and motherhood, spoke so plainly to the experiences of women. Starting with totem-like wooden human figures, she shifted, as her designs grew more abstract, to pliable latex. She then experimented with marble, and finally, as the scale of her works expanded, used anything she could get: metal, rubber, fabric, glass and found objects. Bourgeois’s first major retrospective came in 1982, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, when she was already 70 years old.TODAY'S ARTIST WITHOUT A KNOWN BIRTHDAY: PISANELLO,
painter & medallist from Pisa.
Here, his fab profile portrait
of Leonello d'Este, Marquis of Ferrara, 1442.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ps9s4y6>
Medal of Leonello d'Este, by Pisanello .
Did I mention he was also a medallist?
<https://tinyurl.com/37sm58tp>
Pisanello's nature studies can be so engaging.
I'm liking this dormouse a lot. As did he.
<https://tinyurl.com/4e4jm4wc>
Saint Eustace, excellently clad
for a day's hunting,
encounters a talking stag
with crucifix between its antlers.
Miracle!
Only one of his dogs
growls at this apparition,
which seems unlikely.
<https://tinyurl.com/mu6azarp>
The dogs of Saint Eustace.
A worthy bunch,
even if interrupted in their earnest pursuit.
<https://tinyurl.com/yeetjvc2>
Hare tries to make a break for it
while others are distracted by unfolding miracle.
Smart!
<https://tinyurl.com/2of4m94k>
Hooded falcon on a falconer's glove,
<https://tinyurl.com/4c33p72n>
Birds.
Not on same page as the falcon!
But also drawn by Pisanello.
<https://tinyurl.com/55efse5h>
Luxuria, w/ A+ hair styling
and also a rabbit.
Drawn in 1426
(believe it or not)
<https://tinyurl.com/4b38jzjx>
Metalpoint drawing of an African man,
early/mid 15th century, by Pisanello.
<https://tinyurl.com/ykbymcsf>
Study in concentration:
a child, drawn by Pisanello.
<https://tinyurl.com/3cse4dmz>
Ginevra d'Este, among the flowers & butterflies, 1440.
Back when feminine beauty included a HIGH forehead.
<https://tinyurl.com/4wm29k76>
Man in profile,
rather beautifully painted
by Pisanello in 1433.
<https://tinyurl.com/3e67szsr>
Holy Roman Emperor
Sigismund of Luxembourg in 1433,
baring his teeth and looking very fierce
in his portrait by Pisanello.
<https://tinyurl.com/3hsw9zd8>
Cecilia Gonzaga in 1447,
also looking very fine
and also by Pisanello,
because he was also a medallist.
<https://tinyurl.com/4fv53sfn>
Madonna appearing to Saints Anthony & George,
although they are not paying a lot of attention to this miracle.
George's dashing hat may prevent him from seeing it!
By Pisanello, 1445.
<https://tinyurl.com/va8eapbb>
Ready to be a vision,
although bored with the wait:
enthroned Madonna by Pisanello,
<https://tinyurl.com/4wv5pwbw>
Three studies of dogs hunting hares
yet another dog-loving artist.
Not quite as sympathetic to hares.
<https://tinyurl.com/mw9uh4x9>
Dog, now with muzzle & collar.
<https://tinyurl.com/44fhh8ny>
Three studies of a titmouse or a bearded reedling
<https://tinyurl.com/5yx8f4ch>
Heads of 3 men,
one wearing fab collapsible spectacles.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdhy7mnc>
Saying farewell to rescued princess at Trebizond:
Saint George, and (natch) his dogs.
Fresco from church of Sant'Anastasia, Verona,
<https://tinyurl.com/5xak4thp> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

>>>

ARTIST — OR BRAND? HOW FRIDA KAHLO’S FAMILY LOST CONTROL
<https://tinyurl.com/myke6jdf>
As a child growing up in Mexico in the Sixties, hardly anybody recognised Cristina Kahlo’s surname. “They would say, ‘Calvo?’ And I’d say, ‘No, no: Kahlo. K-A-H-L-O.’ I had to spell out my surname.”
That changed in 1983 with the publication of Hayden Herrera’s Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. “People started asking me, ‘Are you linked to Frida Kahlo?’” recalls Cristina, 65, a photographer and the artist’s great-niece. “Especially women, feminists, started to identify with this Mexican woman.” Now her image is so well known that sometimes when Cristina talks to journalists they “come dressed like Frida Kahlo” or, she says, “they are waiting for me to come dressed like Frida Kahlo”.
Frida, who died in 1954, is the most famous female artist in the canon. Last November her painting El sueño (La cama), aka The Dream (The Bed), sold for £41.8 million at auction at Sotheby’s in New York, far exceeding the previous record for the most expensive work by a woman (£28.8 million for Georgia O’Keefe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 in 2014). Her influence extends far beyond the art gallery, however. In 2003 Salma Hayek became the first Mexican woman to be nominated for the best actress Oscar, receiving the nod for her portrayal of the artist in Frida, a film based on Herrera’s book. In the Nineties Madonna developed an obsession with Frida, dressing like her before starting to collect her work. For the Mexico City leg of her Celebration tour in 2024 the pop star brought Hayek out on stage, dressed as the artist. “It’s really madness,” says Herrera, 85, with a baffled laugh. “I’m still very astonished at her fame.”
<https://tinyurl.com/ywamz5mv>
Today Kahlo’s beautiful, angular, monobrowed face is ubiquitous, not only in galleries across the world but on every possible permutation of tat — there are Frida watches (£96), scented candles (£44) and branded tequila, trainers from Vans, clothes from the Chinese fast-fashion brand Shein, cushions and phone holders (£17) decorated with “FridaMojis”.
Behind much of this lies the Frida Kahlo Corporation (FKC). Last month this organisation unveiled a Frida-themed luxury apartment block in Miami. Prices range from $500,000 to $1.6 million. “The design ethos at Frida Kahlo Wynwood Residences draws inspiration from Frida’s unmistakable strength and spirit, shaping spaces that feel both expressive and intentional,” the website says. “Luminous interiors, balanced by moments of contrast, create a refined interplay of light throughout the residences, revealing her influence in subtle, expressive ways.” There are even Frida sanitary pads. And a controversial Barbie, of course, of which more later. And don’t forget the Frida bracelet Theresa May wore in 2017 when she was prime minister.
This year a Tate Modern exhibition, Frida: The Making of an Icon, will display her art, of course — though it will include none of the pieces owned by Madonna as they were not available — as well as exploring Fridamania and her “transformation into a global brand”. More than 200 objects, including the tequila bottles and sanitary pads, will be on display. This section will lead straight into the gift shop.
Which means even more merchandise. In 2005, during its last Kahlo retrospective, the gallery made £737,000 in gift shop sales. The Tate told me it is “quite confident” it can exceed that number this time. But what would the artist herself make of all this stuff? Is there a limit to how much an artist should be commercialised? And who is benefiting from it?
Frida was one of the photographer Guillermo Kahlo’s six daughters — the third of the four from his second marriage. Only one of them became a mother: Frida’s younger sister Cristina, who had two children, Isolda and Antonio. Antonio’s daughter Cristina never met the artist but tells me on a video call from Mexico City that her father told her “loving” anecdotes about his aunt Frida “that made me laugh a lot”.
<https://tinyurl.com/4btusd4y>
“She had a very strong personality,” she says. “My father would often tell me a story of when they went to the cinema in Mexico City. Frida was dressed in her Tehuana costume you see in photos. That wasn’t common in Mexico City — it’s a costume used in Oaxaca on festive days. They were in the queue to buy the cinema tickets and a woman and her friend were making fun of her. Frida went up to the woman, slapped her and said: ‘Whatever you have to tell me, say it to my face.’”
Antonio and Isolda fell out at some point after their mother died, and Cristina and her brother and sister have no relationship with their cousins. They also have no association with the FKC, a company set up in 2004 by Isolda and her daughter, Maria Cristina Romeo Pinedo, in association with a Venezuelan businessman, Carlos Dorado, which has since registered dozens of trademarks and turned Kahlo into a global brand.
Visit the FKC website and you will be directed to its partnership with Amazon, which has a whole section dedicated to Frida merchandise, including the FridaMoji range, phone cases (£24) and a new collection of T-shirts for International Women’s Day with the caption “I’m my own muse” (£26).
Cristina has mixed feelings about these developments. “It’s been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, commercialisation means Frida Kahlo’s image is better known. But it’s better known in the wrong light sometimes because if you don’t know Frida Kahlo’s story then you are buying a figure you really don’t know anything about. It’s an image, nothing more. I think this in some way distorts what she really was: a great artist… You have to study her by looking at her art.” When you put someone’s face on objects there is “an ethical question”, Cristina says. “[Frida] can’t give her opinion and say, ‘I like this, I don’t like that.’”
I contacted the FKC to talk about the brand but no one was available for comment.
A prominent bone of contention has been the Frida Kahlo Barbie ($30), a collaboration between Mattel and the FKC that was launched in 2018 to uproar from fans who said it went against the artist’s feminist and leftist principles — she was Trotsky’s lover, after all. Plus, the Barbie didn’t look like her. It didn’t even have a monobrow. “She wouldn’t have liked it at all,” Cristina says.
<https://tinyurl.com/3p8pwxrv>
It also marked the beginning of internal trouble in the FKC as the family members on the board objected to the doll’s appearance and sued the FKC. Sales in Mexico were banned after a court granted an injunction. But the FKC countersued, claiming Maria “sought to attack the validity of FKC’s ownership of ‘Frida Kahlo’ related trademarks and to misappropriate such trademarks”. In 2021 Mexico’s Superior Court of Justice ruled in favour of the FKC, allowing Mattel to sell their Barbies.
Ultimately the family has lost control of the brand, because Dorado owns 51 per cent of the FKC. “What I find very sad about all this is that in the end the name Frida Kahlo as a brand, as a trademark, no longer belongs either to the family — or to Mexico,” Cristina says.
The rules around which content can and cannot be used are complicated. Jon Sharples, a lawyer at Howard Kennedy who specialises in art disputes, says that the copyright for Kahlo’s artwork lapsed in the UK in 1975, 20 years after her death, because when she was alive that was the length of copyright in Mexico (the duration of copyright in Mexican law has since been extended to 100 years but does not apply retrospectively). But if you want to use her name or likeness, the FKC has a number of trademarks registered in the UK and many more in the US, including some of her paintings.
<https://tinyurl.com/25yvuefw>
Sharples believes “selling Frida tat is pretty low-risk in the UK because it’s so ubiquitous as a kind of fan art that consumers are unlikely to be misled into believing that it has been licensed or otherwise endorsed by the estate”. Search “Frida Kahlo” on Etsy and you’ll find thousands upon thousands of items. The FKC filed two lawsuits against Amazon merchants in an Illinois district court in 2024, alleging that they were selling products in an unauthorised capacity, and demanding all associated profits or $2 million for each trademark infringement, but it does not appear from public records that FKC has ever achieved a positive court judgment outside Mexico.
Her biographer, Herrera, believes Frida wouldn’t have minded the merch. “I think she would have loved it because a lot of her life was about getting attention,” she says. “She would have probably used the word ‘cursi’, which is a Spanish word for ‘corny’. She would have thought some of them are pretty hackneyed and silly but she would have been amused. She had a great, great sense of humour.”
There are limits. “Maybe the Barbie doll was a bit too much,” she adds. I also tell her about the Amazon partnership. “That’s a bit disgusting,” she says. “She was very leftist. She wouldn’t have approved of becoming a corporation and making a lot of money. She doesn’t need Amazon to be any more famous.”
Herrera first heard about Frida in 1973 when her mother’s friend, who was an editor at Artforum, told her she should go to see an exhibition in Mexico City. “I was just blown away by seeing the actual painting, including The Two Fridas, which is probably the only existing large painting. I realised there was something there and decided to write my dissertation for a PhD about Frida Kahlo.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3mhvwwsv>
She spent a lot of time in Mexico interviewing people who knew Frida and who were surprised that this “gringa” wanted to write about her. At the time Frida was still mainly known as “Diego [Rivera’s] fabulous wife. And a lot of people thought her paintings were pretty odd.” Isolda even tried to sell her a painting of her mother, Cristina, by Frida but Herrera didn’t go for it. “She wanted $2,000 and I didn’t really like the portrait very much… I regret it.”
Herrera’s book became a word-of-mouth sensation in New York feminist circles and then blew up, selling in 25 different countries. It changed Herrera’s life financially and continues to provide her with a “little income”. She was also paid $100,000 for the Frida film rights. Why does she think the artist had and continues to have such an appeal?
“The central thing is her expression of pain and her need to communicate it,” she says. “Everybody has pain, and they’re very attracted to knowing about other people’s pain. She was also incredibly strong. A lot of sick people, depressed people, have taken Frida Kahlo as a talisman.”
A talisman available in the form of extraordinary million-dollar artworks and… sanitary pads.
_Blanca Schofield_TimesUK

>>>

THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/yc7caz4m> _LisaAnneAuerbach

>>>

NEW BIOGRAPHY OF LOUISE BOURGEOIS
<https://tinyurl.com/38bm3rh8>
A famous portrait of the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) shows her outside her home in New York City, wearing one of her latex sculptures, Avenza (1968-69), named after a village in Tuscany. Wrapped in a cocoon of breast-like half-cups, she looks like a rumpled mother goddess who has been accidentally teleported to Chelsea in New York: the Ephesian Artemis, for example, usually portrayed with similar appendages covering her upper torso. Strikingly, Bourgeois, her hair pulled back, looks away from the camera, as if hoping to distance herself from her own daring: a schoolmarm pushed to play the role of iconoclast. In her richly detailed Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois, wonderfully translated from the French by Lauren Elkin, the art historian and curator Marie-Laure Bernadac suggests that such ambivalence is in fact characteristic of her subject’s work as a whole.
Born in Paris on Christmas Day three years before the outbreak of the First World War, Bourgeois spent a lifetime revisiting the traumas of her childhood. Her father Louis, the owner of a gallery of fine tapestries, came back from war an enthusiastic philanderer and incorrigible bully. For years he carried on an affair with his children’s British nanny. Monsieur Bourgeois’s favourite after-dinner entertainment was to cut the peel of an orange into the shape of a girl, leaving the fruit’s pith in place to simulate a penis. “Louise has nothing there,” he exclaimed, according to Bernadac.
Avenging her father
Little did Louis know that his daughter would go on to wield the knife herself, but in a far grander fashion, creating a complex gallery of sexually ambiguous figures and installations that were eventually shown all over the world. If Louise Bourgeois thus avenged herself on her father, she celebrated her beloved mother Joséphine, a weaver and seamstress who died when Louise was 20, in a series of gigantic spider sculptures such as Maman (1999, in the collection of the Tate).
As Bernadac reports, it was Fernand Léger (1881-1955) who encouraged his student to try her hand at sculpture. Dangling a piece of wood before her, he said: “Louise, you are not a painter, but a sculptor.” But was she? Over her remarkable, six-decade career, Bourgeois adamantly refused to be defined by neat categories, denying that she was a feminist, even though her work, with its focus on birth, pain, and motherhood, spoke so plainly to the experiences of women. Starting with totem-like wooden human figures, she shifted, as her designs grew more abstract, to pliable latex. She then experimented with marble, and finally, as the scale of her works expanded, used anything she could get: metal, rubber, fabric, glass and found objects. Bourgeois’s first major retrospective came in 1982, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, when she was already 70 years old.
Concealment
Bourgeois had begun making her signature “lairs”, or nests, in the 1960s, works that both seemed to hide and hint at some deeply personal secret. In The Quartered One (1964-65), for example, she created a suspended bronze sculpture that looks like an animal’s skinned carcass with a hollowed-out interior, a deliberate blurring of inside and outside. For Bourgeois, such “cells”, as she would later call them, were places of both imprisonment and safety. In Precious Liquids (1992, Centre Pompidou), she recycled a decommissioned New York water tower, placed an old bed inside, covered with spilled liquid, and hung clusters of glass containers over it, alluding to the fluids that cascade through the human body. On the wall, framed at the bottom by two large wooden globes (a giant’s testicles?), she placed a huge man’s coat, with a girl’s smaller white nightshirt tucked into it carrying the inscription “Merci/Mercy”. Was this the aftermath of a rape? A strange posthumous message to her dead father? In her 1974 tableau The Destruction of the Father (Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland), Bourgeois was less circumspect: here the father appears as dinner food, a garishly lit assemblage of organs spread out on a table, surrounded by a multitude of latex-covered bumps descending from the ceiling and planted around it.
<https://tinyurl.com/4t5eb2jj>
Family life was a “cell” to Bourgeois, a space both enchanted and accursed, but one impossible to avoid. Emerging from the burdens of her upbringing, she married the art historian and museum director Robert Goldwater and, in 1938, followed him to New York. She adopted a son and had two sons of her own. Struggling in her marriage, she sought fulfilment in affairs but stayed with Goldwater, sending him regular love letters until his death in 1973. A graphomaniac and chronic insomniac, Bourgeois left copious journal notes, the idiosyncratic transcripts of a life lived with blazing intensity.
Bernadac, whose resumé includes leadership positions at the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou, is an internationally well-regarded specialist on Bourgeois. But her expertise, reflected in the numerous quotations from Bourgeois’s unpublished journals, never gets in the way of a richly textured story she tells with warmth and tenderness. Quite appropriately, following in the footsteps of Bourgeois’s mother, she calls herself a weaver.
Hell and back
But Bernadac also warns us not to read Bourgeois’s compositions as simple transcripts of the artist’s inner turmoil. Bourgeois’s art is less a product of the psychoanalytic treatment she sought than an extended comment on psychoanalysis itself, on the stories—simultaneously disturbing and ridiculous—it encourages us to tell about ourselves: “I have been to hell and back,” reads the tongue-in-cheek message on a series of handkerchiefs Bourgeois embroidered in 1996. “And let me tell you, it was wonderful.”
Knife-Woman is the fullest account to date of the life of one of the most influential artists of the last century. But it also delivers, as the best biographies do, a coherent and consistently stimulating interpretation of the wellsprings of Bourgeois’s art. In an inspired aside, Bernadac offers one of the most useful keys I have seen to understanding Louise Bourgeois: she likens her to Baubo, the servant of Demeter. Revered as the Ancient Greek goddess of agriculture and the seasons, Demeter was inconsolable when her daughter Persephone was abducted. Hoping to cheer her up, Baubo did something crude but immediately effective: she lifted her skirt. Nakedness, as Louise Bourgeois also knew, is funny. Demeter laughed. And with that, the world was saved from perennial winter. _Christoph Irmscher_ArtNewspaper

>>>

EDGAR DEGAS, AT THE STABLES, HORSE AND DOG, 1861-6
<https://tinyurl.com/5xma6jsj>
Tatiana Gorshunova, Dream about a horse, 2012
<https://tinyurl.com/46k39xwj>
Paul Gauguin - The White Horse - 1893
<https://tinyurl.com/2hdvtr9t>
----
<https://tinyurl.com/2va8ksjb>
Franz Marc, Little Blue Horse, 1912
<https://tinyurl.com/2s4dnk6y>
Marc Chagall, The Red Horse, 1938-1944
<https://tinyurl.com/4cvwmxa2>
Franz Marc, Red horse with black figures, 1913
<https://tinyurl.com/2sfj7tzh>
Alex Colville, Horse and Train, 1954
<https://tinyurl.com/muprs9eh>
Gertrude Abercrombie, Horse, Owl and Chaise, 1966
<https://tinyurl.com/4849wp3w>
Gertrude Abercrombie - Horse and Blue House, 1942
<https://tinyurl.com/3ssmue4k>
Alex Colville, Church and Horse, 1964
<https://tinyurl.com/2fbtmmm2>
Vincent van Gogh - Plaster Figurine of a Horse - 1886
<https://tinyurl.com/4wmefr79>
Henri Prestes. Horses at Night. 2020
<https://tinyurl.com/4ajusc84>
Debbie Criswell, Horses in the Snow, 2011
<https://tinyurl.com/36k39ubn>
Chadwick Anderson, 2022
<https://tinyurl.com/4ywv6ye4>
Phil Epp, Running Horses with Cloud, 1975
<https://tinyurl.com/4nv9rjd6> _RabihAlameddineConcealment
Bourgeois had begun making her signature “lairs”, or nests, in the 1960s, works that both seemed to hide and hint at some deeply personal secret. In The Quartered One (1964-65), for example, she created a suspended bronze sculpture that looks like an animal’s skinned carcass with a hollowed-out interior, a deliberate blurring of inside and outside. For Bourgeois, such “cells”, as she would later call them, were places of both imprisonment and safety. In Precious Liquids (1992, Centre Pompidou), she recycled a decommissioned New York water tower, placed an old bed inside, covered with spilled liquid, and hung clusters of glass containers over it, alluding to the fluids that cascade through the human body. On the wall, framed at the bottom by two large wooden globes (a giant’s testicles?), she placed a huge man’s coat, with a girl’s smaller white nightshirt tucked into it carrying the inscription “Merci/Mercy”. Was this the aftermath of a rape? A strange posthumous message to her dead father? In her 1974 tableau The Destruction of the Father (Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland), Bourgeois was less circumspect: here the father appears as dinner food, a garishly lit assemblage of organs spread out on a table, surrounded by a multitude of latex-covered bumps descending from the ceiling and planted around it.
<https://tinyurl.com/4t5eb2jj>
Family life was a “cell” to Bourgeois, a space both enchanted and accursed, but one impossible to avoid. Emerging from the burdens of her upbringing, she married the art historian and museum director Robert Goldwater and, in 1938, followed him to New York. She adopted a son and had two sons of her own. Struggling in her marriage, she sought fulfilment in affairs but stayed with Goldwater, sending him regular love letters until his death in 1973. A graphomaniac and chronic insomniac, Bourgeois left copious journal notes, the idiosyncratic transcripts of a life lived with blazing intensity.
Bernadac, whose resumé includes leadership positions at the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou, is an internationally well-regarded specialist on Bourgeois. But her expertise, reflected in the numerous quotations from Bourgeois’s unpublished journals, never gets in the way of a richly textured story she tells with warmth and tenderness. Quite appropriately, following in the footsteps of Bourgeois’s mother, she calls herself a weaver.
Hell and back
But Bernadac also warns us not to read Bourgeois’s compositions as simple transcripts of the artist’s inner turmoil. Bourgeois’s art is less a product of the psychoanalytic treatment she sought than an extended comment on psychoanalysis itself, on the stories—simultaneously disturbing and ridiculous—it encourages us to tell about ourselves: “I have been to hell and back,” reads the tongue-in-cheek message on a series of handkerchiefs Bourgeois embroidered in 1996. “And let me tell you, it was wonderful.”
Knife-Woman is the fullest account to date of the life of one of the most influential artists of the last century. But it also delivers, as the best biographies do, a coherent and consistently stimulating interpretation of the wellsprings of Bourgeois’s art. In an inspired aside, Bernadac offers one of the most useful keys I have seen to understanding Louise Bourgeois: she likens her to Baubo, the servant of Demeter. Revered as the Ancient Greek goddess of agriculture and the seasons, Demeter was inconsolable when her daughter Persephone was abducted. Hoping to cheer her up, Baubo did something crude but immediately effective: she lifted her skirt. Nakedness, as Louise Bourgeois also knew, is funny. Demeter laughed. And with that, the world was saved from perennial winter. _Christoph Irmscher_ArtNewspaper

>>>

EDGAR DEGAS, AT THE STABLES, HORSE AND DOG, 1861-6
<https://tinyurl.com/5xma6jsj>
Tatiana Gorshunova, Dream about a horse, 2012
<https://tinyurl.com/46k39xwj>
Paul Gauguin - The White Horse - 1893
<https://tinyurl.com/2hdvtr9t>
----
<https://tinyurl.com/2va8ksjb>
Franz Marc, Little Blue Horse, 1912
<https://tinyurl.com/2s4dnk6y>
Marc Chagall, The Red Horse, 1938-1944
<https://tinyurl.com/4cvwmxa2>
Franz Marc, Red horse with black figures, 1913
<https://tinyurl.com/2sfj7tzh>
Alex Colville, Horse and Train, 1954
<https://tinyurl.com/muprs9eh>
Gertrude Abercrombie, Horse, Owl and Chaise, 1966
<https://tinyurl.com/4849wp3w>
Gertrude Abercrombie - Horse and Blue House, 1942
<https://tinyurl.com/3ssmue4k>
Alex Colville, Church and Horse, 1964
<https://tinyurl.com/2fbtmmm2>
Vincent van Gogh - Plaster Figurine of a Horse - 1886
<https://tinyurl.com/4wmefr79>
Henri Prestes. Horses at Night. 2020
<https://tinyurl.com/4ajusc84>
Debbie Criswell, Horses in the Snow, 2011
<https://tinyurl.com/36k39ubn>
Chadwick Anderson, 2022
<https://tinyurl.com/4ywv6ye4>
Phil Epp, Running Horses with Cloud, 1975
<https://tinyurl.com/4nv9rjd6> _RabihAlameddine