.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
“I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to...”—Friday Kahlo
Kahlo arrived in Detroit on April 21, 1932 alongside her husband, Diego Rivera, who had accepted a commission to paint a major fresco cycle at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Traveling by train from New York, she descended in a “black silk brocade dress with corded shirrings at the rounded neck, a long dark-green embroidered silk shawl, [and] high spindle-heeled slippers,” according to the local press, and when asked if she, too, was a painter, replied, “Yes, the greatest in the world” (F. Kahlo, quoted in H. Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, New York, 1983, p. 134). The couple settled into the Wardell, a fashionable residential hotel, and Kahlo learned to drive a Ford—a gift from Edsel Ford—all while coping with the early stages of pregnancy and her homesickness for Mexico. She rededicated herself to painting during their nearly year-long stay in Detroit, which saw her produce five important works: Henry Ford Hospital; My Birth; Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States; Self-Portrait with Necklace; and Window Display on a Detroit Street.
“After her marriage to Rivera on August 22, 1929, Kahlo’s life took a dramatic turn,” notes art historian Luis-Martín Lozano. “She went from being the young girl from Coyoacán who wanted to go on and study medicine…to being the wife of the most acclaimed mural painter in Mexico, which immediately catapulted her into the midst of the cultural activities and political life in which her husband was involved.” The newlyweds spent time in San Francisco and New York, and Kahlo “felt welcomed by a community of lively and dedicated artists,” establishing an identity separate from her husband and experimenting with new forms, from “traditional 19th-century Mexican painting and folk art” to “the aesthetics of New Objectivity.” This was a tremendously fertile period for her, as she not only “broaden[ed] her artistic horizons by studying the various works she saw in the exhibitions, museums, and private collections she visited,” but also began to approach her practice of painting “with greater discipline and rigor” (L.-M. Lozano, “The Painter Broadens her Horizons,” in Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings, Köln, 2021, p. 69).
“I am happy because Diego is working very happily here,” Kahlo commented on the time they spent in Detroit, but she struggled with loneliness and boredom—no less, with her recovery from the miscarriage that she suffered on July 4 (F. Kahlo, quoted in H. Herrera, Frida, op. cit., p. 135). She found solace in work during her convalescence, turning first to lithography in the company of her close friend, the artist Lucienne Bloch. Later, with encouragement from Rivera and with a nod to the painter María Izquierdo, “Frida began to paint on metal, to make her works seem more like Mexican ex-votos, or retablos,” notes her biographer, Hayden Herrera. “After preparing the small panels of sheet aluminum with an undercoating to form a binder between metal and pigment, she would proceed as if she were painting a fresco rather than an oil, first drawing the general outlines of her image in pencil or ink, and then, starting in the upper left corner, working with slow, patient concentration across and from the top downward, completing each area as she went along.” Rivera allowed that Kahlo’s “retablos do not look like retablos, or like anyone or anything else…[for] she paints at the same time the exterior and interior of herself and of the world.” Indeed, her innovation was to adapt the style of the retablo—its “deadpan, reportorial directness,” the “dramatization…of the miraculous encounter”—to the narrative of her own lived experience (H. Herrera, Frida, op. cit., pp. 150-51).
Window Display on a Detroit Street portrays an outwardly happy and serendipitous moment when she and Bloch were shopping for sheet metal and happened upon a shop window bedecked with kitschy Americana. “We were walking together on John R. [Street],” Bloch recalled, “and we saw one of those old musty-looking stores. . . . It was so extraordinary—all these camp things that had no connection—that Frida stopped in front and said, ‘Ah, that’s lovely, that’s beautiful!’” (in H. Herrera, Frida, op. cit., p. 152). “It was like Mexico, with the flower garlands and the papier-mâché figures!” she exclaimed to Rivera. His rejoinder—“Well, why don’t you paint it?”—provided the impetus for the present work (L. Bloch, quoted in S. Grimberg, “The Lost Desire,” op. cit., p. 148).
“It is quite possible that this window display reminded her, and perhaps not without a pang of nostalgia, of the shops in downtown Mexico City, with their windows decorated with brightly colored pieces of paper, ribbons, and posters and offering all manner of merchandise piled up at random after being brought from near and far,” Lozano suggests. “Such an urban scene was of course nothing new for Mexican art from this time, and in fact the Detroit shop window may also have brought back memories for Kahlo of similar photographs taken by Manuel Álvarez Bravo”—for example Caballo de madera (1928-29) and Parábola óptica (1931)—“or again some of the paintings by Rufino Tamayo or Antonio Ruiz. . . . In any case, in this small oil painting, seemingly so detached from anything to do with Mexico, the arrangement of elements nevertheless offers an understanding of the intellectual process Kahlo was experimenting with in her work” (L.-M. Lozano, quoted in “The Painter Broadens her Horizons,” op. cit., p. 69).
In Window Display on a Detroit Street, Kahlo combines the red-white-and-blue iconography of Independence Day with proto-Surrealist sophistication and innuendo. A curious tableau vivant stretches across the foreground: a roaring lion (plausibly a stand-in for Rivera, as Lozano proposes); the Great Seal of the United States; a reproduction of Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portrait of George Washington known as The Athenaeum (1976, jointly owned by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); and behind them a stylized statuette of a horse, possibly modeled on a mid-19th-century weathervane made by A.L. Jewell & Co. The background reads as a kind of picture-within-a-picture, recalling the work of Giorgio di Chirico, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí, among others. “The composition itself is filled with the same magical realism and metaphysical references that can be found in the writings of Franz Roh, which Kahlo had been reading since her formative years in Mexico,” Lozano notes. Its array of objects—ladder, glove, paintbrushes in a pot, rolled-up plans, U.S. map—against the long wall may make a wry comment on the mural-making enterprise of her husband (L.-M. Lozano, Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings, op. cit., pp. 69 and 500).
In its myriad visual and cultural sources, Window Display on a Detroit Street captures the breadth of creative possibility that the American scene provided for Kahlo as she entered a new phase of her life and career. This interlude in Detroit marked a period of significant intellectual and artistic growth that set the stage for the rest of the decade, which saw the maturation of her identity and practice as an artist.
Kahlo arrived in Detroit on April 21, 1932 alongside her husband, Diego Rivera, who had accepted a commission to paint a major fresco cycle at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Traveling by train from New York, she descended in a “black silk brocade dress with corded shirrings at the rounded neck, a long dark-green embroidered silk shawl, [and] high spindle-heeled slippers,” according to the local press, and when asked if she, too, was a painter, replied, “Yes, the greatest in the world” (F. Kahlo, quoted in H. Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, New York, 1983, p. 134). The couple settled into the Wardell, a fashionable residential hotel, and Kahlo learned to drive a Ford—a gift from Edsel Ford—all while coping with the early stages of pregnancy and her homesickness for Mexico. She rededicated herself to painting during their nearly year-long stay in Detroit, which saw her produce five important works: Henry Ford Hospital; My Birth; Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States; Self-Portrait with Necklace; and Window Display on a Detroit Street.
“After her marriage to Rivera on August 22, 1929, Kahlo’s life took a dramatic turn,” notes art historian Luis-Martín Lozano. “She went from being the young girl from Coyoacán who wanted to go on and study medicine…to being the wife of the most acclaimed mural painter in Mexico, which immediately catapulted her into the midst of the cultural activities and political life in which her husband was involved.” The newlyweds spent time in San Francisco and New York, and Kahlo “felt welcomed by a community of lively and dedicated artists,” establishing an identity separate from her husband and experimenting with new forms, from “traditional 19th-century Mexican painting and folk art” to “the aesthetics of New Objectivity.” This was a tremendously fertile period for her, as she not only “broaden[ed] her artistic horizons by studying the various works she saw in the exhibitions, museums, and private collections she visited,” but also began to approach her practice of painting “with greater discipline and rigor” (L.-M. Lozano, “The Painter Broadens her Horizons,” in Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings, Köln, 2021, p. 69).
“I am happy because Diego is working very happily here,” Kahlo commented on the time they spent in Detroit, but she struggled with loneliness and boredom—no less, with her recovery from the miscarriage that she suffered on July 4 (F. Kahlo, quoted in H. Herrera, Frida, op. cit., p. 135). She found solace in work during her convalescence, turning first to lithography in the company of her close friend, the artist Lucienne Bloch. Later, with encouragement from Rivera and with a nod to the painter María Izquierdo, “Frida began to paint on metal, to make her works seem more like Mexican ex-votos, or retablos,” notes her biographer, Hayden Herrera. “After preparing the small panels of sheet aluminum with an undercoating to form a binder between metal and pigment, she would proceed as if she were painting a fresco rather than an oil, first drawing the general outlines of her image in pencil or ink, and then, starting in the upper left corner, working with slow, patient concentration across and from the top downward, completing each area as she went along.” Rivera allowed that Kahlo’s “retablos do not look like retablos, or like anyone or anything else…[for] she paints at the same time the exterior and interior of herself and of the world.” Indeed, her innovation was to adapt the style of the retablo—its “deadpan, reportorial directness,” the “dramatization…of the miraculous encounter”—to the narrative of her own lived experience (H. Herrera, Frida, op. cit., pp. 150-51).
Window Display on a Detroit Street portrays an outwardly happy and serendipitous moment when she and Bloch were shopping for sheet metal and happened upon a shop window bedecked with kitschy Americana. “We were walking together on John R. [Street],” Bloch recalled, “and we saw one of those old musty-looking stores. . . . It was so extraordinary—all these camp things that had no connection—that Frida stopped in front and said, ‘Ah, that’s lovely, that’s beautiful!’” (in H. Herrera, Frida, op. cit., p. 152). “It was like Mexico, with the flower garlands and the papier-mâché figures!” she exclaimed to Rivera. His rejoinder—“Well, why don’t you paint it?”—provided the impetus for the present work (L. Bloch, quoted in S. Grimberg, “The Lost Desire,” op. cit., p. 148).
“It is quite possible that this window display reminded her, and perhaps not without a pang of nostalgia, of the shops in downtown Mexico City, with their windows decorated with brightly colored pieces of paper, ribbons, and posters and offering all manner of merchandise piled up at random after being brought from near and far,” Lozano suggests. “Such an urban scene was of course nothing new for Mexican art from this time, and in fact the Detroit shop window may also have brought back memories for Kahlo of similar photographs taken by Manuel Álvarez Bravo”—for example Caballo de madera (1928-29) and Parábola óptica (1931)—“or again some of the paintings by Rufino Tamayo or Antonio Ruiz. . . . In any case, in this small oil painting, seemingly so detached from anything to do with Mexico, the arrangement of elements nevertheless offers an understanding of the intellectual process Kahlo was experimenting with in her work” (L.-M. Lozano, quoted in “The Painter Broadens her Horizons,” op. cit., p. 69).
In Window Display on a Detroit Street, Kahlo combines the red-white-and-blue iconography of Independence Day with proto-Surrealist sophistication and innuendo. A curious tableau vivant stretches across the foreground: a roaring lion (plausibly a stand-in for Rivera, as Lozano proposes); the Great Seal of the United States; a reproduction of Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portrait of George Washington known as The Athenaeum (1976, jointly owned by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); and behind them a stylized statuette of a horse, possibly modeled on a mid-19th-century weathervane made by A.L. Jewell & Co. The background reads as a kind of picture-within-a-picture, recalling the work of Giorgio di Chirico, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí, among others. “The composition itself is filled with the same magical realism and metaphysical references that can be found in the writings of Franz Roh, which Kahlo had been reading since her formative years in Mexico,” Lozano notes. Its array of objects—ladder, glove, paintbrushes in a pot, rolled-up plans, U.S. map—against the long wall may make a wry comment on the mural-making enterprise of her husband (L.-M. Lozano, Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings, op. cit., pp. 69 and 500).
In its myriad visual and cultural sources, Window Display on a Detroit Street captures the breadth of creative possibility that the American scene provided for Kahlo as she entered a new phase of her life and career. This interlude in Detroit marked a period of significant intellectual and artistic growth that set the stage for the rest of the decade, which saw the maturation of her identity and practice as an artist.