New York Botanical Garden re-creates Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s Casa Azul studio and garden (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The New York Botanical Garden
Enid A. Haupt Conservatory
2900 Southern Blvd., Bronx
Tuesday – Sunday through November 1, $8-$25
718-817-8700
www.nybg.org/frida
frida kahlo: art garden life slideshow
Don’t let the cold weather scare you away from seeing the New York Botanical Garden’s beautiful celebration of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s passionate relationship with the natural world. “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” on view at the Bronx institution through November 1, is a wide-ranging tribute to the artist, including paintings, photographs, a historical timeline, a re-creation of her garden and studio, known as La Casa Azul, and special programs. “When we began to research Frida Kahlo, we wanted to delve into the story of the woman who has been examined through her pain and suffering and paint her in a different light,” NYBG associate vice president of exhibitions and public engagement Karen Daubmann writes in her catalog essay, “Making Frida Kahlo’s Garden in New York: The Conservatory Exhibition.” She continues, “We wanted to learn more about the iconic face that is emblazoned on canvases, the strong and fierce-looking dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who used to be known as Diego Rivera’s wife and is now known simply as Frida. The more we researched, the more intrigued we became. . . . We were fascinated by the incredible detail of Kahlo’s curated life.” That curated life is lovingly explored in the exhibition, which features fourteen of the artist’s paintings in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library’s art gallery, including “Portrait of Luther Burbank,” in which Kahlo depicts the famed botanist emerging from the root of a tree; the vulvic “Sun and Life”; “Two Nudes in the Forest,” which was originally called “The Earth Itself”; and the sensational “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird,” in which Kahlo, in between her first and second marriages to Rivera, paints herself surrounded by flowers, a dead hummingbird, a monkey, butterflies, and a black cat, a symbolic representation of life, death, and rebirth. The path to the next part of the show, in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, is lined with poems by Nobel Prize–winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz, including “The Religious Fig” and “Nightfall.” Paz was in fact not a big fan of Kahlo’s and Rivera’s; “Diego and Frida ought not to be subjects of beatification but objects of study — and of repentance . . . the weaknesses, taints, and defects that show up in the works of Diego and Frida are moral in origin,” Paz wrote in Essays on Mexican Art. “The two of them betrayed their great gifts, and this can be seen in their painting.”
Pyramid is centerpiece of Casa Azul re-creation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The centerpiece of the exhibition is La Casa Azul, a reconstruction of Kahlo’s studio and garden at her family home in Mexico City, which is now a museum. The conservatory is filled with folk art objects, religious ex-voto paintings, Mexican plants described in both English and Spanish (and inspired by archival photographs), and re-creations of the Frog Fountain with its mosaic floor, Kahlo’s desk and easel, and the strikingly colorful Casa Azul pyramid, holding dozens of Mexican cacti and succulents. The conservatory exhibition was designed by Scott Pask, the three-time Tony-winning designer of The Book of Mormon, The Coast of Utopia, and The Pillowman. Outside the conservatory, by the lily pond, is a fence of organ pipe cacti, like the one Kahlo had at her San Ángel house. “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life” immerses you in the world of this fascinating artist, who passed away in 1954 at the age of forty-seven. In conjunction with the exhibition, the NYBG is hosting special programming through closing day. On Saturdays and Sundays at 1:00, there is live music and dance in Ross Hall and throughout the garden, with performances by such groups as Mexico Beyond Mariachi, the Villalobos Brothers, Flor de Toloache, and Calpulli Danza Mexicana. “Cooking with Frida” takes place in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden on Wednesdays, Saturday, and Sundays at 2:00 & 4:00. The daily “Frida’s Fall Harvest” consists of family-friendly activities in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden, including a puppet show and playhouse kitchen; the children’s garden will be open till 9:30 on October 23 for “Frida for Families: A Spooky Nighttime Adventure.” Also daily (but not for kids), “Spotlight on Agave: A Tequila Story” presents the history and tradition of the Mexican spirit. October 22 is “Frida al Fresco Evening” LGBT Night, with live music, stilt dancers, and Mexican food and drink. On October 24-25 and October 31 – November 1, things get scary with Día De Los Muertos Weekends, featuring skeletal processions, stilt dancers, skull face painting, and more. The “¡Cámara, Acción!” film series continues on Sundays at 3:00 in Ross Hall with Alonso Ruiz Palacios’s Güeros on October 25 and Francisco Franco’s Last Call on November 1. Also on November 1, there will be a live performance by two male models interacting with Humberto Spíndola’s “Two Fridas” sculptural installation, based on Kahlo’s 1939 double portrait in which two versions of her sit next to each other, holding hands.
Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film in eight years is a visually sumptuous feast, perhaps the most beautifully poetic wuxia film ever made. Inspired by a chuanqi story by Pei Xing, The Assassin is set during the ninth-century Tang dynasty, on the brink of war between Weibo and the Royal Court. Exiled from her home since she was ten, Nie Yinniang (Hou muse Shu Qi) has returned thirteen years later, now an expert assassin, trained by the nun (Fang-Yi Sheu) who raised her to be a cold-blooded killer out for revenge. After being unable to execute a hit out of sympathy for her target’s child, Yinniang is ordered to kill Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen), her cousin and the man to whom she was betrothed as a young girl, as a lesson to teach her not to let personal passions rule her. But don’t worry about the plot, which is far from clear and at times impossible to follow. Instead, glory in Hou’s virtuosity as a filmmaker; he was named Best Director at Cannes for The Assassin, a meditative journey through a fantastical medieval world. Hou and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing craft each frame like it’s a classical Chinese painting, a work of art unto itself. The camera moves slowly, if at all, as the story plays out in long shots, in both time and space, with very few close-ups and no quick cuts, even during the martial arts fights in which Yinniang displays her awesome skills. Hou often lingers on her face, which shows no outward emotion, although her soul is in turmoil. Hou evokes Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Ang Lee, and Zhang Yimou as he takes the viewer from spectacular mountains and river valleys to lush interiors (the stunning sets and gorgeous costumes, bathed in red, black, and gold, are by Hwarng Wern-ying), with silk curtains, bamboo and birch trees, columns, and other elements often in the foreground, along with mist, fog, and smoke, occasionally obscuring the proceedings, lending a surreal quality to Hou’s innate realism.
“Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world,” a growly, disembodied, mechanical-like voice says at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s futuristic sci-fi noir thriller, Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Godard’s 1965 black-and-white masterpiece takes place in an unidentified time period in a dark, unadorned, special-effects-free Paris. A tough-as-nails man in hat and trench coat named Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) has arrived in Alphaville from the Outlands, claiming to be journalist Ivan Johnson, on assignment from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. But his real mission is to first find fellow agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), then capture or kill Alphaville leader and death-ray inventor Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), the former Leonard Nosferatu. A Guadalcanal veteran who drives a Ford Galaxie, Caution — a character Constantine played in a series of films based on the novels of Peter Cheyney, including This Man Is Dangerous, Dames Get Along, and Your Turn, Darling — is a no-nonsense guy who takes nothing for granted. “All things weird are normal in this whore of cities,” he tells a blond seductress third class, who apparently comes with his hotel room. Documenting everything he sees with an Instamatic flash camera, Caution (perhaps a stand-in for Godard himself?) is soon visited by Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), the professor’s daughter, setting off on an Orwellian journey through a grim city where poetry and emotion, and such words as “love,” “why,” and “conscience,” are banned in favor of “because” and “Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence,” where the hotel Bible is actually an ever-changing dictionary and enemies of the state are killed in swimming pools and pulled out by clones of Esther Williams, all overseen by a computer known as Alpha 60 (whose text, based on writings by Jorge Luis Borges, is eerily spoken by a man without a larynx, using a mechanized voice box). 
