Graciela Iturbide, Genius

Dear Reader,

A trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was in order. Their mailing enticed me with one exhibit, “Radical Geometries: Bauhaus Prints, 1919-33.” Through four cycles of work, I have been obsessed with patterns and designs (Judy’s Journal, 2018 October). Josef Albers (German), Lyonel Feininger (American), Wassily Kandinsky (Russian), Paul Klee (Swiss), and László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian) created prints with dizzying, yet precise patterns. Well, some of Kandinsky’s were less orderly than the others, but I was satisfied, nevertheless.

The surprise of day ended up more as a haunting than a sweet memory. It came in the photography of Graciela Iturbide (b.1942). Her larger exhibit, “Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico” was divided into themes that emerged as she lived with groups of indigenous people. Fishes, goats, birds will never be thought of in the same way after seeing what her camera captured, sometimes accidentally as she studied her contact sheets. In the film accompanying the exhibit, she described her process in wondrous detail. She is modest and unassuming and makes it easy to understand why villagers trusted the lady with the camera.

If art can make one feel, Iturbide’s work soars beyond a 10. One series featured a plant hospital, where sick cacti are splinted or sheathed in mesh for temporary support. Two photographs of cacti in intensive care are unforgettable. Bags of nutrients bulge from their sides; others have IV units attached. Empathy for the suffering plants grappled with awe for the person who thought to treat a suffering plant like a human.

Graciela Iturbide is a genius. That’s what I would write in my journal the next day. On the top floor of the Art in Americas wing, another genius was drawing in viewers: “Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular.” Not many of her paintings were there, as one disappointed Finnish visitor told me. The exhibit was contextual: What inspired Kahlo? What objects did she collect? How did she and artists around her produce work that was saturated in their Mexican surroundings?

One gallery produced the haunting I referred to earlier: black and white photographs by Graciela Iturbide of Frida Kahlo’s bathroom. After Kahlo died, Diego Rivera took some of her personal possessions, put them in her bathroom and locked the door. For 50 years, it stayed locked. When it was to be opened, Iturbide was asked to photograph the room. She concentrated on objects that revealed Kahlo’s personal routines, as if electroshocks were daily occurrences. Here was an intimate portrait of the artist: body brace, artificial leg propped against a wall, enema bottles lined up with tendrils of tubes, a hot-water bottle that mimicked a man wearing a large-brimmed hat, a hospital gown Kahlo brought home and used as an artist smock - the wall label noted that, because it was in black and white, the stains could be read as paint or blood or both.

Genius, that’s what you are, Graciela Iturbide.