Speaking of sensual [post below], here is an amazing little film clip from the 1940s: Frida Kahlo Kisses Diego Rivera,
from the Tate Modern's 2005 Kahlo exhibit.
(If the film doesn't show up, as half the time it didn't for me in Safari, try it in Firefox.)
And speaking of famous Jews [ditto], for an examination of whether or not Kahlo was of Jewish descent (turns out, maybe not), read The Un-Chosen Artist from The Jewish Press.
The author, Menachem Wecker, quotes a phrase calling Kahlo a "multiply hyphenated artist."
Too right! She is one of those people in whom it is easy to see what you want to see.
I mean, what other foreign Communist could end up on a US postage stamp?
Wecker also writes about a sociological phenomenon called "familiar strangers."
This phrase is new to me, but catches something I've long noticed: our desire to claim someone--like Kahlo, or Shatner, or the person next to us at the coffee shop--as "one of our own," whatever our "own" happens to be (or, conversely, to claim an identity for ulterior motives--like Kahlo claiming Jewish ancestry perhaps primarily to align herself with anti-Nazism):
"In a 1972 study, Stanley Milgram found that “familiar strangers” who share a repeated experience (like riding the same bus every day) are likelier to communicate when cast into an unfamiliar setting, than are two strangers with no such shared experience.
Apparently, Milgram found, strangers recognize some form of “real” relationship in chance encounters, in which they do not communicate or even know each other’s name.
Perhaps Jews who seek to claim celebrities like Chagall hope to share a similarly “familiar” religious experience with him.
Many artists who are claimed as Jewish do not identify as such, like non-Jewish painters Paul Klee and Max Ernst, whom the Nazis denounced as Jewish “degenerate” artists.
Klee and Ernst would have preferred that Hitler not identify them as Jews, but Mexican-born painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) happily celebrated her “perceived” Jewish lineage...."
