Mexico City - Palacio de Bellas Artes

The Palace of Fine Arts is a multipurpose building. It holds concerts and ballet, but it also holds temporary exhibits. I was in for a treat when I visited. 2007 is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frida Kahlo. In celebration, the curators have organised the biggest ever exhibition of her work, here at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

This exhibition is a big deal for the museum. There were posters all over the city advertising it and massive crowds of people who had come to see it. I wasn’t really aware of the buzz, but when I was told I was lucky to get a ticket on the day I went, I realised the popularity!

By the look of things, every picture Frida ever painted had been pulled into the exhibition. There was a hugely popular exhibition of her work a few years ago in London. This exhibition seemed to have even more pictures than that one, so I’m glad I came along.

Unusually for Mexico, there was absolutely no taking of photos allowed anywhere in the exhibition. I suspect this was to support the seven gift shops that had been setup inside the Palacio to sell merchandise. There was Frida everything – ties, books, magnets, pens. The lot.

The exhibition itself was rather cool. All her great paintings were there, as well as a lot more. The exhibition featured a hell of a lot of home photos. This showed Frida and friends going about their lives, which was a great insight into her life.

In addition to the Frida exhibition, there’s a lot of other art floating around inside the museum. There’s a massive mural by Orozco, as well as another massive Diego Rivera mural. This mural reproduces a mural that was originally painted in the Rockefeller Centre in New York. It shows the struggles of the labour movement and features a few communist figures. This was apparently too much for the Rockefeller’s to take, so they had it destroyed. Rivera recreated it here in all it’s glory.

The Palacio was definitely worth visiting for the Frida exhibition. It was great. Were that not on, however, it would still be worth a visit. The murals inside, as usual, are impressive in their size and decoration. I never saw a show here, but I can imagine it would be a pretty special event. Just walking around the salons was impressive enough!