Art, and Norms, and ... Shudder

I was just watching a documentary about Frida Kahlo, the great Mexican artist with the near-unibrow, who deserved a more nearly svelte and faithful boyfriend than Diego Rivera. We could have told her, “Girl, that man is too fat and too unfaithful.”

But Frieda Kahlo didn't do anything the way you or I (neither of us being Surrealists) would have advised her to, which is why they make documentaries about her. 

            Among her earliest admirers was the French Surrealist Andre Breton. His talent lay in Manifestos. His kind of humor, he defined by quoting a fellow soldier he knew in World War I: "a sense . . . of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything."

            French humor, maybe. Yet you wouldn't call the movies of Jacques Tati or Rene Clair joyless, would you? Their movies are funny.

            I have not talked to many Frenchmen. I did talk to one who pronounced: “France is merde, America is merde.” It didn't have the same ring as shit. There's bad shit, but there is also definitely good shit. In France maybe they don’t have bon merde.

            Breton embraced Kahlo as a natural Surrealist. One who had found her way into Surrealism, "in total ignorance of the ideas that motivated the activities of my friends and myself."

            Fancy that. As if a hen had figured out how to lay colored eggs without having even heard of the Easter bunny.