PROJECT

FEATURE ARTICLE

SUZY BIRSTEIN

'Til There Was You - A Wedding Portrait With A Twist

– ABOUT THE PROJECT

When done by artists, wedding portraits are often coded with symbols of status, personal truths and allegorical references. For her painting, ‘Til There Was You…After Schiele’, Vancouver artist Suzy Birstein riffs on a wedding portrait Diego Rivera made with his bride, Frida Kahlo. For her painting, Birstein has slyly recast the bride and groom with appropriate stand-ins for her fierce spirit and true love. It’s always intriguing to work with Suzy Birstein as her art has a beguiling charm – at first, you think you know the story, then she twists expectations and opens up more narrative possibilities.

“For her painting Til There Was You…After Schiele (2020), Suzy Birstein reconsiders the earlier Kahlo work, opting to recast the wedding couple as Egon Schiele, the German Expressionist painter, and one of Birstein’s own mythological sculptures. Whereas Kahlo’s wedding portrait is a stolid affair, Birstein’s is a riot of colour, costume, symbolism, and joy.“

– Barry Dumka

FEATURE ARTICLE

SUZY BIRSTEIN

Til There Was You: A Wedding Portrait With A Twist

In 1931, Frida Kahlo painted a wedding portrait of herself with her husband, Diego Rivera. They had first met in June 1928 at a party in Mexico City and married one tempestuous year later. In Kahlo’s double portrait, Rivera, twenty years her senior, appears dominant, towering over his new bride while holding a painter’s palette and brushes in his right hand, as if a weapon. Kahlo, diminutive, somber, sphinx-like, appears in her own self-portrait as a shadow of her great artist husband – even though now, her critical reputation, and fame, is greater.

For her painting Til There Was You…After Schiele (2020), Suzy Birstein reconsiders the earlier Kahlo work, opting to recast the wedding couple as Egon Schiele, the German Expressionist painter, and one of Birstein’s own mythological sculptures. Whereas Kahlo’s wedding portrait is a stolid affair, Birstein’s is a riot of colour, costume, symbolism, and joy. Schiele is an interesting choice for a partner – his art was known for its erotic charge – and his appearance in Birstein’s work echoes his own Self-Portrait with Peacock Waistcoat from 1911. The bride – a sumptuous variation of Birstein’s sculptural work Things Blew All Over the Place the Day You Were Born – appears confident, pregnant with purpose, wearing a peacock headdress and garlanded in flowers. It seems to be a happy union; certainly Schiele, with his red-pursed lips, appears pleased.

Still, keep in mind that Birstein is a feather-haired trickster, and a romantic. Her Egon, with his wild mop of black hair and jaunty demeanour, looks suspiciously like the younger version of her husband Hartley. Birstein’s painting is both a puzzle and a poem to the resonant value of creative unions and the charming intrigue contained in wedding portraits.

Barry Dumka

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