How Frida Kahlo became the patron saint of woke

A new Frida Kahlo exhibition is about to open at Tate Modern, with a very different feel from the modern Mexican artist’s last show at the gallery in 2005. That exhibition gathered more than 80 works to celebrate Kahlo the artist. This one, with only around 30 works by Kahlo herself, will examine something else: a phenomenon sometimes described as “Fridamania”, acknowledging her astonishing popularity, and not only with collectors (last autumn, one of Kahlo’s paintings sold at auction for almost £42m – the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a woman).

Today, Kahlo’s face, with its distinctive monobrow, is recognised even by people who rarely set foot inside a gallery: her features are as familiar as those of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, another figurehead of radical chic. Plays, novels and operas have been written about her. More than 100,000 objects printed with her likeness are available for sale online (some of which will appear in a section of Tate’s exhibition examining the commercial exploitation of her persona). When the V&A staged a Kahlo exhibition in 2018, it embraced her “cult”, as it were, by focusing on her clothing and possessions and ensuring that a wide range of associated merchandise was available in the gift shop, resulting in record sales. Kahlo has transcended the art world to become an icon of popular culture and a brand. As Tate Modern’s interim director, Catherine Wood, puts it in the new catalogue: “Frida has gone viral.”

So, how and why did Fridamania emerge? Does this artist deserve such adulation? And have we reached peak Frida?

Recently, I’ve been considering these questions while working on a three-part mini-series about Kahlo for Stories of Art, a new weekly art history video podcast by Heni Talks, which I co-host with the University of Cambridge art historian James Fox.

Part of the myth of Frida derives from her biography (it’s no surprise that Netflix has announced a new series about Kahlo and her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera). At the age of six, she was stricken with polio, which wasted her right leg. She always felt self-conscious about her disability and later tried to mask it by wearing long indigenous dresses, which became part of her signature look. At 18, while travelling back from school in Mexico City to her family home, the so-called “Blue House”, in the nearby town of Coyoacán (or “place of the coyotes”), she was almost killed when a metal handrail pierced her stomach and pelvis in a catastrophic bus crash.

During the painful, monotonous months of bed rest that followed, she took up painting. By the late 1920s, she was able to pursue Diego Rivera, whom, by chance, she had met a few years earlier. Rivera had spent more than a decade in Paris before returning to Mexico, at the invitation of the post-revolutionary government, to paint murals on public buildings for the “pueblo” (people). In 1929, Kahlo, aged 22, married the famous 43-year-old muralist, whom she called her “second accident”.

Their relationship was tempestuous, and both had affairs – including, in Kahlo’s case, with the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who arrived in Mexico in 1937. Supposedly, Rivera didn’t mind Kahlo’s dalliances with other women but was less tolerant of her flings with men.

Gradually, Kahlo emerged as a significant artist whose autobiographical work amply justifies the attention she receives today. In it, she laid bare her emotional and physical suffering in a frank, sometimes graphic fashion. André Breton, the leader of Surrealism (with which Kahlo’s pictures share affinities), likened her art to “a ribbon around a bomb”.

In a superb series of self-portraits, which she produced from the late 1930s onwards (before compounding health problems precipitated her early death), she depicts herself in front of lush vegetation, accompanied by animals including parrots, sparrows, butterflies and her pet spider monkey Fulang-Chang. Kahlo, who suffered miscarriages and painted an explicit scene of childbirth, was the first significant artist to depict the female experience.

Yet although five paintings by her appeared in an exhibition of Mexican art at the Tate Gallery in 1953 (a year before her death at the age of 47), it wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that the “Frida phenomenon” (as a curator of the new show describes it) began to take shape. First, she was embraced by Chicano (ie. Mexican-American) artists, which, in turn, stimulated interest in Kahlo among feminist artists such as Judy Chicago and Kiki Smith, as well as art historians who wished to challenge a patriarchal canon. Then, in 1983, came the publication of Hayden Herrera’s important biography of Kahlo, which was adapted into Julie Taymor’s 2002 Oscar-winning biopic starring Salma Hayek.

Kahlo used to be perceived as a victim, but in recent decades, this has changed and today, she’s a poster girl for an era of identity politics. A little like a patron saint, she now represents various things: feminism, queerness, gender fluidity, body positivity and anti-ableism. She embodies rebellion, resilience in adversity and, given her involvement with Mexico’s Communist Party, Left-wing politics. Thanks to those colourful, patterned indigenous dresses she loved wearing, she’s also a fashion icon. Above all, according to Tobias Ostrander, co-curator of Tate Modern’s show, Kahlo is a symbol of “anti-patriarchal” opposition to “white male dominance”. She has become an avatar of contemporary ideas, issues and concerns.

I wonder, though, whether this means we’re witnessing the zenith of her fame. Identity politics defines our anti-patriarchal moment, but it may not define the future in the same way; there are already signs that it is in abeyance. Tomorrow’s consumers could choose a different “icon” from art history to embody their preoccupations and desires: who knows, perhaps Generation Alpha, as they struggle for financial security, will hanker after an icon of reassurance rather than rebellion? Kahlo may be riding high today, but the next generation will probably be obsessed with other things and need another patron saint.

Frida: The Making of an Icon opens at Tate Modern (tate.org.uk) on June 25.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]