At the time of her death in 1954, Frida Kahlo was known to a limited circle of admirers and collectors. She had had a handful of solo exhibitions and sold a few works. While she was a name, she was little more than that, notable primarily as the painter wife of a much more famous artist, Diego Rivera. However, she has had a spectacular afterlife and is now, by some measure, the most famous female artist of all. Today she reigns as a secular saint, both in her native Mexico and beyond painful matter countless other artists and a fetish figure for feminists, political activists, disability rights activists, LGBQT advocates and nationalist idealists everywhere. If you feel misunderstood, worn or even a little oppressed, then there is a Frida for you.
How she got this way is the subject of Tate Modern’s new exhibition Frida: The Making of an Icon. Perhaps there is no other painter for whom the same formula would work – Leonardo? Monet? Jackson Pollock? They just don’t quite do justice to that buzzy, overused word “iconic.” However, Kahlo’s happiness was fleeting. It was first seen in Britain in 1953 as part of an exhibition of contemporary Mexican art at the old Tate gallery. By 2005, she was significant enough to have a major monographic exhibition at the Tate Modern with around 80 works. Since then, her fame has exploded further.
This latest exhibition actually has very little to do with her art, but rather with her brand and what others have made of her – artistically and commercially. Such is the allure of her name and image that despite showing only 33 of Kahlo’s own works, the show has broken pre-sale records for the gallery. However, this is a show that has adapted to the circumstances. Since 1984, when Kahlo’s work was declared part of Mexico’s “national heritage”, strict restrictions have been placed on loan terms (a version of the Tate exhibition has just closed in Houston after a four-month run that under the Tate’s six-month span would mean a year’s absence of paintings); private lenders have been reluctant to part with the works at a time of international instability (the Trump/Netanyahu war against Iran began just as the delivery of the works was being discussed); and Mexico wanted its leading Kahlos in the country for the duration of the soccer World Cup. So, for example, Madonna – who owns four Kahlos (three per cent of the total number known) and lent to the previous Tate show – is one of the private collectors who refused to contribute this time.
And while 33 pictures sounds like a lot, only a handful can claim to rank among her best, and even they far outnumber the work of 80 other artists, both her contemporaries and those working today. That is why she is the smile of the Cheshire Cat in the exhibition that bears her name. While the curators have cut their clothes accordingly, the exhibition is somewhat shorter than it was intended to be.
On its own terms, the development of the Kahlo brand is also uneven. There are a large number of complementary works of negligible aesthetic merit, variations of folk art in which other artists have simply borrowed Kahlo’s face or her pain as a form of visual shorthand that is easier than creating something of their own. This acquisition could be interesting if the results were of a higher quality, but photographs such as Miranda Bergman’s Tree of Hope, Stand firm (1978) – a floral mandala with Kahlo in the center – or various artists who have used it Two Fridas (1939 and not in the exhibition) – a double self-portrait with a mystical infusion of blood – to show their separate selves as homosexuals, transvestites or physically impaired, are simply unforgettable.
Kahlo was, of course, a collaborator from the start. Her father was a photographer and she learned the power of the camera from him. The exhibition has numerous photographs, both informal and formal, that show how her awkward face, indigenous costumes, an eyebrow and a rudimentary mustache were conscious elements of her self-image. There are many pictures of her with the monumental pig Rivera as well; no matter how much infidelity and stunts they did between them (including catching Rivera in the act with her sister Kristina), the photos say that they came as a package. Kahlo was never averse to having a camera thrust at her: the prostheses and surgical corsets she wore to manage her leg shortened by polio and the broken spine she suffered in a catastrophic bus accident in 1925 were necessary aids, but they also functioned in the same way that saints have long been presented with their symbols of martyrdom.
However, her best photographs reinforce the distance between her work and that of her peers. For example, two self-portraits – Self portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird (1940) and Self portrait with loose hair (1947) – show how carefully, using her hair and clothing as emblems, she wove themes of Mexican history and identity, pre-Hispanic traditions, and Christian symbols into her image. Here was one mestiza – mixed blood – woman who not only understood her heritage, but was proud to advertise it.
Here is her most disturbing painting The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1938-9). It was commissioned for Hale’s mother, but shows the socialite dying three times – jumping from her New York apartment window, in the act of falling through Chagall-like clouds, and to the ground, broken, bloodied and wide-eyed in death. Why Kahlo thought her wretched, bookish memorial (she even painted blood on the frame) would be an appropriate image to comfort a woman who had lost her daughter so distressingly is a mystery. While many of her works here are small in the extreme, this haunting photo shows why Kahlo really could be worthy of imitation.
Perhaps she was very successful in making a cult around herself. of reduction to the absurd is a room dedicated to about 200 objects of Kahlo merchandise. It’s a sticky homage to cell phone cups and egg cups, fridge magnets and lipstick cases. And of course the Frida Barbie doll that caused an uproar when it appeared in 2018 and offended because Mattel had given her a European skin tone and adjusted her eyebrows and upper lip. Although a plastic doll was an appropriate form of tribute in the first place it seems not to have been intended. On the other side of the door to this room is, of course, the museum shop.
It’s a small step from Kahlo being an artistic commodity to a commercial one. The irony is that any use of her face and life story does not cement her as an outstanding artist, but distances her from her paintings. There are times in this show that the viewer will have to wonder if she was ever an artist.
(Further reading: David Hockney was as serious as he was funny)
