‘Rude, hard-drinking, committed communist’: the Frida Kahlo you can’t buy in a gift shop | Frida Kahlo

I I spend a lot of time in museum gift shops, and no matter where I am in the world, I will see Frida Kahlo. Its shape appears on socks, toys, puzzles, water bottles, pillows, jewelry, mugs, egg cups, phone cases, shopping bags, votive candles, notebooks, key chains — almost any consumer goods, in fact, that can be molded or printed.

Her face has been pared down to a recognizable abbreviation of unibrow, red lipstick, and an extravagant pink headdress (her distinctive upper lip hair is rarely trimmed). Likewise, Kahlo’s life and career are stripped of detail, as children’s literature and popular art books sanitize her biography, shaping it into an inspiring story of resilience in the face of physical pain, pride in her identity, and the triumph of art over adversity. She has been flattened into a beautiful but tragic character.

The Tate Modern exhibition, which opened earlier this month, is titled Frida: The Making of an Icon, and her status is now close to that of a secular saint. While I worry that the real, complex Kahlo – who was sharp-tongued, scandalously rude, a prodigious drug user, a drinker, a drunken flirt, and a committed communist – has been erased, “The idea of Frida being universally accessible and inspiring is nothing to apologize for,” says Beatriz Garcia Velasco, co-curator of the Tate Gallery. “It speaks to the extraordinary group of artists and communities that inspired her: Chicana/o art, And feminist movements, disability arts, queer culture, and constituencies around the world have claimed it as their own.

The Tate exhibition is not a straightforward survey. Kahlo’s works are displayed alongside those of her peers, as well as the generations of artists she inspired. Among them is Rio Yanez, the graphic artist who draws “Ghetto Frida,” a character with a tattoo of “Diego” on her neck and “Trotsky” on her armpit. “I used Ghetto Frida as a way to satirize the commercialization of Frida and draw my attention to the art world at the same time,” Yanez said. A classic copy of Kahlo hung on the wall of the Yanez family home in the San Francisco Bay Area, “as it did in the homes of many Chicanos, artists, leftists, radical gays, and Mexicans.”

The exhibition also addresses the broader idea of ​​Fridamania, assimilating mass gatherings of Kahlo likenesses and Camila Fontenelli de Miranda’s public image project Todos Podem Ser Frida (Everyone Can Be Frida, 2012–20), which invited visitors to cultural events in Brazil to decorate with embroidered fabrics and floral crowns. “The commercialization of her image is inextricable from capitalism and consumerism, but can also be understood as a form of democratic ownership – a way for people everywhere to make Frida theirs, literally and figuratively,” says García Velasco.

Don’t you think that some products bearing the artist’s image look a bit blurry? García Velasco acknowledges that the phenomenon is not “without contradictions,” citing Frida Barbie’s widely panned 2018 work, which presented the artist (whose mixed heritage included indigenous roots, and who often used a wheelchair) as a pale-skinned, non-disabled woman with manicured eyebrows.

She sees a “productive tension” between sterile mass-market products and “handcrafted devotional objects that honor Kahlo as Santa Frida: nichos [devotional dioramas], Former voters [votive offerings] and Calaca [skeleton] Characters who all speak to a very different kind of ownership, devotional rather than commercial, rooted in communities for whom Frida remains a symbol of resistance and identity.

The devotion that Kahlo inspires is due in part to her continued sense of the contemporary, both in her interest in identity and in her exploration of her life experiences as a woman. Its open depiction of pain and heartbreak is certainly in keeping with the current trend of self-revelation. She began painting in her late teens after a bus accident caused catastrophic injuries to her spine and pelvis. In the early drawing “The Accident” (1926), she invokes a vision of collision: surrounded by corpses, her bandaged form on a stretcher in the foreground is seen through her floating, disembodied head.

In the gritty painting Henry Ford’s Hospital (1932) she depicts herself bleeding on a hospital bed after a miscarriage, surrounded by anatomical drawings, machines, and personal emblems. The sadness of her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera is there on the canvas for all to see. There are melancholy-charged self-portraits with cropped hair, as well as her brutal depiction of literal death by a thousand cuts – A Few Pieces (1935) – in which a man wearing a fedora stands calmly over a woman’s mutilated body.

All of this speaks for Tracey Emin, whose works are being shown at the same time at Tate Modern. “Women can relate to it,” she said. Kahlo “photographed herself bleeding in the bath, fetuses emerging from her, and portraits of her family and lovers.” Emin discovered Kahlo while he was a student and created a painting inspired by the Mexican artist’s depiction of her family tree. As a tribute, in 2000, photographer Mary McCartney photographed Emin dressed in full Frida costume. Lying in bed, as Kahlo often was in a life plagued by injury and illness, the image now seems like a harbinger of Amin’s own illness.

The art is still there, still loved, but to some extent has been surpassed by her person. In her lifetime, Kahlo’s art and her constructed identity as a cultural figure emerged as one. She entered the public eye when she was 22 as the wife of Diego Rivera, and transformed herself into a character — a braided crown-wearing queen wearing Aztec beads and traditional jewelry. Tijuana Dress – This is the appearance you assume.

She was played by Salma Hayek in the 2002 biopic and appeared as a supporting character in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel about political intolerance, “The Loophole.” It even inspired opera. Earlier this year, New York’s Metropolitan Opera presented El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, written by composer Gabriela Lina Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz. The drama takes place three years after Kahlo’s death, as she returns to Earth for 24 hours during the Día de Muertos festival: a chance to live a day without physical pain, and to take Rivera back with her to the underworld. As Kingsolver noted, Kahlo and Rivera were “two of North America’s first artistic celebrities.”

One of the most important relationships in Kahlo’s life was with the camera. Frida’s father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a photographer. As a child she learned how to stand up and perform. It was an early friendship with the Italian-born photographer Tina Modotti that presented Kahlo with the idea that she might achieve a liberated, modern life as an artist. Meanwhile, her long-time lover Nicholas Murray, a pioneer of color photography, took up the camera after his career as an Olympic fencer. Kahlo admired him so much that, in one of her many flights of mythological madness, she claimed Hungarian Jewish ancestry for herself to match his.

In fact, Kahlo’s father was German, of Protestant descent, born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in Pforzheim in 1871. The artist’s surname is now so familiar to us that it is easy to forget that the woman who is now synonymous with Mexican identity had a German name. This did not escape notice during her lifetime: when Hitler was in power in the 1930s, she sometimes chose another middle name, Carmen (born Kahlo Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon).

Although her portrait has been frequently painted, since her death in 1954, aged 47, Kahlo’s famous iconography has derived largely from color photographs of her by Murray (which are conspicuously beautiful) rather than from her self-portraits (which are often more complex and painful).

One of the earliest mass-produced objects bearing her likeness was a 1975 silkscreen print by Robert Garcia titled Frida Kahlo (September). First printed and sold in the San Francisco Bay Area, it presented Kahlo as an iconic figure for Chicano communities as they emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960s. (It was this poster that Yanez stared at growing up.) García based his prints on a 1939 photo by Murray—Frida with Magenta Rebozo—and took the hot pink of the shawl she was wearing as the background color for his own image.

By the end of the 1970s, Kahlo had become involved in the women’s movement, and was celebrated as an artist who painted her own reality, and whose reputation in life had been overshadowed by that of her more famous husband. In March 1979, artist Mary Beth Edelson hosted a party at her New York apartment to introduce Ana Mendieta to the city’s women’s art scene. The dress code for the gathering was “come as your favorite artist,” and guests included Louise Bourgeois (who apparently came dressed as herself) and Hannah Wilke. Mendieta dressed as Kahlo: In a photo of the gathering, she is sitting on the floor at the front of the group; Her hair is braided with ribbons. Her eyebrows are shaped like a hummingbird. Kahlo’s work was still little known and rarely exhibited internationally at the time.

That changed when, in 1982, feminist theorist Laura Mulvey co-curated an exhibition of works by Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. This was the first survey of Kahlo’s work outside of Mexico, and its impact was enormous: here was an artist who was making works about birth, miscarriage, miscarriage, illness, identity, and heartbreak in the 1930s and 1940s. The following year saw the publication of Hayden Herrera’s best-selling autobiography. Together, the book and the exhibition unleashed Friedmania. As if to cement Kahlo’s new star status, Madonna declared herself a fan, and acquired a few paintings.

It is significant that the “personal” Frida in her posthumous fame returned to the public eye at almost the same moment that her paintings finally reached the mass audience she had never been able to provide in her lifetime. Perhaps more than any other artist, during and after her life, her art and her personality became inseparable.

Despite this elevation to contemporary secular canonization, Kahlo was not a saint in real life. Besides her personal heroism and daring artistry, it is important to remember that Frida was full of self-doubt and disillusionment regarding her work, and was capable of treating the people she loved poorly. If we expect the characters we admire to be pure and flawless, we are setting ourselves up for failure. If there’s one thing Kahlo’s art reminds us of, it’s not to shy away from exploring the more complex and difficult parts of life.

Frida: The Making of an Icon at Tate Modern, London, Until January 3. Hetty Judah is a book author Lives of Artists: Frida Kahlo (Lawrence King Publishing).