Frida Kahlo, Untitled [Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird], 1940. Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art.
From candles to cushions, Frida Kahlo’s face is believed to now adorn over 100,000 objects sold across the globe by retailers mostly looking to make a quick buck from the image of an artist who openly despised capitalism. A political activist, proud Mexican, mixed-race bisexual woman, loving wife, disabled artist and much more besides, during her too-short lifetime (she died in 1954, aged 47) Kahlo used her body and her work to explore her sense of self and to defy the societal rules of the time. Yet in today’s superficial social media age, her image has too often been separated from her radical politics and attitude, turning her into a sort of tote-bag Frida for the masses.
Is it possible to capitalise on Fridamania while reasserting her progressive views and legacy? The Tate’s bank balance suggests so: even before it opened, Frida Kahlo: The Making of an Icon, which presents Kahlo’s work alongside the art of those she influenced, had broken records as the highest pre-selling exhibition in Tate’s history. (It sold 41,000 advance tickets – beating a previous 2017 record held by David Hockney, against a backdrop of declining visitor numbers for Tate Modern.) According to co-curator Mari Carmen Ramírez – who initiated the show for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston – the exhibition seeks to “highlight the embracing of her prolific legacy by artistic and social movements from surrealism, the Chicana/o movement, feminism and LGBTQ+ art and advocacy to neo-Mexicanism, contemporary art and disabled art”. But, featuring just 36 works (the Tate’s 2005 retrospective had more than 80), can it satisfy our endless appetite for this most timeless of artists?
Two black-and-white photographs of Kahlo guide us in: here she is aged 18 looking directly at the camera in a silky black dress and stockings, a scholar with books in her lap. In another, five family members pose with Frida in the middle, a dandy in a three-piece suit, cane and tie and that same transfixing stare, while her sisters wear frocks and meeker looks. Taken by her father, Guillermo, in the family home soon after the near-fatal bus crash that left Kahlo in chronic pain for the rest of her life, she’s barely an adult but already acutely aware of her image and how to rework it.
The trouble is that nobody does Frida as well as Frida: but with so few of her works here, it starts to feel like a highbrow treasure hunt
Nearby, her own early self-portraits hang beside tender depictions by Diego Rivera, the artist she first met as a student then later fell in love with and married in 1929. Five lifesize mannequins display Kahlo’s traditional Tehuana outfits while vivid photographic portraits by the fashion photographer Nickolas Muray show how her now-iconic look was first disseminated.
In 1938, André Breton fell for Kahlo’s work when visiting Mexico, and while she rejected the surrealist label, the movement embraced her as one of their own. The excitement that Breton and co must have felt seeing works such as Memory (The Heart) (1937) is palpable; Kahlo’s heart bleeds at her feet, a stake puncturing her chest. In Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) she’s strangled by thorns, a small lifeless bird pinned at her throat. The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1938-39) – a portrait commission that didn’t go the way its buyer imagined – depicts the actress and socialite plunging to death from her luxury apartment in New York, at once freefalling through wisps of clouds and dripping blood from her corpse on to the pavement and wooden frame of this staggering work.
Frida Kahlo, Memory (The Heart), 1937. Private Collection
It’s hard to tear your eyes away, to spend time with the surrealists’ work nearby. And here the show starts to come undone. A room explicitly called “Homage to Frida Kahlo” features art paying tribute to her exhibited in 1978 at a community space in San Francisco, but could just as easily be the title of all the rooms that follow, as recreations of her face mount up: here one by Rupert García from 1975, there another by the Japanese photographer Yasumasa Morimura from 2001. The trouble is that nobody does Frida as well as Frida: but with so few of her works to see here, it starts to feel like a highbrow treasure hunt.
In a side room displaying Frida and the Miscarriage (1932), a small anatomical self-portrait in which she tearfully holds her paint palette on one side, the baby she recently lost on the other, the show’s premise briefly comes alive. Heartbreakingly candid about the female body, Kahlo influenced generations of women artists including, here, Judy Chicago’s visceral Birth Tear Embroidery 3 (1984), Kiki Smith’s delicate paper sculptures and Tracey Emin, celebrated just down the hall in her own acclaimed show, A Second Life.
Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Las dos Fridas, 1989. © Yeguas del apocalipsis. Tate Collection. Image courtesy Malba Foundation, Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires.
More often it falls flat. Three photographic responses to The Two Fridas (1939) make you long for the original to be on display here, to feel the gut-punch that fired these contemporary artists. The original has its own room at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, a shrine that worshippers weave around the block to see.
This is the exhibition’s inescapable problem: while it’s interesting to consider Frida Kahlo’s artistic legacy, her talent outshines everything else. As the far right rises worldwide, rolling back hard-won progress for so many oppressed groups, Kahlo’s work and her deeply emotional reflections about being alive in an unjust world feel ever more vital. In the middle of the show, her 1933 painting My Dress Hangs There, begun while she was in New York with Rivera while he created his Rockefeller Center mural, shows a cluttered cityscape with plumes of swirling smoke, an overflowing bin and protesting workers. Instantly recognisable at its centre is one of Kahlo’s dresses, hung between an open toilet and a golf trophy. A critique of the Depression-era US, its empty consumerism and the hollow feeling it gave her, it could have been made yesterday, a searing takedown of Trump and how it feels to live in his dystopian America.
Imogen Carter is culture editor and a co-founder at the Nerve. Previously a senior editor on the Observer New Review and an assistant producer on BBC2's The Culture Show, she has a master’s in arts criticism from City University