\u2018I do not like to influence others. I would not like to become famous. I have done nothing deserving of acknowledgement in my life.\u2019 In what is the first of many puzzling choices, Tate Modern has selected this Frida Kahlo quote to open the accompanying catalogue of their new exhibition, Frida: The Making of an Icon. I use the word \u2018exhibition\u2019 deliberately here rather than \u2018retrospective\u2019 because\u00a0\u2014 as many have pointed out since it opened\u00a0\u2014 only thirty-six of the roughly 190 works on display are actually by Kahlo herself. The rest come from her friends and family, her interlocutors and imitators, and, worst of all, the copious bits of merchandise bearing her likeness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m far from the first, and definitely won\u2019t be the last, to point out this issue with the main show; in fact, quite a few writers and critics have already done a wonderful job. For Frieze, Emily Steer<\/a> writes that by \u2018the time we reach the gift shop, such pieces blend seamlessly with the merchandise, much of it emblazoned with Kahlo\u2019s unforgettable visage\u00a0\u2014 a conflation that, whether intentional or not, feels like the show\u2019s greatest disservice to her legacy.\u2019 Nearing the exit, Chlo\u00eb Ashby<\/a> wonders \u2018how many more hackneyed versions of this resilient and talented artist I can take.\u2019 And Hettie Judah<\/a>, author of Lives of the Artists: Frida Kahlo, proves her point by quoting the show\u2019s own co-curator, Beatriz Garc\u00eda-Velasco: \u2018The commercialisation of [Frida\u2019s] image is inseparable from capitalism and consumerism.\u2019<\/p>\n Garc\u00eda-Velasco claims that this \u2018can also be understood as a form of democratic ownership\u00a0\u2014 a way for people everywhere to literally and metaphorically make Frida their own.\u2019 This may be true in a certain sense; the stronger works on show, like Joe Bastida Rodriquez\u2019s Kahlo Pains (1977), an exquisite watercolour of a spinal column and ribcage, hold their own and are allusive enough to Kahlo without feeling derivative. But the lazily referential quality of some pieces merit their inclusion simply by toying with her aesthetic and image\u00a0\u2014 or, in the case of Manuel L\u00f3pez, by painting a picture of several books about Kahlo without saying anything meaningful about her at all.<\/p>\n This particular piece is featured in the exhibition\u2019s final room, where what could have been a genuinely critical interrogation of \u2018Fridamania\u2019\u00a0\u2014 a chance to reappraise the flood of senseless Frida tat\u00a0\u2014 instead settles for straightforward display. The wall text here notes Kahlo\u2019s commodification as \u2018a type of global brand\u2019 but is concertedly neutral about the ethical ramifications of this, likely because the gift shop through the door sells much the same thing. It\u2019s rather disappointing, really; institutions are not, after all, beholden to uncritical reverence. (Tate itself proved as much last year, when its Leigh Bowery<\/a>! show made no effort to offer a blemish-free account of its subject, and there\u2019s no reason the same curatorial nerve couldn\u2019t have been applied here.) But if, as Garc\u00eda-Velasco suggests, the goal is to democratise Kahlo\u2019s legacy under the catch-all idea of universal resonance, then doing so also risks flattening her intractable commitment to decolonial and Marxist politics, not to mention her groundbreaking depictions of disability and medical trauma.<\/p>\n Much has also already been said\u00a0\u2014 and is well documented throughout the exhibition\u00a0\u2014 about the near-fatal tram accident that Kahlo suffered at eighteen, which marked the beginning of decades of pain, repeated surgeries, periods of immobility, and lasting damage to the artist\u2019s pelvis and uterus. The resultant miscarriages she experienced are the subject of the show\u2019s most affecting section, Frida y el aborto (1932), tucked away in a small space out of public view: a lithograph fuses her thwarted ambition to study medicine with an anatomical rendering of a foetus. The graphic print is unsparing about pregnancy loss in a way that few artists have managed to eclipse\u00a0\u2014 except perhaps for Tracey Emin<\/a>, who appears nearby in a Mary McCartney photograph dressed as Kahlo taken in 2000. There\u2019s a gratifyingly conversant quality between their respective bodies of work, too, as is true for all company Kahlo is placed in here: Kiki Smith\u2019s paper sculpture of a fragile foetal body; Judy Chicago\u2019s embroidered Birth Tear Embroidery 3 (1984); and Regina Jos\u00e9 Galindo\u2019s harrowing filmed performance protesting the systemic impunity for wartime rape in Guatemala.<\/p>\n Also brilliant is the room centred on \u2018Neo-Mexicanisms\u2019. Here, a later generation of Mexican artists\u00a0\u2014 like Georgina Quintana, Dulce Mar\u00eda N\u00fa\u00f1ez, Adolfo Pati\u00f1o, and Julio Gal\u00e1n\u00a0\u2014 take up Kahlo\u2019s fusion of folk Catholicism, Indigenous iconography, and self-portraiture to interrogate Mexican identity during the economic and political transformations surrounding the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Even the show\u2019s more crowd-pleasing final stretch, \u2018Frida Folk\u2019, with its nichos, sacred hearts, and calaca skeletons, situates the commercial afterlife of Kahlo\u2019s image within a fittingly devotional tradition.<\/p>\n The Making of an Icon is, however, more tentative on Kahlo\u2019s communist affiliations. It\u2019s not silent on the topic, exactly; a wall text credits her with a \u2018commitment to revolutionary causes\u2019; an early self-portrait places her among a circle of high-school friends beneath a mural of Mexican revolutionary Francisco \u2018Pancho\u2019 Villa; a corset gets a caption noting she decorated her medical supports with \u2018political emblems\u2019; and, in a slightly oblique move, Rio Ya\u00f1ez\u2019s Ghetto Frida\u2019s Mission Memories (2009) features a tiny tattoo of the Leon Trotsky under a comic-book style image of Frida. But it\u2019s a detail that will mean little to anyone who doesn\u2019t already know that Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera sheltered the exiled Russian revolutionary at their home, Casa Azul, or that Kahlo even had a brief affair with Trotsky. And there is no mention here of her late, avowedly propagandistic paintings, made when she was confined to bed and closer to death, like Marxism Will Give Health to the Ill (1954); there is also no mention of the Mexican Communist Party flag that was draped over her coffin.<\/p>\n And what of, in Judah\u2019s words, the Kahlo who was \u2018sharp-tongued and scandalously rude\u2019, the \u2018heavy drinker\u2019, and \u2018prodigious drug user\u2019? It\u2019s one thing to venerate Kahlo as a queer, disabled, mestiza icon; it\u2019s harder to account for the artist\u2019s 1954 self-portrait with Joseph Stalin.<\/p>\n I think Kahlo presents an interesting, and potentially useful, challenge for the left. We are characteristically bad at dealing with our comrade\u2019s foibles (just look at how quickly Your Party\u2019s utopian promise was stymied by public feuds and factional warfare). That tendency is what leaves this particular exhibition so oddly unsatisfying: the Tate struggles to hold Kahlo in tension as both politically radical and personally self-destructive, as someone capable of cruelty as well as conviction. In canonising the artist, the collection equally fails to explain what made her such a spellbinding artist in the first place. Kahlo never set out to become a global icon, nor could she have ever imagined the scale of her posthumous reverence. What she might have recognised, however, and perhaps even admired, is a portrait willing to make a mess of her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018I do not like to influence others. I would not like to become famous. 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