{"id":724839,"date":"2026-06-25T09:15:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T09:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/724839\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T09:15:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T09:15:09","slug":"rude-heavy-drinking-and-a-committed-communist-the-frida-kahlo-you-cant-buy-in-the-gift-shop-frida-kahlo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/724839\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Rude, heavy-drinking and a committed communist\u2019: the Frida Kahlo you can\u2019t buy in the gift shop | Frida Kahlo"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spend a lot of time in museum gift shops, and no matter where I might be in the world, I will see Frida Kahlo<\/a>. Her likeness appears on socks, dolls, puzzles, water bottles, cushions, jewellery, mugs, eggcups, phone cases, shopping bags, votive candles, notebooks, keychains \u2013 just about any consumer goods, in fact, that can be formed or printed.<\/p>\n

Her face has been reduced to a recognisable shorthand of monobrow, lipstick and extravagant floral headdress (her distinctive upper lip hair seldom makes the cut). Kahlo\u2019s life and career are likewise stripped of detail, with children\u2019s literature and popular art books sanitising her biography, shaping it into an inspiring tale of resilience in the face of physical pain, pride in her identity and art triumphing over adversity. She has been flattened into a beautiful but tragic figure.<\/p>\n

Tate Modern\u2019s exhibition, which opened earlier this month, is titled Frida: The Making of an Icon, and indeed her status is now close to that of a secular saint. While I worry that the real, complicated Kahlo \u2013 who was sharp-tongued and scandalously rude, a prodigious drug user, heavy drinker, intoxicating flirt and committed communist \u2013 has been erased, Beatriz Garc\u00eda-Velasco, co-curator of the Tate show, says: \u201cThe idea of Frida being universally accessible and inspiring is not something to be apologetic for. It speaks to the extraordinary range of artists and communities she has inspired: Chicana\/o art, feminist movements, disability arts, queer culture, and constituencies all over the world who have claimed her as their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Camila Fontenele de Miranda\u2019s Everyone Can Be Frida, a work that began in 2012. Photograph: Camila Fontenele de Miranda<\/p>\n

The Tate exhibition is not a straightforward survey. Kahlo\u2019s work is shown alongside that of her peers, as well as generations of artists she has inspired. Among them are Rio Ya\u00f1ez, a graphic artist who draws \u201cGhetto Frida\u201d, a character who has tattoos reading \u201cDiego\u201d at her neck and \u201cTrotsky\u201d at her armpit. \u201cI used Ghetto Frida as a vehicle to satirise Frida\u2019s commercialisation and get my licks in at the art world at the same time,\u201d Ya\u00f1ez has said. A classic print of Kahlo hung on the wall of Ya\u00f1ez\u2019s family\u2019s home in San Francisco\u2019s Bay Area, \u201cas it did in the homes of so many Chicanos, artists, leftists, radical queers and Mexicans\u201d.<\/p>\n

The show also examines the wider idea of Fridamania, taking in mass gatherings of Kahlo lookalikes and Camila Fontenele de Miranda\u2019s public portrait project Todos Podem Ser Frida (Everyone Can Be Frida, 2012\u201320), which invited visitors to cultural events in Brazil to bedeck themselves in embroidered fabrics and floral crowns. \u201cThe commercialisation of her image is inseparable from capitalism and consumerism, but it can also be understood as a form of democratic ownership \u2013 a way for people everywhere to literally and metaphorically make Frida their own,\u201d says Garc\u00eda-Velasco.<\/p>\n

Does she not think some of the products emblazoned with the artist\u2019s likeness are a bit \u2026 iffy? Garc\u00eda-Velasco admits the phenomenon is not \u201cwithout its contradictions\u201d, citing the widely criticised Frida Barbie released in 2018, which presented the artist (whose mixed heritage included Indigenous roots, and who often used a wheelchair) as a pale-skinned, non-disabled woman with plucked brows.<\/p>\n

Mexican Renaissance painter Mar\u00eda Izquierdo\u2019s Dream and Premonition from 1947, included in the Tate exhibition. Photograph: Rocio and Boris Hirmas Collection<\/p>\n

She sees a \u201cproductive tension\u201d between such sanitised mass-market products and \u201cthe handmade devotional objects that honour Kahlo as Santa Frida: nichos [devotional dioramas], ex-votos [votive offerings] and calaca [skeleton] figures that all speak to a very different kind of ownership, devotional rather than commercial, and rooted in the communities for whom Frida remains a symbol of resistance and identity\u201d.<\/p>\n

The devotion Kahlo inspires is in part because she continues to feel contemporary, whether in her interest in identity or in exploring her life experiences as a woman. Her open portrayals of pain and heartbreak certainly chime with the current vogue for self-revelation. She started painting in her late teens after a bus accident that caused catastrophic injuries to her spine and pelvis. In the early drawing The Accident (1926), she summons a vision of the collision: surrounded by bodies, her own bandaged form on a stretcher in the foreground is looked down on by her floating, disembodied head.<\/p>\n

In the courageous painting Henry Ford Hospital (1932) she portrays herself bleeding on a hospital bed after a miscarriage, surrounded by anatomical drawings, machinery and personal emblems. The heartbreak of her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera is on canvas for all to see. There are grief-charged self-portraits with shorn hair, as well as her brutal portrayal of a literal death by a thousand cuts \u2013 A Few Small Nips (1935) \u2013 in which a man in a fedora stands coolly over a woman\u2019s mutilated body.<\/p>\n

Tracey Emin as Frida Kahlo. Photograph: Mary McCartney<\/p>\n

All of this speaks to Tracey Emin, whose work is concurrently on display at Tate Modern. \u201cWomen can relate to her\u201d she has said<\/a>; Kahlo \u201cdid images of herself bleeding in the bath, of foetuses coming out of her, and pictures of her family and lovers\u201d. Emin discovered Kahlo as a student and made a painting inspired by the Mexican artist\u2019s portrayal of her family tree. By way of tribute, in 2000, Emin was captured by photographer Mary McCartney<\/a> in full Frida garb. Recumbent in bed, as Kahlo so often was in a life beset by injury and illness, the portrait now feels like a foreshadowing of Emin\u2019s own illness.<\/p>\n

The art is still there, still loved, but to a degree has been transcended by her person. In her lifetime, Kahlo\u2019s art and her constructed identity as a cultural figure emerged as one. Stepping into the public eye at the age of 22 as the wife of Diego Rivera, she turned herself into a character \u2013 a queen in a braided crown wearing Aztec beads and traditional tehuana dress \u2013 and it is in this guise that she endures.<\/p>\n

She has been played by Salma Hayek in a 2002 biopic and appeared as a supporting character in Barbara Kingsolver\u2019s novel of political intolerance The Lacuna. She has even inspired an opera. Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Opera of New York staged El \u00daltimo Sue\u00f1o de Frida y Diego by composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz. The drama is set three years after Kahlo\u2019s death, as she returns to Earth for 24 hours during the D\u00eda de Muertos festival: a chance to live for a day without physical pain, and to carry Rivera back to the underworld with her. As Kingsolver has pointed out, Kahlo and Rivera were \u201ctwo of North America\u2019s first artistic celebrities\u201d.<\/p>\n

Kahlo\u2019s Untitled Self-portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird from 1940, Photograph: Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art, 66.6\u00a0Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas, Austin<\/p>\n

One of the most important relationships in Kahlo\u2019s life was with the camera. Frida\u2019s father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a photographer; as a child she learned how to pose and perform. It was an early friendship with the Italian-born photographer Tina Modotti that introduced Kahlo to the idea that she might achieve a liberated, modern life as an artist. Meanwhile, her long-term lover Nickolas Muray, a pioneer of colour photography, took up the camera after a career as an Olympic fencer. Kahlo admired him to such a degree that, in one of her many flights of mythomania, she claimed Hungarian-Jewish ancestry for herself to match his own.<\/p>\n

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Performance art duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis in Las dos Fridas. Photograph: Malba Foundation, Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires\/Yeguas del Apocalipsis\/Tate Collection<\/p>\n

In point of fact, Kahlo\u2019s father was German, of Protestant heritage, born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in Pforzheim in 1871. The artist\u2019s moniker is so familiar to us now that it can be easy to forget that the woman now synonymous with Mexican identity had a German name. It did not escape note during her lifetime: with Hitler in power in the 1930s she sometimes opted instead for her other middle name, Carmen (Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calder\u00f3n).<\/p>\n

Despite frequently painting her own likeness, since her death in 1954, aged 47, popular iconography of Kahlo has derived largely from colour photographs of her by Muray (which are straightforwardly beautiful) rather than her self-portraits (which are often more complicated and painful).<\/p>\n

One of the earliest mass-produced objects to bear her likeness was a 1975 silkscreen print by Rupert Garc\u00eda titled Frida Kahlo (Septiembre). First printed and sold in San Francisco\u2019s Bay Area, it offered Kahlo as a totemic figure for Chicano communities as they emerged from the civil rights movement of the 60s. (It was this poster that gazed over Ya\u00f1ez growing up.) Garc\u00eda based his print on a 1939 photograph by Muray \u2013 Frida with Magenta Rebozo \u2013 and took the hot pink of the shawl she was wearing as the background colour for his own image.<\/p>\n

Yasumasa Morimura\u2019s An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo. Photograph: Yasumasa Morimura\/Luhring Augustine, New York and Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo.<\/p>\n

By the end of the 1970s, Kahlo was taken up by the women\u2019s movement, celebrated as an artist who painted her own reality, whose reputation in life had been eclipsed by her more famous husband. In March 1979, the artist Mary Beth Edelson hosted a party in her New York loft to introduce Ana Mendieta to the city\u2019s feminist art scene. The dress code for the gathering was \u201ccome as your favourite artist\u201d, and guests included Louise Bourgeois (who apparently came dressed as herself) and Hannah Wilke. Mendieta dressed as Kahlo: in a photograph of the gathering<\/a>, she is seated on the floor at the front of the group; her hair braided with ribbons; her eyebrows pencilled into the shape of a hummingbird. Kahlo\u2019s work was still little known and seldom shown internationally at the time.<\/p>\n

That changed when, in 1982, feminist theorist Laura Mulvey co-curated an exhibition of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti\u2019s work at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. It was the first survey of Kahlo\u2019s work outside Mexico and its impact was immense: here was a female artist who had been making works about birth, abortion, miscarriage, illness, identity and heartbreak in the 1930s and 40s. The following year saw the publication of Hayden Herrera\u2019s bestselling biography. Together, the book and exhibition unleashed Fridamania. As if to cement Kahlo\u2019s new superstar status, Madonna proclaimed herself a fan, acquiring a handful of paintings.<\/p>\n

I Belong to Samuel Fastlicht (1951), one of many fruit-themed riddles Kahlo painted that year. Photograph: Private Collection<\/p>\n

It is significant that in her posthumous celebrity, Frida the \u201ccharacter\u201d stepped back into the public eye at almost the same moment her paintings finally reached the mass audience they were never afforded in her lifetime. Perhaps more than any other artist, during her life and after it, her art and her persona have come to seem inseparable.<\/p>\n

Despite that elevation to modern-day secular canonisation, Kahlo was no saint in real life. Alongside her personal heroism and bold art, it is important to remember that Frida was filled with self-doubt and disappointment in relation to her work, and was capable of treating the people she loved badly. If we expect figures we admire to be pure and flawless, we set ourselves up to fail. If there\u2019s one thing Kahlo\u2019s art reminds us, it is not to shy away from exploring the more complex and difficult parts of life.<\/p>\n

Frida: The Making of an Icon<\/a> is at Tate Modern, London, to 3 January. Hettie Judah is author of Lives of the Artists: Frida Kahlo (Laurence King Publishing).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I spend a lot of time in museum gift shops, and no matter where I might be in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":724840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":["post-724839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/724840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}