Frida Kahlo’s intense, Mona Lisa-like face gazes out from T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, shopping bags, jewelry, posters, cards, mousepads, watches, pocket mirrors and countless books (including a cookbook). There have been Frida lookalike contests, music composed in her honor, Frida plays, stories and documentaries. There’s even a website that espouses the religion of “Kahloism.” Her iconic self-portraits undoubtedly made her face become synonymous with her work.
While other artists of her time, husband Diego Rivera included, were trying to master the tilting planes of Cubism, Kahlo was painting herself flat on her back, having a miscarriage — and recycling her sorrows as spectacle. This is precisely what made her work important. She was not a pioneer of modern art, but rather a pioneer of confessional culture. Her lifetime of self-portraits blurred the boundary between personal issues and public debate.
However, since her death, Kahlo has been appropriated as the feminist heroine par excellence. This complex figure is often pigeonholed as little more than the embodiment of female assertiveness, an image derived from her self-portraits, where she gained instant recognition as the possessor of perhaps the most famous eyebrows in the history of art. But the totality of Kahlo’s life and work is more than that. Behind her carefully cultivated, sometimes outrageous, public facade was a person for whom art was a lifeline, a way of actuating emotional and physical self-preservation during a sometimes bleak existence.
Kahlo lived her life unconventionally–she joined in Communist causes, formed relationships with both men and women while still married to Diego Rivera, flirted with androgyny, and painted nude self-portraits. She and Rivera lived in separate houses: hers was electric blue, his bright pink, both designed in Bauhaus style. Kahlo was the life of any party and her outspoken, may we say, bawdy style, is one of the reasons Kahlo’s popularity has, for decades, surpassed “cult” status; her notoriety permeating the minds of any ol’ culture monger.