There’s a Frida Kahlo exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and as such things often do, “Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up” (through November 4) tells us something about the culture we inhabit that the curators hadn’t intended.
Kahlo (1907-1954) was of course the arch-bohemian Mexican painter and sometime wife of muralist Diego Rivera who came back into fashion some decades after her death and has remained there since. You can measure her current stature either by citing this blockbuster exhibition at the Victoria and Albert or, more pointedly, with the 2002 hagiographical film (Frida), directed by Julie Taymor, in which Kahlo was played by Salma Hayek.
I should declare, at the outset, my own bias on the subject. Kahlo’s deliberately primitive style is not much to my taste, and her painterly output was comparatively modest. Indeed, as is often the case with cultural icons, much of her appeal to modern enthusiasts has more to do with her own flamboyant self than her merits as an artist. Still, while Kahlo’s artistic and personal styles leave me cold, it’s not hard to see how others find her appealing.
Kahlo’s life was tragic and triumphant: Sexually ambiguous in machismo-ridden Mexico, she contracted polio as a child, was gravely injured as a student in a traffic accident, and suffered from lifelong spinal pain and assorted disorders. Her gangrenous right leg was amputated a year before her premature death. At the same time, she was a notably successful female artist-rebel in a hostile time and place, and as a fervent Mexican nationalist, an equally successful and self-dramatizing character.
Kahlo is probably best remembered for her exuberant dress and accessorizing, based in colorfully retrograde Mexican peasant garb, along with her undisguised facial hair and a famous unibrow. All this has made her not only a posthumous feminist hero but serial inspiration for modern fashion designers—Givenchy, Gaultier, Gucci, etc.—whose clothing lines, needless to say, are priced beyond the means of most indigenous Mexicans.
In that sense, it is worth noting that the Victoria and Albert’s “Making Her Self Up” is not a showcase for Kahlo’s art—although there are some paintings—but a display of personal objects that helped to form her image: half-empty flasks of makeup, clothing, jewelry, embroidery, her steel prosthetic leg shod in a red leather boot.
In another age, this assortment of homely possessions and intimate items would be seen as a standard collection of saint’s relics, reverently displayed for instruction to the faithful. I note also that reviews of the exhibition, while resolutely secular in tone, are careful to pay homage to Kahlo’s status as political icon and social inspiration: A product of Mexico’s upper-middle class, her outward identification with that country’s mestizo population and disdain for her own comfortable origins are described in what amount to religious terms. Like any suitable saint, she suffered for her life and works, which inspire the worshipful.
What is not described, in any detail, are her very specific and fervent political beliefs—and therein lies a tale. For Frida Kahlo, along with Diego Rivera, was a lifelong and pointedly unapologetic left-wing radical and, at various intervals, member of Mexico’s Communist party. One of her last works, Self Portrait with Stalin (1954), depicts the recently deceased Soviet dictator with the artist modestly arrayed in the foreground. So close, in fact, was Kahlo’s identification with communism and so resolute her devotion to Stalin that in 1940 she was briefly suspected by Mexican authorities of complicity in the murder (in Coyoacán near Mexico City) of Stalin’s nemesis Leon Trotsky, whose assassin she knew.
Whatever one may think of Frida Kahlo’s art and habits, it’s hard to avoid the fact that her long and diligent political allegiance was sworn to the service of one of history’s most frightening tyrants and mass murderers. The irony, of course, is that if she and Rivera had lived and worked not in Mexico or California or New York, as they did, but in the Soviet Union of their dreams, they would both likely have been arrested, tortured, and killed—as some 20 million subjects of Stalin were dispatched—at their hero’s whim.
Yet a curious double standard comes into play here. If Kahlo had been an Italian Fascist and not a Mexican Communist, or an admirer of National Socialism, or anything else on the radical-right spectrum, it’s impossible to imagine that such a pertinent detail would be politely dismissed, or casually overlooked, or briefly mentioned in the neutral terms invariably applied to Kahlo’s politics.
The Washington Post’s feature story about the Victoria and Albert exhibition is typical, in that respect, mentioning her devotion to Stalin’s regime in fleeting, even sympathetically contextual, terms:
Like her crypto-peasant dresses and shadowy moustache, Frida Kahlo’s unrepentant Stalinism is treated by chroniclers not as an uncomfortable truth, or disturbing moral failure, but as a mild, endearing eccentricity. To be sure, it’s always difficult to separate artists and their work from personal misbehavior or distasteful opinions. But if one set of historic loyalties—to Franco’s Spain, say, or the Confederacy—is enough to toss certain figures beyond the pale, why should another, and considerably more lethal, allegiance be exempt?
