Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo spun her own life into a myth. She was so good at it that her art almost got lost along the way.
Her persona, fashioned over almost three decades of self-portraits, fused physical suffering and emotional isolation. Her frank depiction of a woman’s psychic pain made her a feminist icon. She became a Chicana heroine and an unintended purveyor of Mexican kitsch. She is an emblem of confessional painting at a time when nothing is intimate anymore.
But this year, as Mexico celebrates the centenary of her birth, the largest retrospective ever of her work attempts to look beyond what Mexicans call Fridamania. The result is a rich view of her art and her life, one that broadens the perspective on her career beyond the narrow, cultish view that has at times threatened to obscure her work. For the majority who know Kahlo’s painting only from the movie version of her life or the unmistakable power of her face on a T-shirt, the exhibition that opened here last month at the Palacio de Bellas Artes may come as a surprise.
“She was completely instinctual,” said Salomon Grimberg, one of the show’s five curators. “She put into art things nobody had dared to put into art before. She was able to access her internal reality and shape it in such a way that it grabs the viewer.”
“Her work is so flashy and so immediate that most people don’t stop to look at her work as a painter,” he added. “They just get caught up in the image. Finally, after 30 years, the work is being reappraised.”