FRIDA KAHLO: THE MAKING OF AN ICON at the TATE MODERN on the 9th of August 2026

 

FRIDA KAHLO: THE MAKING OF AN ICON at the TATE MODERN on the 9th of August 2026

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacan, Mexico City, Mexico in 1907 and died there in 1954.  She married muralist and artist Diego Rivera (1896-1957) and was married to him to the end of her life apart from a brief separation.  She was injured in a tram crash at the age of 18 and had to live with pain and disability.

Untitled Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird (1940, oil on canvas)

This exhibition is not so concerned with recounting the story of Kahlo’s life (most committed Kahlo fans know it anyway) but in interrogating the nature of her celebrity and iconic status.  This is perhaps a bit after the heyday of Kahlo idolatry which was the 1980s. 

Memory the Heart (1937, oil on metal)

While Kahlo’s spouse Rivera was a public artist, espousing radical politics and making murals celebrating the Mexican and Russian revolutions, Kahlo’s art was intimate, subjective and personal.  These twin approaches almost fuse into one overwhelming personality that seem to tell the story of Mexican culture and society in the 20th century.

Firstly, it’s important to point out the scale of advertising, marketing, sales of T-shirts, bags, fridge magnets, socks, postcards and other tawdry memorabilia to which even this reviewer is susceptible having owned a pair of Frida Kahlo socks at one point.  Even the Tate Modern is now officially red faced about this plethora of stuff so to ally the public’s disquiet, they have made the exhibition about the marketing of Kahlo’s image, exposing the countless allusions, interpretations and even shameless rip offs of Kahlo’s life and legend.  At the same time, the Tate Modern is also keen to flog all the usual Kahlo memorabilia.

Kahlo’s exemplary life, symbolic of almost anything including feminism, surrealism, androgyny, chicano/a liberation, communism, socialism, detracts from the limited scope of her painting.  Her self-possession is not exactly distracting, she was, after all, a woman with many problems, but it is a facet of her art which is understated by the exhibition.  It’s clear that both Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera were shrewd enough to realise that the creation and presentation of their own image was a marketing scheme as well as an artistic project. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paul Cezanne and Amadeo Modigliani

Image
Paul Cezanne: Painting People at the National Portrait Gallery and Amadeo Modigliani at the Tate Modern on the 26 th & 27 th of November 2017 Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) was born in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France but soon moved to Paris to be with his childhood friend, the writer Emile Zola.  Throughout his life he divided his time between Paris and Aix.  Cezanne’s father, Louis-Auguste Cezanne (1798-1886) had accrued a fortune firstly by selling hats and then as a banker.   He wanted his son to be a lawyer. However, Cezanne’s ambition was to be an artist.   His wish to be purposefully engaged in a creative life and to marry the woman he loved were all opposed by his father who also happens to be the subject of the first major painting in this exhibition.  Cezanne’s painting of his father, ‘The Artist’s Father reading L’Evenement’ (oil on canvas, 1866) demonstrates the dominant influence of Cezanne’s early life.  Louis-Auguste is ...
Read more

THE PAINTED VEIL and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

The Painted Veil (2006), dir John Curran, starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Diana Rigg and Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), dir Mike Newell, starring Javier Bardem The Painted Veil , adapted from a Somerset Maugham novel, is a moving tale of a love affair played out before the backdrop of a cholera epidemic in China sometime in the early 20th century. The film depicts the horrors of cholera, the beauty of the Chinese landscape, the trials and tribulations of Walter and Kitty Fane’s relationship. Love in the Time of Cholera , (another adaptation from the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, adapted by Ronald Harwood) shares with The Painted Veil the theme of Europeans in a non-European locale, coping, or failing to cope, with cholera. In The Painted Veil , Walter Fane (played by Edward Norton, an American actor with a high art reputation), a British medical official sent to a remote Chinese Province to help control a cholera epidemic is estranged from his wife Kitty, who has be...
Read more

DENOUEMENT at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 23rd of October 2025

Image
  DENOUEMENT at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 23 rd of October 2025 Patrick O'Kane as Liam and Anna Healy as Edel This new play Denouement at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, was a pleasant surprise as the content diverged from the expected literary content, as expressed by the play’s title.   Ultimately, the play was not overly literary, but a better title would enhance things. Extraordinary elements are explained by the surround sound of a world war which is sometimes far and sometimes harrowingly close.   Television sets scattered around the set send warnings but also entertain with banal musicals.   Old technology like a typewriter is contrasted with jarringly new elements like mobile phones and the internet. Minor catastrophes intrude on Liam and Edel’s existence such as a crashed van and distant explosions.   Friends phone the couple to be admonished.   A constant metallic buzz surrounds the action, murmuring irritatingly, becoming a crescendo. ...
Read more