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 9^th of August 2026

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacan, Mexico City, Mexico in 1907 and died there in 1954.  In 1929 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 20^th century.

Diego Rivera - Portrait of Frida Kahlo (1935, oil on canvas)

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.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with loose hair (1947, oil-on-masonite)

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.  Early self portraits like Self-Portrait with Velvet Dress, (1926, oil on canvas) tend to emulate European models, the painting is static and traditional.  Later on Kahlo's painting becomes freer, less conventional and more personal.  In her Untitled Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird (1940, oil on canvas) Frida is depicted with a necklace of thorns, a reference to Christ's martyrdom and crown of thorns.  Religious iconography is an important source for Kahlo; she entertains both the notion of sainthood and celebrity.  A thin moustache is also visible in this painting, a subtle reference to Kahlo's androgyny which she was keen to allude to and emphasize.  In her earlier painting Memory the Heart (1937, oil on metal), painted in the aftermath of husband Diego Rivera's affair with her sister Cristina Kahlo, her heart is physically removed from her body, she stands with one foot on dry land and the other in the sea.  She is suspended between her school uniform and her traditional Tuhuantepec costume as if to say that she is closer to womanhood now her heart has been broken in such a way.  Heavy symbolism and religious allusion surround Kahlo's self-portraits.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Velvet Dress, (1926, oil on canvas)

Artists and radicals like photographer and model Tina Modotti (1896-1942) and former leader of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) came in and out of Kahlo's life.  For a time, Diego Rivera gave Trotsky a place at la Casa Azul (the Blue House, Diego and Frida's residence in Mexico City) until they drifted apart.  Trotsky moved to another residence and was assassinated there by an NKVD agent.  Kahlo received a commission from Clare Booth Luce to paint a portrait of her friend Dorothy Hale, an aspiring actress, who had committed suicide by jumping off the Hampshire House Building in New York.  The painting, presented in this exhibition, is conceived in the form of a retablo or devotional piece complete with a brief text describing the actress who is depicted jumping, falling and lying bleeding on the ground.  Luce was so upset by the portrait's directness that she considered destroying it but instead she had her own name painted out of the text.  It is still startling in its candour and extreme sincerity to the facts.

Julien Levy - Frida Kahlo, (1938, Gelatin silver print)

Both Kahlo and her friend and colleague Tina Modotti embraced the new art of photography.  Another would-be lover, Julien Levy (1906-1981), gave Kahlo her first solo exhibition in New York in 1938.  It was a smash hit and Kahlo sold half of the paintings on display.  Levy also took a series of candid photographs of Kahlo which are presented in this exhibition.  Frida's still lives such as I Belong to Samuel Fastlicht are also unusual and interesting, referring to pre-Colombian elements like the clay dog sculpture, the Mexican flag and some text which refers to her dentist, Samuel Fastlicht.  The composition is intriguing and the modelling and colour superb.

 

Frida Kahlo - Still life I Belong to Samuel Fastlicht (1951, oil on canvas)

Kahlo is a second world heroine, dealing with topics outside the discourse of established first world femininity such as a woman's body, abortion, androgyny, bisexuality, a concatenation of taboos and forbidden subjects.  Kahlo's behaviour is raw, unevolved, unacceptable until she influences the fundamentals of art discourse as the causes she espouses gain centrality.  The heart of this exhibition is Kahlo's own paintings and the paintings of those, like Diego Rivera who knew her well.  If only there were more of them.  The exhibition also details the making of Kahlo's image and the influence it has had on other artists.  This extension of the exhibition was more to do with marketing and merchandising than with Kahlo's actual influence but it was nevertheless interesting to learn how she has been picked up and reinterpreted by the Chicano/a population (these are Mexicans living in the USA).

Rio Yanez - Ghetto Frida's Mission Memories

Tehuana dresses from Kahlo's archive

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, August 2026