At the shrine of Frida

Frida Kahlo (1907–54) is apparently the most famous female artist in history (who is the nearest competitor, I wonder — Grandma Moses or Paula Rego? Probably not Artemisia Gentileschi), and as such, with a recent feature film dedicated to her legend, a hot commercial property. The merchandising angle alone is substantial. There’s never been a solo exhibition of her work in England, so, with her reputation at an all-time high, a show becomes a viable and desirable museum proposition. Yet Kahlo is such a cult figure (‘bohemian artist, a victim turned survivor, proto-feminist, sexual adventurer who challenged gender boundaries’) that the Tate exhibition pamphlet makes this extraordinary statement: ‘First and foremost, Frida Kahlo was a painter, and for this reason Tate Modern’s exhibition focuses upon the frank testimony of the paintings themselves.’ Almost as if the art were a lamentable expedient, but would have to do in the regrettable absence of the star herself. And looking at the exhibition, there is something in that…

Apart from the guards, I counted half-a-dozen men amidst the hordes of women and children visiting the show on the morning I went round. There were parties of schoolgirls, some very young indeed, and even pregnant women come to worship at the shrine of Frida, as if it were essential for babies in utero to imbibe her message. In the first room there is a lovely doomy self-portrait, a mature depiction of the handsome face with its regulation mono-brow, entitled ‘Thinking about Death’ — just to set the scene. Kahlo suffered from polio as a child, which left her with a withered leg, and was then gravely injured in a traffic accident at the age of 18. (Her injuries were truly horrific: her bad leg alone suffered 11 fractures.) It was while she was convalescing that she began to paint. She was in pain for the rest of her life, underwent more than 30 operations, and not surprisingly resorted to drink as well as drugs to deal with it. Yet she lived life to the full, had many lovers, and painted like a demon. She dressed magnificently and embraced nationalist politics. The novelist Carlos Fuentes recalls seeing her enter a box in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City like ‘an Aztec goddess’.

Kahlo’s father was a German–Jewish immigrant photographer, her mother of mixed Mexican (Spanish and Indian) blood. Frida married the great mural painter Diego Rivera (they were known as the elephant and the dove) and entered a lifelong mutual obsession that was stormy, to put it mildly. The exhibition trails through a couple of rooms of not very good early work, including watercolours and drawings, before encountering some arresting images of Birth and Death. (I hope the younger viewers don’t suffer from nightmares.) Then in the fifth room is the famous marriage portrait, along with a couple of powerful paintings about national identity, particularly ‘Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States’. This opposes pre-Columbian culture with mechanisation, but the real brooding presence (as it is in the vast majority of her pictures) is Kahlo herself. She said: ‘I paint myself because I am alone. I am the subject I know best.’ Unfortunately, this ravening self-obsession quickly grows oppressive.

No one in their right mind expects an artist to be modest, but this is ridiculous. As a painter, Kahlo was self-taught. Although she achieved a considerable measure of skill in image-making, taking much from the Mexican folk tradition of ex voto paintings, it is as an illustrator of her own myth that she chose to operate. There are no compensatory passages of beautiful brushwork to distract from the obsession. Even the enjoyable still-life paintings are about her national pride, and the oddest of these pictures, ‘The Chick’, is overcomplicated — a simpler image would have been more effective. Room 9 is full of her self-portraits (with one of Rivera for light relief), occasionally depicted with a spider monkey, that symbol of lust, and once with loose hair beginning to look like poor old Michael Jackson. Probably the most famous painting in the whole exhibition is ‘The Two Fridas’ in which she’s depicted broken-hearted. I overheard one tiny tot saying solemnly to her teacher ‘she killed herself’ as she studied this fearful image before being hustled on to the next shock to the system. (Should there be an age limit for viewing these works?)

This exhibition, of some 70 mostly small paintings, is in many ways compelling. The faux-na