Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern. Sponsored by HSBC with support from Mexico Tourism Board, Tate Modern, 9 June - 9 October 2005, reviewed by Jane Kelly Her paintings were feted by Andre Breton and are collected by Madonna; she is a feminist icon whose pictures combine woman's most intimate experiences with a radical political consciousness; her life-story the explanation for her pictures.
Of course it is standard practice to use biography to explain art. We need only think of Van Gogh to see how this works: mad genius trying to exorcise his demons by fighting off the landscape; a failure during his own, short life only to be hailed as a the father of modern art after his death; his paintings, thick with paint and emotion, selling for tens of millions of dollars by the 1960s.
Like Van Gogh, many of Kahlo's paintings are selfportraits, and much of her work is read as a commentary on her life - her Mexican /European parentage; the polio as a child that withered her leg; her spine and other bones broken in an horrific accident; her relationship with Diego Rivera; the context of Mexican politics. usual hagiographic accounts, visiting the shop you will find Mexican-type bags (in an unfortunate plastic woven material) as well as mugs and the usual, proving how difficult it is to avoid the Frida industry.
Her reputation has undergone a renaissance since the 1970s, mainly as a result of the development of feminist art history. She was rediscovered and placed on a pedestal taller than that of her longterm partner and collaborator, Diego Rivera, originally more famous than her.
More specifically the celebration of her work is part of a rediscovery and revaluation of the work of women artists associated with Surrealism, many of them, like Kahlo, partners and wives of better known male artists.
Much of the writing on her work revels in her life, but others have tried to investigate the problems faced by women artists seeking to represent themselves and other women without succumbing to the dominant male versions of "beauty' or "sexuality.
Even the male Surrealist artists, radical and left wing as many of them were, fell back onto sexist versions of 'unique love, depicting women as 'engulfed in my shadow'. Bellmer sought a different route with his fetishistic and sadomasochistic dolls, but was nonetheless equally informed by male notions of sexuality.
Kahlo's work was hailed by Breton - 'a bomb tied in pink ribbons' — as Surrealist, although she denied affiliation to that movement.
Her work is bound up with biological and other experiences of women: what is it like to inhabit a female body, especially a body that doesn't fit the ideal? What do you feel when your husband is having an affair with your sister?
There is no doubt that many of her most disturbing images - of childbirth and miscarriage; the shattered classical column of her spine; dressed in a male suit with her shorn hair on the floor around her; a naked and bleeding, brutalised female body - reveal sights rarely depicted before, hence the feminist interest in the 1970s and 1980s.
Many of these images were (Left) Henry Ford Hospital (above) Self portrait on the borderline and still are radically different to the norm. However despite the bitter emotions she is able to conjure up, they remain collectable - particularly in recent years with a feminist reinterpretation.
Whereas Rivera's bestknown work is in mural form, painted onto the walls of public buildings and so 'uncollectable', Kahlo's small and portable paintings are by contrast perfect for commodification.
And for those who cannot afford the millions now paid for them, you'll have to make do with the plastic bags.