Frida: more of her art, less of the iconography

Charisma preceded Frida Kahlo’s fame. Early photographs show a self-possessed teenager in silk or dressed as a man, and home movie footage records Diego Rivera’s courtship. She turned that presence inward, taking self-portraiture to new levels of psychological and physical revelation, drawing on surrealism and Catholic depictions of pain; in The Heart (1937) a sword pierces her chest while disembodied arms reappear, and one of the full-length Fridas wears a brace that points back to the bus crash that shaped her life.

Some of Kahlo’s most shocking work confronts the accident directly: a 1926 drawing scatters flattened bodies around wreckage while she lies bandaged in the foreground, and another composition re-stages the trauma with a toy cart and doll. Nearby a surgical corset she wore is displayed in a case, painted with a red hammer and sickle over the moulded breasts and an image of a foetus over the abdomen.

Tate’s show interrogates how Kahlo became an “icon,” but in doing so it lets her image crowd out her art.

frida kahlo, self-portraiture, diego rivera, the heart, surrealism, catholic depictions, bus crash, surgical corset, foetus image, iconography