OpinionFrida Kahlo This article is more than 5 years oldMemes are of the moment – Frida Kahlo is for ever
This article is more than 5 years oldRhiannon Lucy CosslettIf the cultural ubiquity has drawn you in, check out her magnificent art at the V&A’s forthcoming exhibitionIt feels as though Frida Kahlo is everywhere. She is on T-shirts, candles, duvet covers; she is on the front cover of the Little Book of Feminist Saints and was a cake on The Great British Bake Off (Paul Hollywood had never heard of her, despite attending art school). There she is, embroidered on the front of a £145 cushion. Look: she is bunting, she is necklace. She is gif, she is emoji, she is meme. I bet anything you like she starts to appear in the baby name charts.
The subject of a major exhibition beginning in June at the V&A, Kahlo, with her famous monobrow, scowls at us from the pages of newspaper supplements, including the Guardian. She is lauded as a fashion icon, a brand. She has become a Barbie doll – a very white one, with plucked eyebrows and a miraculously healed body; Kahlo was disabled, and of mixed Mexican, indigenous and German-Hungarian cultural heritage. Much of this commercialisation does a talented, transgressive artist a huge disservice.
The cult of Frida Kahlo did not begin this year: it has built over time, especially after her work was reappraised by feminists in the 1970s. In Mexico, she took on the status of an icon many years ago – how bemusing it must seem to see her so appropriated now by globalised capitalism. An excellent biography by Hayden Herrera was published in 1983. The film of her life, produced and starring a determined Salma Hayek, who was forced to put up with Harvey Weinstein in order to have the film made, came out in 2002.
Hilariously, considering the fact that Kahlo was a communist who had a relationship with Trotsky, and a disabled woman who in modern Britain would no doubt have had her benefits cut, Theresa May wore her on a bracelet at Tory conference last year. But it feels that this year the Kahlo coveting has reached its zenith, and very little of it seems to have anything to do with her art.
When I read about Kahlo lately, it is hard to believe that the subject matter is the same artist I studied and loved. Her mystical, dreamlike, violent, shamanistic, physical art is reduced to the status of a selfie – we are told that she would have done well on Instagram. This complex woman, who lived with chronic pain, suffered miscarriage and abortions – she desperately wanted a child – slept with men and women, kept monkeys as pets, and who, yes, appeared in Vogue, has now become a meme. Repackaged and recuperated, her immense cultural contribution is reduced.
The woman who painted herself bleeding, attached to a hovering foetus in Henry Ford hospital (La cama volando, 1932) is reduced to the status of advertisement. No one wants a T-shirt emblazoned with A Few Small Nips (Passionately in Love), 1935, a harrowing but wry look at violence against women and the emotional violence done to her by the infidelity of her husband, Diego Rivera. No one is making My Nurse and I, 1937, in which Frida is a big-headed baby ingesting the milk from a mysterious, shadowy figure (possibly herself), into a cake.
She has become this season’s pineapple or flamingo, trendy symbols which adorn everything and are ultimately forgottenThis is not to say that all of the tributes being paid to Kahlo are reductive and shallow. Her love of fashion is well documented, and I have no doubt that the V&A show will do her justice. Roland Mouret gets it. Fashion designers are artists, I would expect them, by and large, to understand and do justice to her legacy. Her clothes were an expression of her communist politics and her indigenous heritage.
Fabric designers, too, have produced beautiful tributes: I love the print Frida’s Garden, by Alexander Henry, because I think it captures something of who she was. It is also heartening to see so many biographies and reappraisals of her in book form, though I am not sure what she would have made of being lauded as a saint. But this trickle down into mass marketing and consumption is dispiriting.
It’s not even about her art: it is about her face. She has become this season’s pineapple or flamingo – trendy symbols, which for a brief flash adorn everything and are then ultimately forgotten. We’ve had owls, foxes, cactuses, moustaches. What next? Dead artists are constantly raided, appropriated and commodified. Are we to see Magritte’s bowler hat motif (already an expensive lamp)? Max Ernst’s Birdman? A pair of jeans with Goya’s depiction of Saturn devouring his son on the arse?
Maybe I’m just being a Kahlo hipster, a pretentious art lover. I have written before about how the internet is changing the way we engage with art history, and much of what it offers is positive. I heard an anecdote about a little girl who disappeared upstairs and came down sporting a monobrow. Brilliant! Frida Kahlo would have loved such a tribute. But I can’t get away from thinking that she would have felt this marketplace co-option of her image is, well, total bullshit.
One positive is that this cultural ubiquity will encourage some to seek out her magnificent art, to attend the V&A exhibition, read her diaries or travel to the Blue House one day. Kahlo only received a full obituary in the New York Times in 2016. Prior to that, the paper’s perfunctory obituary from 1954 opened with the words: “Frida Kahlo, wife of Diego Rivera, the noted painter, was found dead in her home today.”
Now that her complex, transgressive art is rightly regarded as superior to her husband’s, we too have a duty to do her justice.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
Explore more on these topicsShareReuse this contentncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJuforqmutOiqp%2BqlZp8c3yQcWammaJkf3p7xaugnZldoK6puM5mmq6kpKq%2ForiMrpmiqaWewbp5wKurZq5dlrulecBmnLGgmZe2tbXOpw%3D%3D