This past International Women’s Day I received a spam e-mail from a craft company. They urged me to spend 15 hours “Making Women who Made History” by crocheting a doll honoring a famous woman. And who might I be able to immortalize via a $75 crochet kit? First up, Emmeline Pankhurst. I know who will be second. Bingo. Here she is; Frida Kahlo, complete with folk skirt, beetling brows and gold chain. For an extra $90, the company will throw in a Queen Elizabeth II kit.
This, then, is the present status of Kahlo. On a par with our former monarch and only just behind Votes for Women. This is only the beginning. So valuable is the Kahlo name and brand that only last week the Frida Kahlo Corporation, which owns many trademarks associated with Kahlo, fired a legal threat across the bows of online merchants for unauthorized use of imagery. Although the artist herself was a staunch anti-capitalist, her image is now a valuable commodity, worth millions. Meanwhile, a vast immersive biographical exhibition is under way in Berlin, and this autumn will move, with great fanfare, to the Grand Palais in Paris.
However, there is no need to step into a gallery to be immersed in Kahlo. How about enjoying her art on a jaunty fridge magnet, umbrella, designer sweatshirt, chocolate bar or solar-powered dancing woman? She is on display in airports, galleries, boutiques and tourist shops across the globe. There is a term for it: “Fridamania” — recalling Beatlemania. This avowed left-winger even touches the Conservatives; when she was prime minister, Theresa May wore a Kahlo bracelet onstage during the 2017 Tory party conference.
How did this radical Mexican artist, lover of Trotsky, and wife to Mexico’s famed muralist Diego Rivera, transform after her death aged 47 into not only a feminist icon, but also a fashion influencer? She has been monetized and commodified, and is even a force on social media, with an Instagram account followed by more than a million people. A “kitsch marketing bonanza” is how The New York Times has described it.
This posthumous journey by the little-known Kahlo to global fame is on a par with Vermeer and Van Gogh, but Kahlo is in some ways more of a commodity. I don’t think there is a Vincent van Gogh Barbie, for example, but there is a Frida Kahlo Barbie — an extremely controversial one at that. Thinner, whiter and less disabled than Kahlo herself (she had polio as a child, received devastating injuries in a bus accident aged 18 and wore a prosthetic leg in the last year of her life), the doll was publicly criticized by Kahlo’s great-niece. She won a temporary injunction against the Frida Kahlo Corporation to stop it being sold, but the Mexican Superior Court of Justice ruled in favor of the corporation.
How about enjoying her art on a jaunty fridge magnet, umbrella, designer sweatshirt, chocolate bar or solar-powered dancing woman?
When she died in 1954 Kahlo had had only a few solo shows and most of her paintings were unsold. She had achieved some success, becoming the first 20th-century Mexican artist to have a painting in the Louvre collection, but she was firmly in the shadow of her husband. At a sale of Latin American art by Sotheby’s in New York as late as May 1985, a painting depicting her as a deer pierced by arrows remained unsold. Thirty-six years later a Kahlo self-portrait was sold at auction for nearly $35 million, breaking the records for Latin American art. The painting was called Diego and I — but the celebrated muralist had been eclipsed by his wife.
Kahlo had an almost prophetic sense of how her work would resonate in the future, through the way she lived, dressed and positioned herself. Indeed, her focus on her face and body, provoked by chronic physical pain and mental anguish (due to her turbulent marriage), prefigures the rise of the selfie.
Yet it was something far more straightforward that signaled the start of her rise to fridge magnet-level fame. Her love for and championing of Mexican traditional dress and the folk traditions of her country resonated with the American civil rights movement of the mid-1960s. “The Chicano [Mexican-American] civil rights movement was part of the struggles in the United States,” Professor Patience Schell, chairwoman of Hispanic studies at Aberdeen University, says. “Part of the movement was about looking at Mexican culture for inspiration. There was a lot of interest in drawing on folk traditions. Kahlo’s work, which already did that, was an important inspiration.”
For feminist art historians of the late 1960s and 1970s searching for “lost” female artists, Kahlo was an ideal candidate. “There was a spirit of excavation in the air,” Laura Mulvey, an eminent feminist film theorist, tells me. “There was momentum, a desire to dig up the past and find these women, to understand a little more about what women’s art could offer culture in general, offer to women to celebrate.”
There is a term for it: “Fridamania” — recalling Beatlemania.
Mulvey is a crucial part of the story. She and her partner, the academic Peter Wollen, were invited to visit Mexico City by a friend in 1979, and there discovered the art and culture of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20.
Mulvey admits she had never previously heard of Kahlo, but she and Wollen returned to the UK determined to bring her work to greater prominence. They went to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which was then run by Nicholas Serota. Their aim was to present an exhibition of work by Kahlo and her friend, the Italian photographer Tina Modotti, to create a conversation about modernism, politics and women’s art. It captured the Zeitgeist, and Serota (who went on to champion Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and became director of the Tate) showed his knack for understanding what might resonate with the public. Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti opened in 1982. It was the first retrospective of Kahlo’s work outside Mexico.
The show toured to the Grey Art Museum in Manhattan in the spring of 1983. The New York Times reported: “They were artists, Marxists, and each developed her talent in the shadow of a gifted man,” going on to say that “Kahlo is the reason for seeing this show”. A young Madonna reportedly went to see it, and started buying Kahlo pictures. The show moved to the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. National headlines ensued, and Fridamania was under way.
Celebrity canonization via Hollywood was the obvious next step.
Frida, starring Salma Hayek, came out in 2002 and was nominated for six Oscars. A blockbuster exhibition at the V&A in 2018 presented a collection of Kahlo’s personal artifacts and clothing, retrieved from her now-famous home, La Casa Azul, where they had been locked away for 50 years after her death. It seemed as if Fridamania had reached its peak.
But the trade in immersive shows, tote bags and in gallery shops would suggest otherwise. “I wonder sometimes whether the people who carry the tote bags and so on really know all of her story,” says the American journalist Stephanie Mencimer, a staff writer at Mother Jones. “It’s like with Che Guevara. People have seen the pictures, but don’t really know what he’s famous for. And I wonder if Frida has reached that point.
“The thing that always gets glossed over, especially in the US, is her politics. We put her on a stamp, which is kind of crazy because people might not know she was a devout supporter of Stalin, up until the minute she died.” Tell that to the Fridamaniacs getting busy with their crochet hooks.
Rosie Millard is a U.K.-based freelance journalist and the author of The Brazilian
