How Frida Kahlo’s Mythic Life Became Artistic Legend

Only a select group of 20th-century artists have achieved widespread name recognition, most of whom were straight white men. And then there’s Frida Kahlo—a disabled, bisexual, Mexican woman of indigenous descent and radical politics who was largely unknown during her lifetime, other than as the wife of the acclaimed muralist Diego Rivera.

A new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, seeks to suss out how Kahlo defied the odds to become one of the world’s most beloved artists, and has had her image splashed across all manner of products, from tote bags to T-shirts. A selection of over 200 objects inspired by this so-called Frida mania—culled from more than 100,000 Etsy and Amazon listings—is part of the show, which also seeks to highlight Kahlo’s appeal to many different communities.

“The Chicana movement, the women’s movement, the LGBTQ movement, contemporary artists, and more recently, disabled artists—Frida’s legacy has been embraced by all of these groups, both in the United States and in Mexico,” exhibition curator Mari Carmen Ramírez said. “So it’s a completely different kind of show. It’s about how artists have appropriated her for their own purposes, and they’re introducing innovation in the process.”

There are 80 other artists in the show, spanning five generations, including Judy Chicago, Kiki Smith,
Ana Mendieta, the Guerrilla Girls, Miriam Schapiro, and Carrie Mae Weems.

“These are artists who you never associate necessarily with Mexican art or with Frida, but who were very much influenced by her. They acknowledge Frida as a core reference for their work,” Ramírez said, noting that this fascination with Kahlo extends across generations. “When I proposed this exhibition, I thought it would be a historic show focused on the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. And what surprised me was how topical Frida continues to be today.”

The Artist’s Life

Born in 1907, Kahlo grew up at La Casa Azul in Mexico City, which is today a museum dedicated to her life and career. A childhood bout of polio left one leg shorter than the other, but it was the debilitating injuries that she suffered in a bus accident at the age of 18 that left her with lifelong health issues.

Always politically engaged, Kahlo met her future husband, Rivera, through the Mexican Communist Party in 1927. She was just beginning her career as an artist, while he, 20 years her senior, was already well established.

Their relationship would be a tumultuous one, marked by mutual infidelity, and even a brief divorce before remarrying. Rivera had an affair with Kahlo’s sister Cristina Kahlo, while Kahlo was romantically involved with former Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, artist Isamu Noguchi, and photographer Nickolas Muray.

Kahlo was not completely without professional success as an artist. She had a New York solo show in 1938, and traveled widely, counting artistic luminaries such as André Breton, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marcel Duchamp as friends.

Kahlo suffered from ill health for years, and she had to get her right leg amputated at the knee in 1953. That didn’t stop her from attending her only solo show in her native country. She arrived by ambulance, entering the gallery via a hospital trolley and sitting in bed for the duration of the opening. She died in 1954, at just 47 years old.

The Making of an Art History Icon

In 1968, Kahlo became a potent symbol of the Mexican student movement, as protesters adopted her image as an emblem of cultural pride and resistance. It was one of the first moments when her likeness moved beyond the art world and into the realm of political symbolism—an early instance of what would become a long history of activists and movements invoking her image to support a cause.

In the decades that followed, Kahlo exploded in popularity, finding the fame that eluded her in life and achieving rare posthumous celebrity. Teresa del Conde and Raquel Tibol planted the seeds with biographies published in Mexico, respectively, in 1976 and ’77. There were retrospectives in 1978 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Then the breakthrough: a 1982 international traveling show that paired Kahlo with photographer Tina Modotti, stopped in London, Sweden, Germany, the U.S., and Mexico; and a best-selling English-language biography from Hayden Herrera.

The final push to stardom came with the inclusion of eight of her paintings in the blockbuster 1990 exhibition “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Suddenly, the woman who once inspired the condescending headline “Wife of Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art,” was becoming famous in her own right. Kahlo’s story was undeniably captivating, and deeply intertwined with the art she had left behind.

Ramírez watched this all unfold beginning as a young doctoral student in Mexico City in the early ’80s: “I saw the whole evolution of her iconicity,” she said. “I
thought that it would be very interesting to do an exhibition that would reflect that process.”

An Artist Versus Her Own Mythology

Kahlo’s road to recognition had its bumps. Del Conde wrote that “this is one of those cases where the artist’s persona is more rich, complex, and vital than her work.”

Kahlo’s artistic merit seemed to be questioned in a way that never applied to male artists with equally colorful lives, such as Vincent van Gogh. And in some ways, Kahlo’s art has continued to be overshadowed by her biography—and her image, immortalized in photographs as well as so many of her own paintings.

“She created many different kinds of personas through her self-portrait,” Ramírez said. “And one
 of the reasons why people also feel so inclined to embody her is because she’s a multifaceted icon.”

The exhibition catalogue refers to “her many selves,” how Kahlo was at once a self-taught and avant-garde artist, an intellectual and political activist, a loving wife and an independent flapper. Her identity as a mestiza and a bisexual woman made Kahlo a master of code-switching.

Perhaps above all, the artist became renowned for her beauty and style, instantly recognizable for her braided updos and colorful indigenous garments. Her face was plastered on commercial goods (although her unibrow and faint mustache aren’t always reproduced), and Salma Hayek played her in the 2002 film . As a cultural figure and brand, Kahlo eclipsed her stature as an artist.

“It’s what I call ‘the Frida phenomenon,’ which has to do with this intersection of iconicity, myths, and consumer culture,” Ramírez added. “But the aspect that is more dangerous is the commodification and the commercialization of her image. When you put her image in a sanitary napkin, I think you are lowering her to something very crass.”

On the other end of the spectrum are the exhibition’s works by other artists, like the 1975 Rupert García print that is based on a Muray photograph of Kahlo, but presents her as a Chicana woman with dark skin, or (2018) by Rafael Doniz, which overlays her face on the famous photograph , of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara by Alberto Korda.

“I think she would have supported the way most artists have interpreted her,” Ramírez said,

But if there is one project that truly embodies Kahlo’s widespread appeal, it is “Everyone Can Be Frida” by Brazilian photographer Camila Fontenele. Between 2012 and 2020, the artist shot 5,800 portraits of people of all ages, ethnicities, and genders in costume as Kahlo, donning flower crowns and colorful shawls.

“The idea is that anyone can sit down and perform and be Frida,” Ramírez said. “And I think that’s very much what the gist of the show is all about.”