THE ARTIST AS SUBJECT

A current exhibition of Frida Kahlo8217;s work underscores that the painter is a work of art herself

There aren8217;t many artists whose reputations have yo-yo8217;d like Frida Kahlo8217;s. During her lifetime and for decades after her death in 1954, she was 8220;just8221; the colourful painter-wife of the superstar Diego Rivera. Beginning in the 1970s, her star eclipsed his: she became the icon of female and ethnic empowerment and of radical self-expression. But it8217;s not Kahlo8217;s paintings that matter; her crucial artwork was herself in a role: as a woman, an ethnic woman, and an ethnic woman artist such as the world had never seen.

It took Kahlo a while to come up with that trademark character. A formal photo of the Kahlo family taken in 1926 shows everything as it should be, with Frida as tidy and composed8212;except that the 19-year-old is dressed in one of her father8217;s suits and wears her hair slicked back like a man8217;s. That first glimpse of Kahlo gives a hint that, for the rest of her life, who she makes herself out to be will be as important as what she makes as a painter.

So she constructs a vision of herself as an idiosyncratic woman, immersed in her homemade visions of femininity and Mexicanness and resistance to norms8212;social, sexual, artistic, political.

A new Frida show in Philadelphia begins with more than 100 photos of the artist never seen before. Of all these stunning pictures, there8217;s hardly one in which Kahlo doesn8217;t look as though she8217;s onstage. She wears thick lipstick even for a sickbed photo, where most of her face is hidden by medical straps. Kahlo appearing out of costume would be like Picasso giving up his brush.

Kahlo adopted and adapted an eccentric, hybrid version of Mexican folk dress. She could cross a magenta rebozo shawl across her chest in the bandoleer style of Mexico8217;s female revolutionaries, and also wear colonial white lace. And she topped off her outfits with exotic hairdos and garlands. Like her unpolished painting style, Kahlo8217;s alien costume sets her up as an authentic 8220;primitive8212;unsullied by the studied artificiality of European modern art.

Kahlo8217;s self-portraits are often praised as acts of searching self-inquiry, but I find them more theatrical than probing. Frida, the boldly authentic Mexicana is, of course, front and centre in her self-portraits. The paintings actually make her out to be less gorgeous than she comes off in the photographs, maybe because personal beauty isn8217;t part of her artistic image as a monkey-taming 8220;primitive.8221;

Kahlo8217;s work is filled with abstruse, even unintelligible symbolism. This also sets her up as a cultural rarity, out in a world of her own. By using imagery that is so hard to understand, Kahlo becomes something like the last speaker of some vanished tongue.

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I can8217;t say I admire Kahlo8217;s pseudo-primitive way of painting. In the hands of an absolute sophisticate8212;which she was8212;it can seem cloying and contrived, or just unskilled. But the larger picture that Kahlo8217;s art presents, of someone committed to investigating how identities get built by building one herself, on canvas and in life8212;strikes me as absolutely radical and fascinating.

The weaknesses in Kahlo8217;s paintings are irrelevant so long as you think of those pictures as nothing more than documents or ephemera left over from the larger creative project of her life.
-Blake Gopnik LAT-WP