Erik Visits an (Non) American Grave, Part 1,874

This is the grave, or cool frog urn anyway, of Frida Kahlo.

This is not going to be a typical biography of Kahlo. Do we need that? I assume readers of this site know who Frida Kahlo is. So I am going to make a few points, largely about how she is remembered today and how she is presented to modern audiences as the perfect artists for the extreme individualism identity politics age while erasing the parts of her life that don’t fit that image.

First, Kahlo is obviously one of the great artists of the 20th century and everything I say about they way she is presented to the public later here should not get in the way of this. I’ve seen quite a lot of her work. I love Mexico, my wife is a scholar of Mexico, we spend a lot of time in Mexico, and if American museums want to get people in the door, having a Frida exhibit is a great way to do it, including getting my wife especially to go. The Two Fridas is just one of the great pictures of all time. She was astoundingly productive. Maybe not quite Picasso level of production and certainly not sustained over the decades due to her serious health issues and shorter life, but there’s no shortage of Frida paintings out there. They really range in style. The most beloved tend to be the ones where she is musing on her disability and pain. She also had a stark look and she knew it and the iconic eyebrows were something she knew she could deploy with great power in her art. If you wanted to include Kahlo in a list of the top 10 artists of the 20th century, I would not argue with you, though I might not include her. But then maybe I might.

Second, her relationship with Diego Rivera needs some discussion based on their artistic reputations. Of course at the time, Rivera was the more famous artist. He, along with Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siquerios, were the great muralists of the post-revolutionary era, being paid a lot of money to produce astounding politicized public art on buildings throughout Mexico, but especially in Mexico City. This stuff really is incredible. But it is somewhat out of fashion today. Today, Rivera is still famous, but in the art world, Kahlo is almost universally considered the better and more beloved artist. The overwhelming belief in this direction has everything to do with fashions in the art world. Rivera’s open communism is seen as a bit yucky and his propaganda as too on the nose, where as Kahlo’s displays of her own suffering and own her personal journey fit perfectly into our extraordinarily individualized identity politics age. If you want to argue that Kahlo is the better artist, I won’t say a word against it, but if you dismiss Rivera, or Orozco or Siquerios, I will be outraged. Maybe if contemporary artists actually addressed the public in a way that people could see and understand, they would have more of an impact.

Third, Kahlo was the original white woman dressing as Native, a favorite activity of rich white women for a long time since. Now, yes, by U.S. standards, Kahlo was not strictly white. Her father was German and her mother Mexican, and part Purepecha. But this gets to my broader point here, which is that we can’t look at Kahlo as part of North American identity politics if we want to understand her. By Mexican standards, Kahlo was quite white and would have been seen that way at the time if she hadn’t played up her indigenous background. This was rebellion against the Mexican middle class more than anything else. And that’s fine, but let’s be clear here, for all Frida dressed in indigenous clothes, it is unlikely that indigenous people from Mexico would have really recognized her as such. She was romanticizing the nation’s indigenous past, a big part of the post-revolutionary Mexican left, and playing it up in herself gave her some advantage because most of the intellectuals involved in this project were even whiter than she. In any case, one thing Kahlo pioneered, as women such as Georgia O’Keefe and Mabel Dodge Luhan were doing in New Mexico at the same time, was white women especially finding authenticity in Native people and landscapes. And the intentional attempt to discover authenticity inherently leads to some level of appropriation.

Finally, there is the construction of the Kahlo memory. This is pretty universal, but is really demonstrated for all to see in the Kahlo house, the famous blue house in the Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacán. This is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Mexico and it presents a Frida that visitors want to see. The problem is that this chooses part of her identity while leaving equally important parts of her identity out that might make this whole thing seem a bit out of place for the modern art loving visitor. Specifically, the museums tells a story that makes Frida the perfect icon of 21st century identity politics. Much of this makes sense. Whatever you want to say about her embrace of indigenity, that is easily spun for the modern viewer and she leaned all into that, so the house is filled with archaeological objects (how local people felt about the whites coming and taking all that stuff, I don’t know and it’s unlikely she or Diego really cared). Frida’s survival of the horrific bus accident that left her disabled and in pain the rest of her life is front and center, as it should be. She was a feminist and the museum discusses that. She was sexually fluid and of course 21st century liberals love that as much as Trump loves ripping someone off.

This would all be fine and good if the museum didn’t leave the one thing tying it all together out almost completely. Frida was a communist. Or more accurately, a Communist. She was a member of the Mexican Communist Party, beginning in 1927. This was as strongly held in her life as her disability, her feminism, her indigenity, her sexuality. It was part and parcel of her art, her life, and her self-presentation. And this is almost totally missing because Stalinism isn’t cool anymore. So the museum just drops it. In fact, at best, this is barely acknowleged in Frida World generally. No one is getting the Frida tattoo because she’s a commie. As she stated,

“I have a great restlessness about my paintings. Mainly because I want to make it useful to the revolutionary communist movement… until now I have managed simply an honest expression of my own self … I must struggle with all my strength to ensure that the little positive my health allows me to do also benefits the Revolution, the only real reason to live.”

This is what bothers me. You can not like the politics if you want. I really don’t care. But if we are going to present artists as icons, we should actually present the artist in an honest way. And the hero worship of Frida almost totally ignores the most important part of her life because it doesn’t fit the contemporary North American/European identity politics of the market her modern promoters have so successfully tapped. Among many other things, you can’t understand her sexual relationship with Leon Trotsky if you don’t understand that at its core, his appeal to her was his politics, for example. Not to mention that communist iconography is all over her work.

Frida Kahlo’s urn is in the Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico.

If you would like this series to visit American artists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Mary Cassatt is in France if you want to send me over there. It’d be tough. If not, Louise Bourgeois is in Cutchogue, New York and Lee Krasner is in East Hampton, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.