Frida Kahlo was little known outside the art world until about 40 years ago, so much so that when she died in 1954, the New York Times announced: ‘Frida Kahlo, artist, wife of Diego Rivera, has died’. Since then, things have changed a lot and Frida Kahlo has become a cultural icon. Similar to Munch’s Scream, Michelangelo’s David, or van Gogh’s Starry Night an entire industry has grown up around her. Now you can find her face with its, piercing gaze and pronounced eyebrows, on coffee mugs, T-shirts, playing cards, key rings, magnets, postcards and posters, but also more unlikely objects such as, tiles, cosmetics and cleaning products and even on food products. What is particularly interesting, however, that unlike the other examples mentioned, it is the artist herself rather than one of her paintings that has become iconic.
The rediscovery of Frida Kahlo as an artist can probably be traced back to the 1982 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, in which the painter’s works were displayed alongside those of the photographer Tina Modotti, or to the seminal biography written by Hayden Herrera, the main reference text on Kahlo’s life, which came out a few years later. Since the early 1990s, images depicting Frida Kahlo have permeated our daily lives, many films have retraced her life, many celebrities have turned out to be fans of her – the pop star Madonna, who is also her collector, above all – and her works have repeatedly broken auction records.
In addition to tracing the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Nickolas Muray, this exhibition also aims to investigate the particular relationship between Kahlo and her image. A painter who made extensive use of self-portraiture, Kahlo has in fact joined the small number of artists who have undergone a process of iconisation and whose figure has often transcended the scope of their work.
Several factors contributed to this process of transformation into an icon, some of which Kahlo herself was no stranger to. It is well known that the artist chose to dress according to traditional Mexican costumes, and also that Kahlo altered her biography to make it more sympathetic to the cause of the Mexican revolution (pretending to have been born in 1910, the year the uprisings broke out, and to be of Jewish origin). Of particular interest is also the fact that Kahlo loved to be photographed and never shied away from the lens of the most diverse photographers, who in turn have given us a very extensive documentation that is difficult to compare with that of other artists.
In this room is presented an important collection of stamps from different countries – including Mexico, S. Tomé and Principe, Mozambique, Serbia, Niger, Maldives, Central African Republic – celebrating the artist. Produced on the occasion of various Kahlo-related anniversaries, these stamps are also proof of the artist’s international success: Frida is the first Hispanic woman whose image is portrayed on a United States philatelic product