Upon completing my MFA, I went to work as the exhibits curator at Arizona State University Museum of Anthropology, where I was immersed in issues of representation and authority related to the production of museum exhibitions. Because the graduate classroom was the most satisfying environment in which to consider the endless implications of putting objects, cultures, and histories on display, I decided to complete a master of art in art history. During my program of study, the Metropolitan Museum of Art traveled its blockbuster exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, for which one of Kahlo’s self-portraits was reproduced as an advertisement on billboards and in museum brochures and magazines. Mexico epitomized the superficiality with which such exhibitions tend to represent complex histories and transnational relationships, and I found it was a prime subject for poststructural analysis. As I considered its representations of Mexico in terms of the presentation of Kahlo’s paintings, I began to think more critically about the uneasiness with which I simultaneously was enthralled and wearied by interpretations of the artist’s life and work.
With encouragement from J. Gray Sweeney, I continued writing about Kahlo’s work despite being advised that there already was a glut of essays and manuscripts about the artist’s life and work. I am grateful to Corrine Schleif for helping me to consider the ways in which the popular celebrity of Frida Kahlo complies with the art history of Frida Kahlo. And, thanks to Julie Codell’s brilliant command of feminist, semiotic, and critical literary theory, I finally was able to analyze the complex social, cultural, and political structures through which Kahlo’s life has been recalled and recounted. Thus I began working on a master’s thesis incorporating alternative interpretations of Kahlo’s paintings that resist reducing the artist to an icon of tragedy and triumph. Following that project I began developing this deeper analysis of the historical context in which Kahlo worked.
Without the stimulating conversations with Nancy Mahaney and Julie Katz, I would not have sustained the subsequent years of reading, writing, and revising. As the manuscript developed into its current form, Arturo Aldama graciously agreed to read a portion of it and offered valuable suggestions for ways to enrich my interpretations. With support from Suzanna Tamminen and in response to comments by anonymous reviewers, my initially vague yet unsettling feeling toward the narrative of Kahlo’s life has been articulated as an analysis of representation. I could not have obtained permission to reproduce Kahlo’s work without generous assistance from Dulce Aldama, to whom I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude. I am indebted to Mary Crittendon for her editorial work. And, finally, I thank Owen Lindauer for encouraging me throughout this and other projects.
M.A.L.
Devouring Frida
Introduction: Rereading Frida Kahlo
IN THE EARLY 1970s Frida Kahlo was only known as a subject for interpretation and admiration among a small academic and artworld audience. Films, exhibitions, and publications produced in the 1970s and early 1980s generated the shift, in the United States, from seeing Kahlo as unsung artist to Frida as venerated heroine. Among her biographers and admirers she is referred to simply as Frida, which indicates the mythologizing of the artist but also imparts a sense of intimate familiarity between painter and admirers. By 1991 when New York’s Metropolitan Museum used one of Kahlo’s self-portraits to advertise the traveling exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries on billboards, in newspapers, and within museums, Kahlo’s popularity had reached “cult” status, and her notoriety permeated United States popular culture.1 The so-called Frida-look was copied in high fashion magazines and look-alike contests; museum gift shops offered postcards, T-shirts, and jewelry incorporating Kahlo’s self-portraits; and specialty shops commemorating Kahlo’s life and work sold Frida nail polish, Frida shoes, and Frida clothing. Also in 1991, Madonna, the popular singer/performer, repeatedly broadcast her admiration for Kahlo, her purchase of two Kahlo paintings, and her plans to play the lead role in a new film about the artist. Madonna’s self-promoted idolization further advanced Kahlo’s name in a popular realm represented by such magazines as Vanity Fair, Style, and Mirabella. Since then, several photography exhibitions on Kahlo have been produced; a number of new monographs and essays about the artist have been published; and a flurry of Kahlo-inspired paintings, performances, films, and musicals have been created by several other artists.
Edward Sullivan explains that Kahlo has attained such celebrity status, which goes far beyond the success she enjoyed during her lifetime and is astounding when compared to the obscurity that followed her death, because she is “a role model for many people—feminists, lesbians, gay men and others who were searching for a hero—someone to validate their struggle to find their own voice and their own public personalities. Frida, as a woman of personal and aesthetic strength and courage, met that need.”2 Although Sullivan’s judgment is valid, it begs further analysis. Why do those who are “searching for a hero,” who “struggle to find their own voice,” celebrate Kahlo? What specifically about her life—or, more accurately, the way her life has been recounted—constitutes the “strength and courage” that politically disenfranchised or marginalized groups admire? Through what assumptions and ideologies has the artist been venerated? And in what ways has the mythic Frida, as “a role model,” affected the representation of “feminists, lesbians, gay men and others” within hegemonic United States culture?
This book responds to these questions by analyzing the language of interpretation and veneration through which the popular persona “Frida Kahlo” has been constructed. I examine Kahlo’s self-portraits for references to political and cultural complexities incorporated in the production and reception of her paintings. And I investigate the processes through which, and the implications of how, the artist has been idolized. Her posthumous transformation from forgotten painter to celebrated heroine has cast her as numerous, sometimes contradictory, characters. She is renowned for her devastatingly unfilled desire for children and also for her overt challenges to bourgeois social/sexual expectations. She sometimes is described as a politically involved nationalist but also as Diego Rivera’s devoted wife, who parroted her husband’s political opinions. She is variously held as a “great” artist but also is noted for the strictly personal references of her paintings. She is recognized for her involvement in campaigns for women’s and minority rights although her behavior was characterized by an obsession to arouse men’s libidos with her theatrical costumes and flirtatious behavior. Each of these descriptions has developed alongside interpretations of her self-portraits, which, in turn, correlate the temporal point of production to events in the artist’s life as documented in Kahlo’s letters and diary and through the recollections of colleagues and acquaintances. For example, Kahlo produced Henry Ford Hospital in 1932 shortly after a life-threatening miscarriage. The painting is considered to illustrate the artist’s mourning for her aborted child and despair over her apparent physical inability to carry a child to term. This one-to-one association of life events to the meaning of a painting follows the paradigmatic art history model described by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson; the “purpose of art-historical narration is to merge the authorized corpus and its producer into a single entity, the totalized narrative of the-man-and-his-work, in which the rhetorical figure author=corpus governs the narration down to its finest details.”3
My analyses of Kahlo’s paintings disrupt the author=corpus narrative by probing the relationship among the artist’s paintings and the social constructs that extend beyond the events of her personal life. While I do not dispute the scholarship behind the production of Kahlo’s biographies, represented most thoroughly in Hayden Herrera’s 1983 Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, my analysis recognizes that any biography, like an interpretation of a painting, is not discovered