does not set out in the first place to produce interpretations of works of art, but rather to investigate how works of art are intelligible to those who view them, the processes by which viewers make sense of what they see. Standing somewhat to one side of the work of interpretation, semiotics has as its object to describe the conventions and conceptual operations that shape what viewers do—whether those viewers are art historians, art critics, or the crowd of spectators attending an exhibition.10
To consider “conventions and conceptual operations” among “viewers” is to reconfigure the context in which Kahlo’s paintings were produced and interpreted by shifting attention slightly away from the artist to include the social discourses through which Kahlo’s colleagues, critics, and historians encountered her work.
Semiotics does not disavow the analysis of determinants but recognizes that one’s view of context is necessarily partial. For example, as I address in the chapter on “Frida of the Blood-Covered Paint Brush,” some interpretations of Kahlo’s self-portraits consider the artist’s pain to be the determining context in which the paintings were created. Herrera states, “she painted mostly self-portraits, suggesting that the confinement of invalidism led to a confinement in subject matter. Indeed the peculiar intensity of her paintings convinces us that they were somehow therapeutic, crucial to the artist’s well being.”11 Herrera thereby conflates Kahlo’s painting and pain. Although her self-portraits unquestionably include biographical and medical references, they go beyond documenting the individual to include broader political, social, and economic referents in representations of a woman negotiating her gendered position in relation to dominant social and political directives. I do not disagree completely with strictly biographic interpretations of Kahlo’s work. Indeed, I rely on the work by other scholars even when I do not espouse the same theoretical approach. However, I argue against the view that Kahlo’s work is strictly self-referential, a conjecture exemplified, for example, by Richmond’s proclamation that “Frida was a woman who defined herself politically—but she did not make political paintings.”12 Clearly, as Joan Borsa asserts, “the critical reception of [Kahlo’s] exploration of subjectivity and personal history has all too frequently denied or de-emphasized the politics involved in examining one’s own location, inheritances and social conditions.”13 Thus rather than accepting Kahlo’s history of physical and emotional pain as the context in which her paintings were produced, I incorporate analyses of masculinist canons and histories in order to evaluate the engendered classifications of artist, wife, patient, and political activist that have been reproduced through the construction of “mythic Frida” and her “apolitical” paintings.
In response to Linda Nochlin’s question “why have there been no great women artists?” the grand art history canon was extended in the 1970s, through work by women artists and art historians, to rediscover forgotten women artists.14 Kahlo, as a subject for research, was prominent in this project carried out by “first generation” feminist art historians. This term, coined by Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, refers to scholars with an “unspoken but still apparent objective, to prove that women have been as accomplished, even if not as ‘great’ as men, and to try to place women artists within the traditional historical framework.”15 Many of these historians focused on stylistic analyses and biographic chronologies in such a way that each woman artist incorporated into the canon was accorded stylistic forebears. André Breton and Henri Rousseau were deemed influential to the unique blend of surrealism and primitivism with which Kahlo integrated Mexican compositional features, particularly those reminiscent of votive paintings and retablos. Feminist critiques argued that, while rediscovering forgotten artists, first generation methodology allowed dominant structures based on “masculine” models to persist. Thus feminist scholars whom Gouma-Peterson and Mathews designate as “second generation” embarked on a different theoretical inquiry as they disclosed the consequences of integrating women artists into the canon without disrupting the masculine paradigm of “great artist.” Generally, the masculinist category “artist” integrates patriarchal gender stereotypes that reserve public space and historically relevant activity, including the production of socially and aesthetically significant paintings, for aggressive, active men while relegating women to a domestic sphere where their activities are invisible and inconsequential to the outside world. As Griselda Pollock explains, the attempt simply to annex a woman artist to the existing art history canon does not, indeed cannot, shift its masculinist paradigm.16 The woman is framed in a relative, secondary position by the patriarchal discourses of art history in which the commemoration of her private, autobiographical art consigns her to an insignificant role in history. She cannot be judged to be as great as the male artists because she does not paint the masculine subjects that make an artist great. In Pollock’s words, “The discourses which produce the gendered definitions of the artist and creativity have ideological effects in reproducing socially determined categories of masculinity and femininity.”17 Thus second generation feminist scholarship critiques the mechanisms through which the canon maintains the paradigmatic artist as masculine, sexually aggressive, and socially outcast by incorporating poststructuralist, semiotic, and psychoanalytic theories in order to reconstitute a history focusing on the specificity of individual (versus mythic or paradigmatic) women both as artists and as subjects.
Art history is but one among numerous masculinist canons at work in Frida mythology. Chloe Furnival, for example, asserts that in Latin American histories women are “pigeonholed resembling either the supposed treacherous whore or the self-abnegating mother or the socially deviant scholar.”18 And analogous to the first generation/second generation theoretical and methodological distinctions of feminist art history, feminist scholars endeavor to renegotiate the terms under which women are included into the existing historical narrative rather than simply slotting more women into the canon. For instance, the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Collective argues against “limit[ing] women’s demand for liberation to a question of personal fulfillment,” cautioning that when woman’s “struggle . . . remains at the level of individual demands, [it] does not begin to touch upon the social structure from which domination stems.”19 Both European and Latin American masculinist discourses permeate the recollections of Kahlo’s colleagues and acquaintances and thus are perpetuated in interpretations of the artist’s paintings and the celebration of the mythic Frida. In this book, I do not set out merely to recognize what these interpretations are and how they work, but also to analyze how her position as a woman artist is, in Lisa Tickner’s words, “repressed, refracted or revealed in her work.”20 Accordingly I articulate the social and cultural positions of “artist” and “woman” within the European canon and within postrevolutionary Mexico in order to disrupt totalizing narratives that restrict the possible considerations of women’s histories. However, just as “artist” and “woman” are not monolithic categories, the distinction between “masculinist” and “feminist” discourse must also acknowledge cultural, historical, racial, and economic differences. Thus I am alert to the relationships among feminisms, particularly the description, or in Cherríe Moraga’s view, the trivialization, of the women’s movement as a “white middle-class thing, having little to offer women of color.”21 But, Moraga argues, so-called white middle-class feminist theory does provide important means for understanding particular circumstances facing women of color who endure and resist economic, racial, or cultural oppression.