Since her death in 1954, Frida Kahlo has become as popular as an artist could possibly be. Keychains, Halloween costumes and even Barbie dolls depict the Mexican artist known for her self-portraits.
Films, books and operas retell the dramatic course of her life.
Twenty-six paintings and works on paper by Kahlo recently went on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. The exhibition, “Frida: Beyond the Myth,” was organized by the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas, where it opened last year and was extended three months because of demand.
The show’s only other stop is Richmond, which runs through Sept. 28. The Virginia museum's installation evokes Kahlo’s colorful home.
“Most exhibitions don’t really try to get behind the facade that Kahlo had created for herself,” said Sue Canterbury, the Dallas curator who co-created the exhibition. “Think of the image of her — the unibrow, the flower crowns, the Tehuana dress.
“It’s really a persona she created for herself, and self-protective, in a way.”
To counter the persona, the show includes about 35 photographs and prints that capture the artist’s other sides—curious, sad, contemplative. These are depictions of a less-guarded Kahlo by people who knew her well.
In her paintings, however, her face is impenetrable, Canterbury said.
Kahlo, who was born in 1907, taught herself to paint at age 18 while bedridden after a horrific bus accident. She painted her first self-portrait in a polished, 16th-century Mannerist style. She hoped to seduce her boyfriend with her beauty so he wouldn’t abandon her.
She sent him the elegant painting of herself in a velvet dress, but the beau left her anyway. The wreck and the heartbreak caused pain, which only worsened throughout her life. Art became her salve.
The year after her accident, she is shown dressed in a man’s suit for a formal family portrait by her photographer father. The image is in the show.
“This was pretty out there for Coyoacan,” the Mexico City suburb where she lived, Canterbury said.
Her father’s profession made her aware of the power of images. As she continued to paint, she began to wear the Tehuana—a costume for Indigenous Mexican women that included long skirts, chunky jewelry and flower-topped hair. Her peers wore modern clothes.
The outfit and the folksy approach she developed underlined her Mexican heritage. This impulse came after the Mexican Revolution freed her country from a dictator and sparked a new nationalism.
The man’s suit and the Tehuana garb also hid her disfigurement. In her paintings, her intense gaze led viewers’ eyes up to her lovely face.
“It was a way of controlling her circumstances,” said Sarah G. Powers, the Virginia museum curator in charge of the Richmond stop. After polio struck her at age 6, children teased her about her shorter right leg.
“If you feel like people are looking at you, you want to be able to control that.”
She and the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, with whom she endured a hurtful marriage full of infidelities, shared a fervent revolutionary spirit. He didn’t mind her retaliatory flirtations with women, though he hated her to be with other men.
“You know Frida is homosexual,” Rivera told a mutual friend in front of Kahlo, who laughed, wrote Hayden Herrera in her 1983 definitive biography on Kahlo. Scholars have spotted imagery in her work that they interpret as coded lesbianism, Herrera added, though it's as vague as "a kind of atmosphere.”
“She is box office gold,” Canterbury said. “And it’s in great part due to this mystery she presents. She offers us riddles in her paintings.”
Timed-entry tickets are $10 to $20; visit vmfa.museum for information.
