Complements the BBC Two series Becoming Frida Kahlo
Today, we all fall under the gaze of Frida Kahlo. Looking out from posters, prints, book covers, mugs, tea towels and T-shirts, her image is more familiar than it was during her short life. Sometimes she appears androgynous, sometimes feminine and delicate, but there's always an underlying sense of someone who carefully curated her own public image. No wonder Kahlo fits so easily into the iconography of a 21st-century world that's invented the idea of the influencer, personifying as this version of Kahlo does a giddy and contradictory mix of bohemianism, tragic heroine and living your own best life.
But how much does this tell us about the historical Frida Kalilo, an artist of rare talent who grew up amidst the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution, endured chronic pain and fragile health throughout her life and who, in the wake of her marriage to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, mixed with some of the 20th century's most important figures?
A great deal in that she understood the power of her own image, but also not much at all (1932) shows Kahlo lying in a pool of her own blood on a hospital bed (). A single tear falls across one cheek. Six red umbilical cords emanate from her stomach, one of which is attached to a male foetus. The painting was created in the wake of a miscarriage.
