Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo

By Margaret A. Lindauer

This provocative reassessment of Frida Kahlo’s art and legacy presents a feminist analysis of the myths surrounding her.
 
In the late 1970's, Frida Kahlo achieved cult heroine status. Her images were splashed across billboards, magazine ads, and postcards; fashion designers copied the so-called “Frida” look in hairstyles and dress; and “Fridamania” even extended to T-shirts, jewelry, and nail polish. Margaret A. Lindauer argues that this mass market assimilation of Kahlo's identity has detracted from appreciation of her work, leading to narrow interpretations based solely on her tumultuous life.
 
Kahlo's political and feminist activism, her stormy marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivera, and her progressively debilitated body made for a life of emotional and physical upheaval. But Lindauer questions the “author-equals-the-work” critical tradition that assumes a “one-to-one association of life events to the meaning of a painting.” In Kahlo's case, such assumptions created a devouring mythology, an iconization that separates us from the real significance of the oeuvre.
 
Accompanied by twenty-six illustrations and deep analysis of Kahlo's central themes, this provocative, semiotic study recontextualizes an important figure in art history. At the same time, it addresses key questions about the language of interpretation, the nature of veneration, and the truths within self-representation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9780819572097

Book preview

Devouring Frida

DEVOURING

FRIDA

THE ART HISTORY AND

POPULAR CELEBRITY OF

FRIDA KAHLO

Margaret A. Lindauer

Published by Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, CT 06459

Originally produced in 1999 by Wesleyan/University Press of New England

Hanover, NH 03755

© 1999 by Margaret A. Lindauer

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

5  4  3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lindauer, Margaret A.

Devouring Frida : the art history and popular celebrity of Frida Kahlo / by Margaret A. Lindauer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–8195–6347–1 (cloth : alk. paper). ISBN 0–8195–6348–x (pbk : alk. paper)

1. Kahlo, Frida—Criticism and interpretation. I. Kahlo, Frida. II. Title.

ND259.K33L56   1999

To Karen and Jennifer

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

Introduction: Rereading Frida Kahlo

Frida as a Wife/Artist in Mexico

Frida of the Blood-Covered Paint Brush

The Language of the Missing Mother

Unveiling Politics

Fetishizing Frida

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

1. Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931

2. Henry Ford Hospital, 1932

3. Insurrection Ballad of the Proletarian Revolution, Distributing Arms, mural by Diego Rivera, 1928

4. Today and Tomorrow: Modern Mexico mural by Diego Rivera, 1934

5. A Few Small Nips, 1935

6. Self-Portrait (Dedicated to Leon Trotsky), 1937

7. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940

8. Two Nudes in a Forest, 1939

9. Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me, and Señor Xólotl, 1949

10. The Broken Column, 1944

11. Without Hope, 1945

12. The Little Deer, 1946

13. Tree of Hope, 1946

14. Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill, 1951

15. My Birth, 1932

16. Tlazolteotl

17. My Nurse and I, 1937

18. Self-Portrait on the Border between Mexico and the United States, 1932

19. My Dress Hangs There, 1933

20. Four Inhabitants of Mexico, 1938

21. Remembrance of an Open Wound, 1938

22. The Two Fridas, 1939

23. Self-Portrait as Tehuana, 1943

24. Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940

25. Mexico: Thirty Centuries of Splendors billboard

26. Self-Portrait with Monkeys, 1943

Preface

IN THE MID-1980s, when I first read a biographic account of Frida Kahlo, I was inspired but also vaguely unsettled by the tragic-heroic narrative. At the time, I was a master of fine arts student, and my sense of inspiration undoubtedly related to my continuing project of rediscovering forgotten women. My uneasiness was more difficult to explain. Although it was tiresome to hear Kahlo’s life incessantly reduced to psychosexual tragedy, I did not yet have a sufficient feminist and cultural theory vocabulary to enable me to analyze the construction of the artist. For years I noted the increasing circulation of Kahlo’s story and self-portraits, but without the theoretical framework through which to consider the phenomenon, it remained intriguing, albeit disconcerting.

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 but produced. I use the term biography in reference to publications about Kahlo’s life ranging from popular to academic, celebratory to analytical, captious to venerate. An entrenched narrative of suffering permeates the telling of her life. While considering the representation of Kahlo that has emerged from the combined efforts of researchers, filmmakers, artists, and ardent admirers, it is crucial to keep in mind that Kahlo’s life, like any biography, is recounted so that a chronology is made into a cohesive narrative by concentrating on events, and associations among events. Tautologically, selected events become relevant as a persona emerges from an investigation of historical evidence, including letters, diaries, exhibition reviews, interviews, and paintings. Kahlo’s character development and life story have been produced simultaneously, in accordance with one another, in such a way that various social classifications—nationalist, invalid, rebel, hypochondriac, lesbian, adoring wife, childless mother, sexually desired object, antibourgeois, communist—are seen as being illustrated in her paintings. Furthermore, among biographies of Kahlo, and therefore throughout interpretations of her paintings that emulate the author=corpus model, these classifications generally revolve around two core aspects of her life, her tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera and the interminable deterioration of her body. Kahlo’s own words from a 1951 newspaper interview have been cited consistently to support the centrality of these circumstances. She remorsed, I have suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar ran over me. . . . The other accident is Diego.⁴ The streetcar accident refers to the horrifying, life-threatening 1925 accident in which an iron handrail impaled Kahlo’s torso, causing extensive injuries and lifelong physical complications. The Rivera accident alludes to Kahlo’s anguish over his notorious womanizing. Thus her statement is taken as evidence that her life was emotionally and physically torturous, and her paintings accordingly are interpreted as documents of her pain.

It is tempting to condense Kahlo’s life into a narrative of emotional and physical health, first because biographers’ interviews with the artist’s colleagues and acquaintances bind significant events, passions, and idiosyncratic characteristics of the artist’s life to her marriage and/or illnesses. And second, it allows for a heroic/tragic drama. Because Kahlo’s life has been recounted as a litany of physical and psychological symptoms, she is revered for her triumph in creating art despite the torment of bodily and emotional injury. A pervasive torment/triumph approach can be gleaned from a cursory glance at monograph and essay titles: Andrea Kettenmann’s Frida Kahlo: Pain and Passion; Malka Drucker’s Frida Kahlo: Torment and Triumph in Her Life and Art; Martha Zamora’s Brush of Anguish; Nancy Breslow’s Cry of Joy and Pain; Hayden Herrera’s Frida Kahlo: The Palette, the Pain and the Painter; and Gloria Orenstein’s Painting for Miracles. (There are notable exceptions to the preponderant heroic/tragic interpretations of Kahlo, which are cited in subsequent chapters and from which many of my ideas have developed.)

While recognizing Kahlo’s resilience fosters admiration, it also implicitly solemnizes the tribulations of her life so that celebrating her strength simultaneously and necessarily evokes sympathy for her pain. Accordingly, Herrera evaluates Kahlo’s entire oeuvre, and her late-twentieth-century popularity, in terms of bipolarities subsumed within the overarching battle between surrendering to pain and struggling for survival:

There is the tension created by Kahlo’s festive, becostumed exterior and her anguished interior. There is a split between her mask of control and the turmoil that thrashed inside her head. Even as she presented herself as a heroine, she insisted that we know her vulnerability. And while she was compelled to see herself and to be truly seen, she hid behind the mythic creature she invented to help her withstand life’s blows. . . . [H]er self-portraits . . . were not just a means to communicate feeling, but a device to keep feeling in check. Thus while her paintings draw us into her power, they also frustrate. They are steely in their distance and obdurate in their silence . . . forc[ing] us to come face to face with Frida . . . and . . . with unexplored parts of ourselves.⁵

Herrera’s appraisal insinuates that the act of painting was emotionally exhausting for Kahlo and that the act of viewing her paintings is emotionally exhausting for Kahlo’s admirers, in essence suggesting that Kahlo’s paintings devour the artist as well as the audience. The production of paintings is, in Herrera’s judgment, thought to have depleted the artist’s pain but also to have consumed her energy as she sought to control the turmoil that thrashed inside her head. The painted products then superseded the actual being of Frida Kahlo and replaced her with the mythic creature she invented and hid behind. And this mythic creature depicted in self-portraits devours its audience draw[ing] us into her power, and yet, steely in their distance and obdurate in their silence, the paintings do not soothe the anguished interior of the artist or unexplored areas of ourselves. The title Devouring Frida refers to these aspects of Kahlo’s constructed persona and reception and also to the canons and theories that seamlessly have been incorporated into the mythic Frida. In other words, Kahlo herself is construed as devouring, expending herself and her audience, but she also is devoured, consumed by the implicit ideologies of the author=corpus paradigm. Within those biographies that do not acknowledge theoretical applications and assumptions, there are indeed ideologies at work in the seemingly benign, objective quest for historical facts that, together, recount Kahlo’s dramatic life. I argue that the mythic Frida narrative eradicates the social and cultural negotiations that mediate recollections by colleagues and acquaintances, thereby impeding an analysis of Kahlo’s paintings as representations of political inquiry. For example, as I argue in the chapter on Frida as a Wife/Artist in Mexico, the symbolic significance of motherhood relevant to postrevolutionary reconstruction in Mexico is apparent in recollections of Kahlo’s miscarriage and perpetuated in interpretations of Henry Ford Hospital. My analysis of the painting takes postrevolutionary nationalism into account as I look beyond the personal iconography of the self-portrait for references to social and political prescription and resistance.

Countering the author=corpus approach that leads to the devouring mythology of Kahlo, I undertake a semiotic, feminist analysis of the mechanisms through which the Frida myth has been constructed. Semiotic theory offers a methodological process for investigating the construction of meaning, context, artist, and audience, whereas feminist art history promotes theoretical reasoning for why I should want to dilute Frida’s mythic status. I embark on this project not simply to show how ideologies are written into interpretation but to interrogate the celebratory aura surrounding Kahlo’s mythic persona. It is important to recognize that, as the feminist dictum declares, the personal is political. Characterizations of Kahlo’s emotional and physical well-being invoke cultural definitions of health and illness, gender relations, social restrictions, sexual expectations, and creative production. As Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen note, The phrase ‘the personal is political’ rejects the traditional exclusion and repression of the personal in male-dominated politics. It also asserts the political nature of women’s private individualized oppression.⁶ Texts that most powerfully relegate Kahlo to a feminine sphere of apolitical art and private life uncritically and insidiously sequester the artist from broader social contexts.

Even some recent essays that set out to broaden the social relevance of the artist’s work maintain a patriarchally defined gender prescription that empowers the male by disempowering the female cultural domains. Kahlo’s biography, and thus the commemoration of her life and work, have been composed through various and specific cultural lenses that, despite claiming to reveal, have distorted the politics of Kahlo’s life. For example, as I discuss in the chapter on Unveiling Politics, Kahlo’s ethnic clothing and self-portraits in Mexican dress generally have been interpreted to represent Kahlo’s fervent nationalism, or mexicanidad. While this conclusion has a certain validity, it is not specific, for there were many nationalisms in postrevolutionary Mexico. Artists, intellectuals, and politicians debated the country’s self-definition and its social, political agenda. However, an investigation of Kahlo’s specific political views has been precluded by the generalized assertion that she embraced her heritage. (This omission partly is a reflection of the difficulty in discerning women’s political views from historical records written by key male politicians, activists, artists, and social critics.)

Most of Kahlo’s biographers implicitly recognize the constructedness of interpretation.⁷ For example, Robin Richmond notes that Kahlo and Rivera were the world’s most inventive and consummate confabulators. . . . They told different people what they wanted them to know.⁸ In the introduction to her biography of Kahlo, Martha Zamora cautions the reader that her research was carried out twenty-seven years after Kahlo’s death, by which time the artist’s colleagues and friends relied on selected memory that filters out what hurts, combines the incidents that remain, and then adapts them to the form it wants to remember.⁹ Zamora’s description of memory as a filter does not necessarily lead to a rejection of the recollections by Kahlo’s contemporaries. There is unquestionable value in incorporating these recollections, although they must be recognized, in themselves, as having been constructed within ideological, historical, and political contexts. By starting with the view that the artist’s social and gendered positions are not absolute but rather are rendered by the very discourses used to describe them, I implore that Kahlo’s identity not been seen as static. Thus I consider paintings and interpretations semiotically in terms of cultural constructs. Semiotic analysis, Bal and Bryson explain,

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