Frida Kahlo

Saturday

Alys Denby

Frida Kahlo is a Tory icon

When Theresa May coughed into her hand during her painful conference speech back in 2017, adorning her wrist was a chunky Frida Kahlo bracelet. Some left-wingers were outraged that a Tory would ‘appropriate’ the image of ‘a Communist, bisexual artist who was also a disabled woman of colour’. The Guardian described it as ‘a surprising statement’ given that Kahlo ‘spent her career concerned with the plight of the impoverished, our connectedness to self, nature and the universe, the relationship between pain and identity, and imagined, one day, we could live in a classless society’. She was as much a materialist as a Marxist But I believe it was an apt choice for my fellow Conservative. Kahlo is a capitalist icon, a right-wing poster girl.

Wednesday

Robin Simon

The cult of Kahlo

A Max Beerbohm cartoon famously reduced Arthur Wing Pinero (author of that interesting play, The Second Mrs Tanqueray) to a single eyebrow and a fur coat. Frida Kahlo’s fame rests upon little more: not so much anything she painted but her eyebrows – or should that be eyebrow? – and her moustache. If you get the impression that her output contains an awful lot of images of her face, you would be right. She painted 55 self-portraits – more than a third of her output. Hers is a strange cult, but a cult it is, and Making of an Icon is what the Tate exhibition subtitle says, not ‘Making of an Artist’. The show is drawing the pilgrims in record numbers.