Look at me: Tate Modern seeks to demonstrate the full cultural and political significance of Frida Kahlo—but ultimately her work is essentially personal

Apollo, Sept, 2005 by Susannah Woolmer

Brutal as well as passionate, subtle as well as outrageous, Frida Kahlo's art is not always easy to digest. Wilfully naive, deliberately subversive, fierce and often obscure, she brandished the paintbrush like a weapon, using it as a political tool with which to express her rage at the turbulent political climate of early-twentieth-century Mexico, and also self-defensively, as a method of coping with personal tragedies.

Kahlo's works incorporate a rich melange of cultural and historical influences that include but are not limited to Western art-historical traditions, Aztec mythology, medical anatomical studies, surrealism, Mexican folklore and mysticism. Since her death in 1954, she has become the focus of intense study within the canon created by feminist critics in the 1970s and 80s, thanks largely to her frank dismantling of taboos surrounding birth, miscarriage and menstruation. Tate Modern's current exhibition--the first monographic show on a Latin American artist ever to be held at Tate--endeavours to extricate Kahlo from this exclusive context by emphasising the full range of her art's political and cultural aspects.

Familiar with her work largely through reproductions, I anticipated being frustrated by Kahlo's peculiarly childlike figurative style and what can be perceived as a determined self-indulgence. What I found was a proud and passionate woman whose strange paintings, inextricably connected with her socialism and her physical suffering, are infinitely more emotive and complex in the flesh than any photograph conveys.

Kahlo's life can be defined by a series of physical traumas. Born in Mexico City in 1907, she was continually affected by illness. A near-fatal road accident in 1925 dramatically altered the course of her life. Afflicted with dreadful abdominal injuries that rendered her unable to have children, it was while she was bedridden in hospital during her long convalescence, 'bored as hell', that she began to paint. For subject matter, she turned to herself, and so began a lift-long obsession with her own image.

Tate has mounted a broadly chronological representation of Kahlo's output. Her early portraits demonstrate a confident painterly style. The influence of the Italian renaissance is evident in the rich colouring and stark backgrounds she favoured (Fig. 2) and a fascination with her own beauty is starkly present in Self-Portrait wearing a Velvet Dress, painted for her first love, Alejandro Gomez Arias. Entirely self-taught, she brings a delicate naivete to her paintings but there is also a marked sophistication that is somehow lost in reproductions.

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The curators, Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson, have assembled some little-known watercolours and drawings, stylised to the point of being cartoonish, in which Kahlo expresses her frustration with the reassertion of conservatism within post-revolutionary Mexico in the 1930s. Difficult to engage with, they are awkward and obscure, and I find instead the painful reality evident in the only known drawing she made referring directly to her road accident much more powerful.

Her explicit depictions of childbirth, miscarriage and its aftermath are without precedent in the history of art. Her husband, Diego Rivera, said in 1937, 'she is the first woman in the history of art to have adopted with absolute ruthless sincerity ... the general and specific terms which concern women specifically'. My Birth, one of her most notorious paintings, is a graphic depiction of birth in all its visceral, bloody gore. Painted in ex-voto format, a style she adopted during the early 1930s, the centre of the composition is the woman's exposed genitalia, through which the head of Kahlo as a child protrudes. The image is made all the more shocking by Kahlo covering the mother's head with shroud-like material, and positioning a portrait of the Virgin Mary directly above the bed.

Situated directly opposite at Tate Modern is Henry Ford Hospital, also rendered as a votive painting, in which Kahlo depicts herself in the throes of miscarriage (she nearly died during a traumatic miscarriage in 1932). The simple formats of these disturbing images endow them with a sterile, surgical feel that serves to enhance their impact. Potent as they are as expressions of intrinsically female experiences, I cannot help feeling that her motives for these works are her personal, painful experiences as one woman rather than an intention to represent the condition of womankind. However, to claim that these paintings are solely autobiographical would also be misleading--far from one-dimensional, they are threaded with non-biographical imagery drawn from a range of sources.

Kahlo's shrewd, vivid and often witty commentary on the turbulent political fortunes of Mexico, its complex relationship with the us and her sense of her own national identity are sensitively represented in this exhibition (for example nos. 13 and 14), but it is for her self portraits that she is best remembered and it is these that lingered in the memory long after I left the gallery. Serene and mournful, passive yet sensual, they are also inscrutable, rather like flamboyant Byzantine icons. Kahlo's deeper intentions are manifested through the symbols incorporated into these extraordinary images. In Self Portrait as a Tehuana or Diego on my Mind (no. 42; 1943), for example, she depicts her face framed by a traditional Tehuanan headdress (Fig. 1). An image of Rivera, Christ-like, is branded into her forehead, emblematic of the profound influence he had on her, not only creatively, but also politically and emotionally. As Emma Dexter argues in her excellent catalogue essay, it may well be that all Kahlo's works are to an extent suffused with political content; however, on the evidence of this exhibition, it is her predominantly autobiographical paintings that dazzle most brightly.