I had already written the second part of my piece on Frida Kahlo. But after reading the feedback I received from part one — and listening to the opinions of friends, family and acquaintances —I felt compelled to reconsider it.
My professors used to warn us to approach studies of movements and artists with caution. Critics and historians, they said, inevitably project their own preferences and phobias onto the page. Kahlo is a perfect example: scholars, writers and the general public have turned her into a mirror, reflecting their own context and visions of life.
For many, the first encounter with her work provokes discomfort — sometimes even revulsion — for its raw intimacy. Yet for countless communities, Kahlo has become a powerful emblem, one that propelled her to a level of cultural celebrity few visual artists have ever achieved. “Fridamania” — the cult of personality and commercial obsession surrounding her — was born in the 1980s and thrives to this day.
Frida in her time
During her lifetime, Kahlo was already a notable cultural figure in Mexico. But she was almost always introduced as “the wife of Diego Rivera.”
Rivera was the towering figure of Mexican modern art. Alongside David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco — Los Tres Grandes — he redefined Mexican national identity through monumental murals that celebrated revolutionary values and Indigenous heritage.
While other movements existed in early 20th-century Mexico, none enjoyed the state sponsorship that muralism did. Its influence remains embedded in Mexican cultural discourse even now, a romanticized vision of pre-Columbian civilization that doubled as one of the most successful cultural propaganda projects of the 20th century.
Kahlo’s contribution was radically different. She turned inward, confronting the private sphere with startling candor: domestic life, pain, miscarriage, infertility, desire, identity. She lived — and loved — with radical openness, defying the social conventions of her time.
After Frida
Diego Rivera, beyond being a gifted painter, was an extraordinary promoter — especially of Kahlo’s work. He frequently called her the greatest Mexican painter of them all. Following her death in 1954, he established a trust that transformed the Casa Azul into a museum, which opened to the public in 1958. This act preserved her possessions and paintings, allowing researchers and admirers to piece together the mythology that now surrounds her.
Dolores Olmedo, a close friend and patron, became one of the foremost collectors of Rivera’s and Kahlo’s art. Her namesake museum in Mexico City, inaugurated in 1994, further solidified their place in the cultural canon.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a generation of artists began revisiting Mexican icons — Zapata, the charro, and Kahlo herself — subverting them into symbols of feminism, queer identity, and cultural resistance. By the century’s end, Kahlo had become a vessel for causes she may never have imagined.
Frida goes global
In 1982, the Whitechapel Gallery in London mounted the first major Kahlo retrospective outside Mexico, pairing her with photographer Tina Modotti. The show sought to challenge the Western-centric canon and give overdue recognition to women artists. The academic and curatorial world, eager to correct historical exclusions, began folding Kahlo into broader conversations about race, gender and global modernism.
A year later, Hayden Herrera published “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo,” a landmark study that cemented Kahlo’s mythos. Though Herrera’s psychoanalytic interpretations at times verge on speculation, the narrative she shaped — Kahlo as wounded, passionate, political, queer martyr — remains dominant in the zeitgeist.
From that moment forward, exhibitions, documentaries, films, and books multiplied, feeding the global appetite for all things Frida from different perspectives. In one decade, Frida became an icon for multiple communities.
Feminist Frida?
Kahlo never called herself a feminist — because feminism, as we understand it, barely existed in her Mexico. Most women were confined to the home, excluded from voting, banking, and public debate. Cultural life was open to them, but their work was treated as “secondary” art.
Still, her subject matter has invited feminist readings. While the muralists painted sweeping political epics, Kahlo painted the intimate: the home, the body, the psychic pain of miscarriage, the betrayals of love. In today’s language, she articulated a “female gaze.”
Yet Kahlo did not speak of shattering glass ceilings or fighting for gender parity. Her life remained bound, in many ways, to Diego Rivera’s orbit. She was not an iconoclast in the way modern feminism would define one.
And yet, she opened doors — alongside contemporaries like Modotti, Nahui Ollin, Lola Cueto, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Adela Siqueiros, Lilia Carrillo, María Izquierdo, Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro — for women in Mexican culture.
Queer Frida and sexual politics
A professor once told me that Mexico has always had space for homosexuality — so long as it stayed discreet. Novels like “Queer” and “Junky” by William S. Burroughs offer a glimpse into that discreet freedom.
Many authors have psychoanalyzed Kahlo’s sexuality, and suggest that her openness was a reaction to Diego’s infidelities. Yet, her bisexuality is well-documented, predating her marriage to Rivera. After his first infidelity, their relationship evolved into an open marriage. Rivera himself bragged about her affairs with women.
Later scholars, in the 1980s and ’90s, reframed this arrangement as a defiant challenge to patriarchy and heteronormativity. It’s my bold assessment to think that she wasn’t trying to subvert the Mexican machista society, but to be provocative with her husband and lovers. In that artistic context, Kahlo was not necessarily the most transgressive figure of her era — lesser-known Mexican artists like Nahui Olin or Nellie Campobello pushed even further.
A Mexican icon
Kahlo, like many of her contemporaries, was steeped in European culture even as she came of age during Mexico’s nationalist renaissance. Her signature Tehuana dress was not an act of cultural appropriation but a political one: a declaration of allegiance to Mexico’s Indigenous heritage and rejection of foreign domination.
Through today’s lens, that sort of nationalism can look romanticized — an embrace of Indigenous symbols without grappling with the realities of Indigenous marginalization, but by the 1990s, Kahlo’s image had been reinterpreted: in Mexico, she became a feminist counterweight to the macho charro; abroad, she was fetishized as folkloric, colorful, “authentically Mexican.”
Frida as a pop culture icon
There is no faster way to neutralize a countercultural figure than to turn them into a commodity. Movements and figures that once stood for resistance become popular and fashionable statements. You can now find t-shirts of The Clash, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Janis Joplin, Nirvana and Frida Kahlo sold at low cost, fast fashion outlets like T.J. Maxx and Primark.
Perhaps unexpectedly, it was Madonna who played a pivotal role in Kahlo’s pop-culture ascent. In the 1980s, she is rumored to have paid US $1 million for “Self-Portrait with Monkey,” the first of five Kahlo paintings she would collect.
Madonna introduced Kahlo’s work to designers like Jean Paul Gaultier, whose 1998 collection was inspired by Kahlo’s aesthetics and Marilyn Manson’s pastiche of gothic and glam styles. The iconic outfit he designed for Milla Jovovich in “The Fifth Element” was inspired by “The Broken Column.” Karl Lagerfeld followed suit, styling supermodel Claudia Schiffer as Frida for a Vogue Germany editorial. Patti Smith, Salma Hayek, Coldplay, Gwen Stefani, and Dolce & Gabbana have all drawn inspiration from her image.
The market value of her art
Determining the value of an artwork is a complex, multifactorial process shaped by cultural relevance, rarity, and the opinions of tastemakers — critics, curators, galleries and institutions.
In 1979, a Kahlo painting sold for US $85,000. By 2021, her 1949 “Diego y yo” fetched $34.9 million at auction, making her the most expensive Latin American artist in history. As Fridamania continues to grow, she’ll likely break her own record again.
The Frida Kahlo Corporation
Frida’s image — unibrow, braids, flowers — has been reduced to an aesthetic. Her face now adorns every imaginable product: notebooks, mugs, socks, tequila bottles.
Whether this constitutes cultural trivialization or widespread homage is debatable. What is clear is her global relevance.
In 2005, Venezuelan entrepreneur Carlos Dorado acquired the commercial rights to Kahlo’s name and likeness from her niece, Isolda Pinedo Kahlo, creating the Frida Kahlo Corporation. Any officially licensed product now generates revenue for the company.
The legacy of Frida Kahlo
I often wonder what Kahlo would have made of all this.
In my admittedly subjective imagination, she would have delighted in her ubiquity but recoiled at her own commodification. Her communist sympathies would have resisted the idea of becoming a brand. And yet, she might have embraced the causes — feminism, queer liberation, Indigenous pride — that now rally beneath her image. Just as she once embraced the red flag of communist revolution.
What do you think? What would Frida make of the world’s obsession with her? I’m listening.
María Meléndez is a Mexico City food blogger and influencer.
Frida had marginal talent and would have been forgotten long ago if she weren’t married to Diego. She tolerated his cheating because she knew it.
Who cheated first, Jim?
She did!
“Marginal talent”? Are you blind??
You are the role model for our time. An idiot who is proud of it.
Outstanding and thought provoking article and video. I learned a lot. Thank you.
Here is the truth:
Frida Kahlo (Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon 1907-1954) was a disgrace to Mexico. She joined the communist party (PCM) in 1948 for communist, socialist and marxist revolution to overthrow Mexico’s Republic. She was a life long bitter woman that was mentally ill, crippled in a school bus accident as a child and had polio at birth that disfigured her body. A double and possible triple abortionist and adulterer to her husbands in particular husband Rivera with Noguchi. She was a life long cheater. She was treated for sexual diseases namely syphilis. She had fits of rage. She had an affair with the infamous communist Leon Trotsky and was implicated in his murder. She was an alcoholic and a drug addict that tried suicide several times. She hated patriarchal society of Mexico in particular machismo because she was a feminist. She was an anti-Catholic. She liked the dark side of Aztec mythology and put skulls, monkeys and blood in her paintings and ALWAYS painted of HERSELF (estimates of 150-200 self portraits). She was a LA RAZA racist. She did a portrait with marxist Stalin in 1954. Her husband Rivera tried to promote her but because of her failures of art roll outs in New York City, France and in Mexico she hated all three but especially jealous of USA success. She was a life long financial failure that never made money on her art. She was anti-motherhood in her paintings. She was commissioned by the Mexican government twice for two murals that were so bad they were destroyed. She advocated suicide. Her last drawing was a black angel, her black Angel of Death. It was accompanied by the last words she wrote, “I joyfully await the exit – and I hope never to return – Frida” (“Espero Alegre la Salida – y Espero no Volver jamás”).
How could anyone, anywhere even think about hanging anything of hers on their wall. Disgusting person.
RIP.
-On the evening of 13 July, Kahlo’s body was taken to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where it lay in a state under a Communist flag.
Andrew, thank you for engaging — debate about public figures is necessary, and illuminating. I want to begin with a brief, personal caveat: I do not trust a single, absolute “truth.” As a journalism student I once joined classmates to cover the same event; we witnessed the same facts but each of us emphasized different moments and meanings. That exercise taught me that facts need narratives to become intelligible, and those narratives are shaped by context, values, and perspective. This is not an argument against facts; it is an argument for humility in how we assemble them.
With that in mind, I’ll correct several factual errors and offer context.
Dates and political affiliation: Kahlo’s involvement with the Mexican Communist Party began in the late 1920s—she joined in 1928, was briefly expelled in 1929, and re-engaged with Communist circles thereafter, including in 1948. Placing her membership two decades later distorts the political milieu that shaped her early adult life. The Mexican Communist Party (PCM), founded in 1919, was a national Marxist organization rooted in Mexico’s post‑revolutionary social struggles and indigenous/peasant issues, differing from U.S. Communist groups.
Health and medicine: Frida did not, as some claim, simply suffer ordinary ailments—she endured congenital and traumatic injury that reshaped her body and life. While earlier reports sometimes attribute her condition to spina bifida, the established record names polio in childhood and a catastrophic 1925 bus accident that left her with chronic pain, pelvic injuries, and lifelong disability. Contemporary medical readings now suggest autoimmune complications may account for positive Wassermann results once interpreted as syphilis, and specialists warn against definitive diagnoses from imperfect mid‑20th‑century tests. Whatever the precise labels, the salient fact is humane and immediate: she lived for decades with relentless abdominal and spinal pain. Try, for a moment, to imagine carrying that degree of constant suffering while also making a life and a body of work.
Trotsky and assassination allegations: Kahlo did have a brief affair with Leon Trotsky in 1937 and moved in similar political circles. Trotsky was murdered in 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a Stalinist agent. There is no credible evidence implicating Kahlo in that crime; historians do not support that claim.
Personal life: Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s marriage was volatile and punctuated by mutual infidelities; records indicate Rivera’s affairs began only months after their wedding, and episodes—among them his liaison with Frida’s sister Cristina—left wounds she traced candidly in her diary. Why Frida reciprocated is a more knotty question of anguish, agency, and survival; these facts complicate rather than cancel her artistic voice.
Reproductive history and abortions: Kahlo endured multiple pregnancy losses and miscarriages; while some accounts differ, there is evidence that certain induced abortions followed medical recommendations stemming from the pelvic and spinal injuries she sustained in the 1925 accident—decisions made under duress and medical necessity—and these tragedies inform her art without wholly defining it.
Mental health, addiction, and suicide: Kahlo endured chronic pain, depression, and periods of substance use; some sources report suicide attempts. These are humanizing details of a life of suffering, not moral failings that cancel her work.
Allegations about STDs: Assertions that she was treated for syphilis rest on contested interpretations of historical medical tests; such claims should be treated cautiously unless supported by primary medical evidence.
Artistic themes and self-portraits: Kahlo painted 143 works, roughly 55 are self-portraits. Her use of indigenous motifs, skulls, animals, and corporeal imagery engaged with identity, colonial histories, and personal pain; reducing that to morbid fascination misses her deliberate cultural and political engagement.
Murals and commissions: Claims that the Mexican government commissioned and destroyed two Kahlo murals conflate her record with Diego Rivera’s controversies. There is no solid evidence that Kahlo had government murals destroyed in that manner.
Financial success: Kahlo was not a wealthy artist during most of her life, but she did exhibit internationally and sold works. Long-term market reevaluation after her death greatly increased her posthumous commercial and cultural standing.
Death and funeral: After her death in 1954, her body lay in state at the Palacio de Bellas Artes; Communist sympathizers did honor her. That factual detail reflects her political ties without serving as a final moral judgment.
Labeling Kahlo a “La Raza racist” flattens mid‑century Mexican politics. Like many artists and state intellectuals of her time, Kahlo embraced indigenismo and anti‑colonial symbolism—an aesthetic and political attempt to recover and celebrate Indigenous heritage while contesting colonial hierarchies. Those choices invite valid critiques of paternalism or exoticization, but they do not amount to a straightforward claim of racial supremacism; such an accusation requires careful historical evidence and contextual nuance rather than anachronistic shorthand.
A final thought: calling her “disgusting” or demanding that no one hang her work on their wall flattens a complicated life into a list of invectives. Frida Kahlo was neither saint nor caricature. She transformed suffering into images that continue to speak because they resist simple interpretation. If your concern is political—her Communist affiliation, her provocative imagery—that is fair to debate. But such debates should rest on careful evidence.
Andrew — thank you again for taking the time to read and respond; I appreciate the conversation.
Excellent information with kindly delivery. Thank you for sharing your very organized and well balanced thoughts.
Your judgement of the person says nothing about her art and the way it is being used today. To me Frida Kahlo is one of the great and important painters of her time. A true expressionist. In Europe where I come from she is usually portrayed as a victim but since we moved to Mexico I have discovered that she was a very brave and most of all a great artist. And I am sorry that her art is bring used for money because people don’t see the true artist anymore.
Bring = being
What I have always come away with from all I have read is that the things driving her feeling about being Mexican were her promotion of the indignant culture which is so deeply imbedded in all things Mexican and adhering to the deep socialist heritage of Mexico ever since Independence. She made no bones about being a communist, which if are you well read about the traditional subjugation of the poor in Mexico, makes sense and was before Stalinism erased the ideas behind Marxism
I also feel the real center of her art and lifestyle was deeply rooted in the artistic and cultural rebellion of art current then, particularly in Europe, of which she was well aware.
Maria I feel you have done a very excellent job covering Frida
I don’t think Frida was bisexual to make a point. She just liked sex, and intimacy, and was attracted to males and females. And Frida had no need for feminism. Her life and work made a statement stronger than politics.
Maria-
Many thanks for the excellent article and particularly your immensely satisfying rebuttal. Write on!