Viva la Frida: A look at the making of a unique legend

Seventy years after her death, Kahlo is one of the most recognisable faces in the world. She has inspired generations of artists and merchandise makers, fan fraternities and collectors. She continues to have a chokehold on the art world and “is surely enjoying all the attention,” says Carla Gutierrez, director of Frida (2024), a documentary that uses images, letters and diary excerpts to explore the painter’s life through her own words.

***

How is a legend born?

Kahlo came by most of her fame posthumously. In life, she had few exhibitions and rarely sold through dealers or art galleries. Many of her works, she gave away as gifts, to family, friends and fellow artists.

Then, in 1990, Diego and I (1949), a scathing portrait of her troubled marriage, became the first artwork by a Latin-American to fetch over $1 million at auction (it sold for $1.4 million, at a Sotheby’s event in New York).

By 2021, it had been auctioned again, by Sotheby’s, for a record-smashing $34.9 million.

For clues to how this happened, we may turn to the Titanic.

This was a ship that was the best in its class; reasonably famous in its own time; with a famously tragic maiden journey that ended, abruptly, in 1912.

The sinking made headlines for a while, and then faded out (for a contemporary parallel, think of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370).

The Titanic burst back into view more than 70 years later, when the wreck was finally found at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, in 1985.

James Cameron would begin writing his screenplay at this point.

By the early 1990s, a special company had been formed to take ownership of the vessel and its contents. Artefacts could now be displayed, and the first exhibitions were held at museums in London, in 1994-95: dinner plates, top hats, a staircase cherub.

Cameron’s blockbuster film Titanic would recreate these expertly, and put them on even bigger display, in 1997. The movie’s signature song has lived on, long past the point at which anyone wants to hear it, including its singer. It resurfaced most recently at a Donald Trump rally, violating copyright rules and prompting Celine Dion to issue a cease-and-desist letter, to which she added: “Really, that song?”

Between the discovery of the wreck and the success of the film, the legend of the Titanic was born.

***

The legend of Kahlo can be traced to two distinct turning points too.

The first occurred in 1982, when the filmmakers Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey curated a retrospective of the artist’s work at Whitechapel Gallery in London, from where the exhibition travelled to Sweden, Germany, the US and Mexico.

The show was a rare major display of Kahlo’s work outside Mexico. Because it was curated by two storytellers, it also highlighted the artist’s remarkable tale.

It told of her mixed heritage, born to a German photographer, Guillermo Kahlo, and a homemaker, Matilde Calderón y González, who was part-Mexican, part-Spanish and part-Native American. It told of how she was raised religious, alongside three sisters, and left weakened by polio at age six.

At 18, there was the accident. When the metal rod went through her midsection as she rode a streetcar in 1925, her pelvic bone was fractured, her abdomen and uterus punctured, and her spine broken in three places. She would spend months confined to her bed; it would be two years before she could leave the house.

Four years after the accident, she would marry fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera, 21 years her senior. Their open relationship would be shattered when he began an affair with her sister. They would file for a divorce in 1939, and remarry months later, in 1940.

By the time of her death at 47, Kahlo had undergone 32 surgeries, had her right leg amputated to treat gangrene, and had lived in chronic illness and pain for decades.

As her story made headlines and captured the public interest via the travelling exhibition, art historian Hayden Herrera released her biography, Frida, in 1983. It was an instant bestseller, and served as the second big turning point.

A year later, Mexico declared Kahlo’s work part of the country’s cultural heritage; nothing more could now be taken out of the country.

By the time Diego and I went on auction in New York, the artist’s distinctive, defiant face and art had begun to appear on T-shirts and pillowcases; stores began to stock readymade Frida Halloween costumes.

Her appeal went beyond the pop-culture phenomenon; she was an idol to the lonely and betrayed, and an icon of revolt, says the documentary filmmaker Gutierrez, 49.

Around the world, she adds, “people carry pieces of Frida inside them”.

Gutierrez herself sought shelter in Kahlo’s work, as a teenage immigrant from Peru to the US, when home “didn’t feel as welcoming as it should have”. “Her paintings resonated with me, and made me feel seen,” she says.

It was a full-circle moment when Frida, her directorial debut, opened at the Sundance film festival this year. It felt like, “finally”, she could tell her story in her own words, Gutierrez says.

***

The documentary certainly offers a different view of Kahlo.

In the artist’s writing, one can hear her emotional reactions to the events of her life: the accident and pain; the three miscarriages; the fear that her marriage was failing.

One sees evidence of extraordinary courage.

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?” she wrote in 1953, after her right leg was amputated.

Elsewhere, there is acknowledgement of pain: “I have suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar knocked me down…. The other accident is Diego. Diego was by far the worse.”

***

In such films and books, the legend lives on.

Take Jennifer Clement’s book, The Promised Party (2024). In it, she writes of being best friend to Diego Rivera’s granddaughter, Ruth Maria. She writes of afternoons spent in Kahlo’s home. The artist had died years earlier, but as a girl, she spent hours, for instance, in the bathtub that Kahlo depicts in What the Water Gave Me (1938).

In the painting, “you can see bits of her life, her pain and joys floating in it,” Clement says.

Now 64, the Mexican-American author writes of how she lived through the unwrapping of the legend too.

In her early years at the house, she says, Frida was the woman Diego had been married to. By the time Clement was 20, Diego was “Frida’s husband”.

It has taken her a while to unpack how this happened. But if she had to venture a guess, Clement says, she would say that the legend of Frida boils down to the fact that “this woman lifted the veil of shame from the pain women feel in their bodies”.

Do you see what we are dealing with, she demanded, through her canvases.

At the same time, “here was also someone who had a great sense of humour and a love for life. She was a person of contradictions,” Clement says.

She was “covered under layers of heavy garments in real life, but let herself be seen in the flesh and the nude in her self-portraits,” adds Gutierrez. That raw honesty and sense of self make Frida an icon across borders.

“Whether it is queer folk (Frida was bisexual) or feminists, Hispanics, communists or socialists, the differently abled or even hypochondriacs, Frida seems to welcome them all,” Gutierrez says.

Madonna is famously a Kahlo fan, and owns one of five canvases the artist painted during her time in Detroit, in 1932-33. Salma Hayek famously portrayed her in the 2002 biopic, Frida. BBC released a miniseries, Becoming Frida Kahlo, last year. Frida, Gutierrez’s documentary, is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Her likeness, meanwhile, has popped up on The Simpsons and in the 2017 film Coco; in music videos and comic art. (See the story alongside for more on this.)

Fashion designers, from small, independent labels in Mexico, Africa and India to brands in Thailand and luxury houses such as Givenchy, Jean Paul Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana, have showcased Frida-inspired collections since the 1990s. Her unibrow most recently appeared on the runway last year, in the Christian Dior Cruise 2024 Collection, which also featured “Frida braids”, and blood-spattered dresses and slogans drawn from her art.

Kahlo will soon have her Broadway debut.

The theatre producer Valentina Berger, 34, is working on Frida, The Musical, authorised by the artist’s family. “It explores her relationships with her sisters, parents, lovers and, most importantly, herself,” Berger says. “The Kahlo sisters lived their lives to the fullest. They did things that were not common in 1920s Mexico. And just in doing so, they played a part in the evolution of the role of women in that country.”

Perhaps this is the afterlife Kahlo had in mind, when she completed, on July 5, 1954, Viva la Vida (Long Live Life), inscribing those words on a wedge of watermelons in a still life of carved-up fruit.

Eight days later, she was dead.