Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular

This February, the Museum of Fine Arts opened its first ever exhibit on Frida Kahlo. Transporting the viewer back to 1920s Mexico City, Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular displays famous Kahlo paintings like “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” and “Still Like with Parrot and Fruit” with the traditional Mexican folk art that inspired Kahlo.

Art By Lily Hartenstein

“Kahlo was inspired by folk art,” said Layla Bermeo, Kristin and Roger Servison Assistant Curator of American Paintings at the MFA. “She is not a folk artist.” The MFA presents her works beside their inspirations, unlike an exhibit in Kahlo’s lifetime that once displayed her works as comparative to folk art, much to her dismay. (Read her vehement letter to a friend about the incident in this new exhibit.)

With Mexico fresh out of its 10-year civil war, Kahlo and other artists in the group of affluent, left-leaning artists to which she belonged, celebrated Mexican folk art, or arte popular, as representative of the true Mexico. Kahlo’s own arte popular collection lives in La Casa Azul, her home-turned-museum in Mexico City, but the MFA has assembled folk art of her time, ceramics, children’s toys, and religious retablos, to give the viewer a visual of her inspirations. 

See Kahlo’s famous “Girl with Death Mask” next to an eerily similar folk mask. Or notice her family tree painting, “My Grandparents, My Parents, and I;” its plaque details how she made the painting after Hitler passed his Nuremberg Laws, when many Germans were making family trees to demonstrate the purity of their bloodline. Instead, Kahlo proudly painted the marriage between her German father and Mexican mother. 

Also in the exhibit visitors can find photos of her personal bathroom taken long after she had passed, left preserved for many years. Or, examine a 1970s issue of Vogue containing an article called Señoras of Mexico, in which Kahlo’s photograph is captioned, laughably, “Señora Diego Rivera, wife of the famous Mexican artist.”

A proud communist, “Kahlo was part of a group of artists and intellectuals who espoused native Mexican culture as an anti-colonialist political position and as an aesthetic choice,” said Gannit Ankori, Professor of Art History and Theory at Brandeis University. As the new exhibit details, Kahlo, and other women in her circle, dressed in the style of indigenous, rural Mexican women, or Tehuanas, showing pride in all things Mexican, and cultural solidarity with indigenous people. 

“Her method of dressing was an extension of her creativity,” said Adriana Zavala, Associate Professor of Art History at Tufts University, “She was validating the people she was dressing like. But it is a form of cultural appropriation that we have to think critically about. Kahlo was elite: not quite wealthy, but comfortable.” 

“On the one hand, it was meaningful for a middle-class woman like Kahlo to celebrate and bring attention to the art of rural and indigenous peoples, which had largely been ignored before the Mexican Revolution,” said Bermeo. But she also noted that Kahlo’s life was a privileged one, much more privileged than the lives of the women whose dress she was wearing.

Ankori detailed how Kahlo’s style of dress also functioned to distract people from her physical disabilities caused by a bus accident when she was an adolescent. “Mexican fashion scholar Circe Henestrosa explains that the long skirts covered Kahlo’s injured leg. The huipil, or tunic, was capacious enough to hide her medical corsets,” said Ankori. Her intricate updos and heavy, colorful jewelry also brought attention to her face rather than to her disability. Ankori also pointed out that a photograph in Kahlo’s home shows her mother wearing a dress from the Tehuantepec region--her mother was of indigenous descent, so in a way, this dress was a part of Kahlo’s heritage.

Fridamania describes the craze around Kahlo’s popularity and image. You’ve probably seen some of the Kahlo paintings at the MFA exhibit on a few mugs, or pairs of socks, or anything sold in a gift shop. Zavala describes this as a “reduction of what she was to her image.” How would she have felt about Fridamania?

“The biggest criticism isn’t how she would feel,” said Zavala, “But rather, what does it do to dilute our understanding of her contribution to history.”

“It whitewashes a woman of color; it Barbie-fies the body of a woman with disabilities; it plucks the convention-defying unibrow,” said Ankori. It presents a distraction to who she actually was: “A radical, taboo-breaking artist with a passionate socialist political stand. Making her merchandise and domesticating her is undoing her legacy.”

Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular, through June 16, MFA, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston.