For Frida Kahlo, It's All A One-Woman Show, With Herself as Artist and Subject

There aren't many artists whose reputations have yo-yo'd like Frida Kahlo's.

During her lifetime and for decades still beyond her death in 1954, she was "just" the colorful painter-wife of the superstar Diego Rivera. Then, beginning in the 1970s, her star eclipsed his: She became the icon of female and ethnic empowerment and of radical self-expression. And now she may be starting to lose out again. Lots of artists that I've talked to say they've had enough of her: In light of current art, her painting can seem overwrought and underskilled, more fussy than profoundly complex. There's something to those complaints about the paintings, but I also think they get the artist wrong. That's because it's not Kahlo's paintings that matter; what matters is the larger act of self-creation they document. She was a master of performance art before the term was coined.

Her crucial artwork was herself in a role: as a woman, and an ethnic woman, and an ethnic woman artist such as the world had never seen.

It took Kahlo a while to come up with that trademark character. At least for a moment, one day in 1926, Kahlo wondered how much she wanted to be known as a woman at all. A formal photograph of the Kahlo family taken that year shows everything as it should be, with Frida as tidy and composed as other members of the bourgeois clan -- except that the 19-year-old is dressed in one of her father's suits and wears her hair slicked back like a man's. That first glimpse of Kahlo gives a hint that, for the rest of her life, who she makes herself out to be will be as important as what she makes as a painter.

Mostly, she doesn't take the transvestite tack (though there are moments when her self-portraits try it on). Instead, she constructs a vision of herself as a very idiosyncratic kind of a woman, immersed in her own homemade visions of femininity and Mexicanness and resistance to norms -- social, sexual, artistic and political.

One of the most important and unusual features of Philly's Frida show is that it lets us watch the building of that vision from the outside, through the eyes of others, as well as in the more constricted view that Kahlo's paintings give.

The show begins with more than 100 photos of the artist, taken from the 400 now held in the private Vicente Wolf collection in New York and never before on public view. (They were once owned by Kahlo herself.) Of all these stunning pictures, by some of the great names in modern photography, there's hardly one in which Kahlo doesn't look as though she's onstage, dressed up rather than just dressed. She wears thick lipstick even for a sickbed photo where most of her face is hidden by medical straps. This isn't vanity, or not only vanity. It's about keeping up a Kahloism that's central to the making of her art -- that is her art. Kahlo appearing out of costume or out of character would be like Picasso giving up his brush.

Kahlo adopted and adapted an eccentric, hybrid version of Mexican folk dress. She could cross a magenta rebozo shawl across her chest in the bandoleer style of Mexico's female revolutionaries, the famous soldaderas, and also wear colonial white lace. Cloth she got from craftspeople in the country's south could be mixed and matched with ancient jewelry left over from defeated Aztec cultures farther north. And she topped off those outfits with a range of exotic hairdos and garlands that mixed indigenous styles and invented conceits. A Mexican curator at this show's opening insisted she'd never seen a thing like them except on Kahlo's head. Like her unpolished painting style, Kahlo's alien costume sets her up as an authentic "primitive" -- a tribe of one -- unsullied by the studied artificiality of European modern art.

Given how well Kahlo established herself as one of the most Mexican of artists, I wonder how many of her American fans even realize that the name "Kahlo" is in fact Hungarian. It arrived in the New World only when the artist's Jewish-born father Wilhelm (later Guillermo, and an atheist) emigrated from Germany in 1891. He married into a family that was equally hybrid, with roots in both colonial Spanish and indigenous Indian culture.

All our identities are at least in part constructed. You decide which bits of your family's Frenchitude or Founding Fatherhood you want to emphasize and which you'll take a pass on. Kahlo started out on less stable cultural foundations than many. That gave her even more leeway than usual in the identity she built. And Kahlo, more than almost any other modern artist, turned that identity-building into an art form.

Like experts who study other famously outre artists, serious Kahlophiles lament the public's neglect of her art in favor of the story of her life. Normally I would feel the same, but in this one artist's case it seems a false distinction. You want to study both to see the whole. That's not because Kahlo's such a fascinating person that you need to go to the paintings to get true insights into her. As a young woman, Kahlo endured a body-crushing accident from which she never quite recovered. Like thousands of others, she lived her life in pain. Then she married an egomaniacal philanderer -- an accident we've seen repeated countless times. The one thing that makes Kahlo's sufferings unique is that she used them as performance props and art supplies.

The Fridamania of the 1980s and '90s led artists to believe that every "inner self" deserved a public outing. It encouraged plenty of self-indulgent navel-gazing. But that's only because Kahlo's followers thought her art was about her, when it was really about a fictional creature she created and to which she gave her name. She called herself "the great concealer," and I think that gets her right. Kahlo's self-portraits are often praised as acts of searching self-inquiry, but I find them more theatrical than probing.