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

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Frida Kahlo

An exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art celebrates the centennial of artist Frida Kahlo's birth.

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Where some of Kahlo's colleagues in bohemia may have adopted ethnic or outlandish poses on the street, she also made such posing central to the images she paints.

Frida the boldly authentic mexicana is, of course, front and center in her self-portraits. Those paintings (about half her total works) actually make her out to be less gorgeous than she comes off in the photographs, maybe because personal beauty isn't part of her artistic image as a monkey-taming "primitive." It's the paintings that make that famous unibrow into the artist's unique, almost animal attribute. It is barely there in many photos.

But the same constructed identity is also evident in everything Kahlo paints, whatever the subject. Her crude style, for instance, always borrows from the votive paintings, known as retablos, turned out by Mexico's anonymous folk painters. They made them for devout Mexicans, in commemoration or anticipation of miraculous relief from suffering. By painting as she does, Kahlo appropriates some of the exotic authenticity and fervor of those earlier pictures. ("Magic" imagery from much older Aztec objects could also find a place in her art.)

The abstruse, even unintelligible symbolism Kahlo sprinkles through her work also sets her up as a cultural rarity, out in a world of her own. By using imagery that is so hard to understand, Kahlo becomes something like the last speaker of some vanished tongue.

I can't say I admire Kahlo's faux-naif, pseudo-primitive way of painting. In the hands of an absolute sophisticate -- which she was -- it can seem cloying and contrived, or just unskilled. The handful of antique retablos on show in Philadelphia have more grace and emotional intensity than Kahlo's self-conscious derivations from them.

And I don't have much patience for her symbol-slinging: Whatever wisdom her riddles finally reveal rarely repays their deciphering.

But the larger picture that Kahlo's art presents, of someone committed to investigating how identities get built -- by building one herself, on canvas and in life -- strikes me as absolutely radical and fascinating. It has parallels in Marcel Duchamp's experiments with gender-bending early in the last century. And it anticipates the great photographs Cindy Sherman made in the late 1970s, which let us watch as their everyday female protagonists (always played by the artist herself, as it happens) take on roles they've learned from Hollywood.

The weaknesses in Kahlo's paintings are irrelevant, so long as you think of those pictures as nothing more than documents or ephemera left over from the larger creative project of her life. We don't blame great dancers or architects -- or performance artists -- if there are flaws in the images and evidence that fill us in on their achievements. Even when that documentation comes from the artist's hand, we can choose to look through its shortcomings to see the endeavor behind it.

Frida Kahlo is on view through May 18 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Call 215-763-8100 or visit http://www.philamuseum.org.