Room Guide

Who was Frida Kahlo? 51 years after her death, there are as many answers to the question as there are audiences to ask it. Kahlo is variously enshrined in the popular imagination as a bohemian artist, a victim turned survivor, proto-feminist, sexual adventurer who challenged gender boundaries, and, with her mixed-race parentage, an embodiment of a hybrid, postcolonial world.

Indeed, Kahlo's position as a globally recognised cult figure has become so powerful that at times it threatens to overshadow her art. First and foremost, Frida Kahlo was a painter, and for this reason Tate Modern's exhibition focuses upon the frank testimony of the paintings themselves.

Between 1926, when she made her first self-portrait, and her death in 1954, Kahlo produced around 200 images. Certainly the biographical details of her remarkable life inflect many aspects of her work, yet her depiction of her body and experiences can also be seen as a response to wider cultural and political debates. For all their apparent naivety, her works frequently reveal an incendiary subtext, whether they are questioning power relationships between developed and developing nations, testing the role of women within a patriarchal society, or attempting to reconcile the global histories and religions of East and West.

Room 1

In this room, My Grandparents, My Parents and I (Family Tree), 1936, sets out Kahlo's genealogy. Her mother was a Mexican mestiza and her father a German immigrant. This bloodline is at the root of her divided loyalties, on the one hand to the indigenous culture of her native Mexico, and on the other to Europe. Kahlo's scrutiny of her mixed race heritage and its relationship to national identity in her newly democratic homeland would resurface throughout her career.

The self-portrait Thinking of Death, 1943, deals explicitly with Kahlo's preoccupation with mortality and the fragility of her body - the legacy of polio in childhood and a near-fatal bus accident. She drew on many different types of funerary imagery in her paintings, including Aztec art and Mexican folk traditions. Later, she extended her range of sources to include Eastern religions. In this work, the third eye chakra in the centre of the forehead, which denotes wisdom or spiritual truth according to Indian Yogic beliefs, has been supplanted with a death's head.

These two paintings, one of beginnings and one of endings, reflect Kahlo's enduring obsession with the universal cycle of life, and her search for harmony between dualistic principles such as life and death, male and female, light and dark, ancient and modern; thematic currents that will be encountered at every turn as the exhibition unfolds.

Room 2  Early works

Kahlo began painting in 1925, during her convalescence from a terrible accident, when a tram collided with the bus on which she was travelling home from school. The impact broke her spine in three places and fractured her right leg, collarbone, ribs and pelvis. From 1925, her life was a battle against the slow deterioration of her body. 'She lived dying', said one friend.

Though a self-taught painter, she was highly educated and her knowledge of art history was extensive. The earliest paintings shown here reveal the influence of European traditions on her work. Kahlo particularly admired the Renaissance masters. The elongated body and stylised gestures of Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress, 1926, and Portrait of Alicia Galant, 1927, recall the figures in a Botticelli or Bronzino. Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress is Kahlo's earliest known self-portrait, and her first serious painting. She was 19 and made it for her boyfriend, fellow student Alejandro Gómez Arias, whose portrait hangs nearby.

In other works, elements of European avant-garde painting come to the fore, including Cubism, Futurism and Neue Sachlichkeit. These overtly modernist paintings reveal Kahlo's early political commitment. As a child, she lived through the Mexican Revolution, and from a young age was interested in politics. She is believed to have joined the Young Communist League, and attended rallies and meetings. In paintings such as Pancho Villa and Adelita, c1927, she celebrates the heroes of the Revolution, placing her own portrait at the centre of the composition.

In 1928, when she was 21, Kahlo embarked on a relationship with Diego Rivera. Rivera, then aged 41, was Mexico's most celebrated artist, famed for politically motivated murals that adorned the walls of numerous public buildings. Encouraged by Rivera, who used aspects of Mexican folk art in his mural schemes, Kahlo began to paint in a more vernacular style. The influence of Rivera's style is evident in a number of her early works. In The Bus, 1929, made the year she and Rivera married, she satirises the class divisions of Mexican society, portraying different types as they ride on the bus. The lower-middle class matron, the proletarian worker in blue overalls, the Indian mother with her infant, the capitalist gringo with a bulging money bag, all line up for our scrutiny. The modern young woman at the end of the bench could be taken for Kahlo herself.

Room 3  Watercolours and Drawings

An unassuming sketch in this room records the accident that was to change Kahlo's life so dramatically. We see the moment of impact, the bodies in the street, and Kahlo lying bandaged on a stretcher. Confined to bed, Kahlo began to paint to relieve her boredom. A carpenter made an easel that could be attached to her bed, and a mirror was placed in the canopy above, allowing her to embark on the series of self-portraits that would become central to her work.

A watercolour and drawing, made during Kahlo's long recuperation, show her as a girl in Coyoacán, an old town that became a suburb of Mexico City. Despite her later identification with indigenous Mexican peoples, hers was an urban, middle-class upbringing. The family home in Coyoacán, now called 'The Blue House' or 'Casa Azul', was built by her father along colonial lines, and it was to this house that she would later return. Kahlo and Rivera lived there from 1940 until her death in 1954, adding another wing to include a studio for Kahlo, and extending the garden.

Alongside these works are two curious drawings featuring the character of Santa Claus. One shows him having a perm in a beauty parlour, while in the other he lounges in a chair, nursing a priapic sombrero in his lap. These humorous sketches are in fact caustic missives directed at the more conservative elements within the Mexican post-revolutionary political scene.

Santa Claus is a cipher for the bourgeois revolutionary leader and former president Venustiano Carranza, who died in 1920. During the bitter power struggles of the Revolution, Carranza had waged a reign of terror against the enlightened and able presidential candidate Alvaro Obregón, and became a bitter enemy of populist revolutionary leaders Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. These are amongst Kahlo's most explicitly political works.

Room 4  Birth and Death

In her work of the early 1930s, Kahlo adopted the characteristic format of Mexican ex-voto paintings. Ex-votos are a Catholic tradition, an offering made as a gesture of thanks for salvation from illness or accident. Painted on small-scale metal panels, a material that Kahlo adopts in the works shown here, they depict both the incident and the saint to whom they are dedicated, along with an inscription describing what had occurred.

However, rather than being tokens of gratitude, Kahlo's 'ex-votos' are unflinching images of traumatic events drawn from her own experience, in which life and death coalesce.

Kahlo began painting My Birth in 1932, following a miscarriage, and completed it after her mother's death, a few months later. Thus, paradoxically, My Birth relates to two deaths. The child's distinctive eyebrows mark her out as Kahlo, while the identity of the mother is shrouded beneath a sheet, and could represent Kahlo's mother or the artist herself.

Around the same time, Kahlo also painted Henry Ford Hospital, 1932. The images of a foetus, a pelvic bone, a female abdomen, and an orchid that resembles a uterus are based on medical illustrations. The snail, she said, referred to the slowness of the miscarriage, while a sixth object, an autoclave, is an instrument used to sterilise medical utensils. The link to sterility probably relates to Kahlo's sense of her own infertility.

Rivera later commented that the paintings Kahlo made in 1932 were 'much better than those she executed before losing her baby,' describing her as: 'The only artist in the history of art who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings.' Indeed, Kahlo told a friend that the painting A Few Small Nips, 1935, based on newspaper accounts of a brutal murder, related to her feelings of being 'murdered by life'. Sometime in the previous year, Rivera had embarked upon an affair with her younger sister Cristina, which wounded Kahlo deeply.

In My Nurse and I, 1937, Kahlo paints herself as a baby with an adult's head, suckling in an Indian wet-nurse's arms. Her preoccupation with her mixed race genealogy takes an ambiguous tone in this work. The composition suggests a Christian Pieta, yet the threatening stone mask invokes darker aspects of Aztec beliefs. Protected and nourished by this ancient Indian bloodline the infant Kahlo is, simultaneously, offered up as sacrificial victim.

Room 5  National Identities

Kahlo's burgeoning sense of national identity was thrown into stark relief by her experience of living in the United States for the best part of four years. Travelling with Rivera as he painted murals in San Francisco, Detroit and New York, she found herself marooned in an alien culture.

Two works, Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, 1932, and My Dress Hangs There, 1933, serve as manifestos for Kahlo's 'Mexicanidad', or sense of pride in being Mexican. In the former, she appears on a pedestal poised between two conflicting worlds - the capitalist industry of the USA, represented by Ford's belching factories, and the agrarian plateaus of Mexico, dotted with ancient temples and ritualistic artefacts. Holding the Mexican flag in her hand, she makes her loyalties clear.

My Dress Hangs There, 1933, set amidst the skyscrapers of New York, ridicules the modern American obsession with sport and sanitation by placing a golf trophy and a toilet on top of classical columns. The temple (Federal Hall), with its steps in the form of a sales graph, and the church, with a dollar sign in its window, are dedicated to the worship of mammon. At the centre of the composition is a traditional Mexican dress, of the type Kahlo took to wearing soon after she married Rivera. By adopting regional costume, and through paintings such as these, Kahlo developed her own distinctive brand of Mexicanidad at a time when, post-revolution, the country was rediscovering its pre-Columbian and indigenous heritage.

Kahlo stated that two accidents shaped her life: the first was the bus accident, the second was Diego Rivera. They married in 1929, divorced in 1939, and remarried in 1940. A key influence on her work and career, he encouraged her to paint and to cultivate her vernacular style, drawing on Mexican folk art. However, in the double portrait shown here, from 1931, she depicts herself as the demure Mexican wife, while her husband takes the lead as the Great Artist, palette and brushes in hand. Like so much of Kahlo's work, the pseudo-naive style masks a more complex reality. The composition is partly based on a well-known European precedent - Jan Van Eyck's fifteenth-century portrait of the Arnolfini Marriage, a reproduction of which Kahlo kept in her studio.

Room 6  Drawings

Studies and preparatory drawings in this room reflect a number of recurring themes in Kahlo's work. The lithograph Frida and the Miscarriage, 1932, can be linked to the painting Henry Ford Hospital, 1932, seen in room four. Kahlo portrays herself and her lost foetus with anatomical precision. The image is divided into two halves, light and dark. On one side embryonic cells divide around a male foetus; on the other the moon weeps, while Kahlo's blood drips into the earth, nourishing plants that are shaped like human body parts. A third arm, clutching an artist's palette, might imply that painting must supplant maternity in Kahlo's life. A drawing called The Dream, 1932, repeats some of the same motifs, such as cellular structures and plants becoming limbs. She shows herself lying naked on a bed, dreaming a cloud of images - a device reminiscent of Surrealist art.

In other drawings Kahlo extends her experimentation with Surrealist imagery. She often amused herself with the Surrealist game of 'Exquisite Corpse', in which one person draws a head on a piece of paper, folds it over, and passes it to the next who adds a torso, and so on. Kahlo was notorious amongst her friends for her risqué and sexually explicit contributions.

In another work, Kahlo portrays Luther Burbank, a Californian horticulturalist famed for his vegetable and fruit hybrids - the painting based on this drawing is included later in the exhibition. She presents Burbank himself as a hybrid, half man, half tree, whose roots are fed by what Kahlo said was his own corpse. This dream-like imagery may owe something to Surrealism, of which, despite her statements to the contrary, Kahlo was very likely aware. However, it could equally stem from the fantastic vein in Mexican popular culture.

Room 7  Still-Lifes

The still-life genre might appear an unlikely vessel for nationalist sentiment, yet in Kahlo's hands, the fruits of the earth become emblematic of pride in her country. The choice of locally grown produce such as prickly pears, corn cobs and pitahayas is a deliberate political stance.

For Kahlo still-life was also a type of indirect self-portraiture, and a number of the themes that run throughout her work are found here. The ripe forms, splitting to reveal fleshy interiors, suggest body parts, and carry an undercurrent of eroticism. Fecundity is linked to death in Fruits of the Earth, 1938. Fresh corn cobs contrast with a dried-up husk, recalling the cycles of life. The theme of mortality is even more explicit in the painting Pitahayas, 1938, with the inclusion of a toy skeleton.

The circular flower painting in this room has a particular connection to Kahlo's life. Ironically, she made it for the American actress Paulette Goddard, with whom Rivera is believed to have had an affair. Rivera's philandering was a contributing factor to the couple's divorce in 1939, though Kahlo herself had a number of extra-marital liaisons.

Room 8  The Two Fridas, 1939

In perhaps her best-known work, The Two Fridas, 1939, Kahlo paints a double self-portrait. It was created during her separation and divorce from Rivera. On the right-hand side Frida sits in traditional Mexican costume, representing the woman that Diego loved. She holds a picture of him as a child in her hand, and her heart is exposed but whole. On the left is the unloved Frida, dressed in a colonial-style wedding dress; her heart is broken and an artery drips blood into her lap. Kahlo once said that The Two Fridas showed the 'duality of her personality'. Whilst presenting an image of a divided self, the painting is also emblematic of a cultural divide: the conflict implicit in the mestizo race, neither fully European nor fully Mexican Indian.

Kahlo made The Two Fridas for the 'International Exhibition of Surrealism' held in Mexico City in 1940. Although some of Surrealism's leading figures, including André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, championed her work, she preferred to keep her distance from the movement. Elements in Kahlo's work that might be considered surreal such as dualism and metamorphosis, can also be traced to traditions in both Aztec and contemporary Mexican culture.

  Kahlo wearing a Tehuana headdress. Photo: Edward B. Silberstein. Courtesy Throckmorton Fine Art, New York

Later in her career, Kahlo added another element to this blend of Mexican and European influences: an interest in Eastern religions and mysticism. The Little Deer, from 1946, is an example of this complex assimilation of sources. Kahlo's head is conjoined with the body of a stag, which is pierced with arrows. No doubt the work relates to Kahlo's suffering due to her failing health and turbulent relationship with Rivera, but it is also a summation of a world view in which different cultures and belief systems combine.

At the bottom of the canvas in The Little Deer, Kahlo inscribed the word 'carma', a reference to the Eastern concept of reincarnation; while the arrows allude to Christian images of St Sebastian. In Aztec culture, the deer symbolised the right foot - Kahlo's injured limb - and relates to the animal alter-ego, a subject that fascinated Kahlo. Another painting in this room shows Kahlo with one of her Itzcuintli dogs, a breed that can be traced back to the Aztecs, who believed that they accompanied the dead to the underworld.

The alter-ego, or split identity is likewise a focus in Two Nudes in a Forest, 1939. Two women lie entwined on the fringes of a lush jungle. One is light skinned, one dark skinned. They might represent two aspects of a single nature, or the mixed racial origins of the Mexican people. The painting also touches on Kahlo's bisexuality - the pair are watched by a spider monkey, a symbol of lust - and could equally be interpreted as Kahlo herself and a woman she loved.

Room 9  Self-Portraits

Self-portraiture was Kahlo's most consistent and successful mode of expression, and the genre that allowed her to penetrate and dissect the very core of her being. Yet compared to other paintings in which she depicts herself, the works on these walls reveal surprisingly little variation in pose or mood. Kahlo's characteristic features are as impassive as a mask. It is only the addition of symbols, such as teardrops, thorns, or arterial red ribbons that indicate psychological intent. In this respect, the self-portraits could be compared to religious icons.

Viewed as a series spanning a decade, however, a gradual refinement over time can be discerned. The increasingly stylised presentation has been compared to the way in which celebrities of the period cultivated their image through publicity photographs - Kahlo counted a number of American and Mexican film stars amongst her friends, and certainly, paintings like these helped to increase her public recognition. A saleable commodity compared to her more excoriating works, self-portraiture allowed her to establish herself as an artist in her own right and to gain financial independence from Rivera.

  Kahlo with Magenta Reboza, 1941. Photo: Nickolas Muray © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives

Kahlo's fascination with identity and delight in masquerade was apparent even in her early life - she appears in a number of family photographs wearing a man's suit. Soon after she met Rivera, Kahlo began to dress in the traditional Mexican clothes that would come to define her image for posterity. In particular, she chose the regional costumes of the Tehuana women of southern Mexico, who were known for their matriarchal society and associated with a proud indigenous culture - Kahlo sports an elaborate Tehuana headdress in two of the self-portraits shown here.

The full skirts, shawls, braided hairstyles, and heavy jewellery that she adopted were worn in part to please Rivera, and in part to conceal her physical ailments. Yet it was also a political statement in support of an authentic and independent Mexican heritage. Similar ideological principles informed her inclusion of the landscape and native animals of Mexico in these paintings.

If many of the self-portraits assume the fixity of a mask, in one, the principle is reversed. In The Mask, 1945, Kahlo conceals her features behind a papier-mâché caricature of a figure from Mexican history known as La Malinche. La Malinche was the Indian mistress and translator for the conquistador Cortés, who overthrew the Aztec empire and claimed Mexico for Spain. Though reviled as a traitor ever since, as the mother of Cortés's child, she is also regarded as the founder of Mexico's mixed-race culture. In this conflicted character Kahlo found a mirror for her own anxieties, sometimes signing her letters 'Frida, La Malinche'.

Room 10  Friends and Patrons

This side-room includes a number of portraits of Kahlo's friends and patrons. During the months she spent in San Francisco, from 1930-31, she produced several portraits of people she met there. Amongst them, a careful pencil drawing of Lady Cristina Hastings, whose explosive personality intrigued Kahlo, and a nude of an African American woman, called Eva Frederick, about whom nothing else is known.

It was in the United States that Kahlo first found recognition, but from around 1945 her work was increasingly acknowledged in her native country, and included in major exhibitions. However, it was not until 1953, a year before her death, that she was given her first solo show in Mexico.

Kahlo never found it easy to earn a living from her art, despite the support of several enthusiastic patrons. One such was the engineer Eduardo Morillo Safa, who purchased some thirty pictures from her over the years and commissioned her to paint five members of his family, including his mother, Doña Rosita Morillo. The portrait of Doña Rosita, shown here, was one of Kahlo's favourites. This affectionate image reprises familiar themes. As always, Kahlo presents death as part of the cycle of life, mingling prickly flowering plants with dried leaves and dead sticks in the background foliage, an appropriate setting for a woman at the end of life. The motif of ribbons or threads that Kahlo used to suggest emotional ties is also employed. Here, the knitting wool in Doña Rosita's hands leads out beyond the picture frame, as if to make a direct connection to the viewer. In essence the painting is a vanitas, calling to mind the inevitability of death.

Room 11  Achieving Equilibrium

Towards the end of her life, Kahlo's art focused more than ever on her deteriorating physical and psychological health. In the diary she kept during this period, next to a drawing of her body, she wrote the words: 'I am disintegration'.

By the time she painted The Broken Column, in 1944, she was reduced to wearing a steel corset, and in constant pain. She portrays herself against a barren, fissured landscape that echoes the yawning cleft in her torso. An Ionic column takes the place of her damaged spine, while nails pierce her flesh, suggesting the religious iconography of martyrdom.

In Self-Portrait with Portrait of Dr Farill, 1951, made just three years before she died, she appears in a wheelchair in front of a portrait of her surgeon. She holds an artist's palette that metamorphoses into a heart, while the brushes in her hand drip blood. This was one of her last successful paintings. After this date, she was unable to work without taking painkillers, and the brushwork and detail of her compositions became looser and less polished.

Other paintings in this room express Kahlo's developing spiritual quest, as she sought to assimilate philosophies from the ancient and modern cultures of both East and West into an overarching world view.

In the extraordinarily detailed painting Moses, 1945, the sun is presented as 'the centre of all religions'. The composition is divided into three registers, which consist of images of gods in the upper section and portraits of 'heroes' below, including Alexander the Great, Martin Luther, Napoleon and Hitler, whom she called 'the lost child'. At the bottom are the masses, and scenes relating to the process of evolution. The painting was inspired by an essay by Sigmund Freud that made a link between Ancient Egyptian beliefs, Moses and the origins of monotheistic religion. The infant Moses has been given the third eye of wisdom, a device Kahlo sometimes used in her portraits of Rivera.

Rivera is shown with just such an eye in The Love-Embrace of the Universe, 1949. Though depicted as an adult, he is naked, and Kahlo cradles him like a baby. She in turn is enfolded in the arms of an embodied Mexican earth that literally roots her in the landscape. Sun and moon divide the painting in two, symbolising the union of opposites in this pre-Columbian universe.

Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954 at the age of 47. Doctors reported a pulmonary embolism, relating to a bout of pneumonia, though it has also been suggested that she committed suicide. The last entry in her diary, written while in hospital a short time earlier, is typical of her grimly defiant humour even at this bleakest hour. She bids farewell to her doctors as she awaits discharge with words that carry a double meaning: 'I hope the exit is joyful - and I hope never to come back - Frida.'

Text by Jane Burton