Character, Caricature, Crucible By Catherine Lacey

Though I have lived in Mexico City for a few years now, and have loved Frida Kahlo’s enigmatic and entrancing self-portraits since my first encounter with one as a teenage art student, I’ve never been to the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacán – a short drive or a long walk from my apartment. 

Everyone tells me that the museum – La Casa Azul (the Blue House), as it’s also known, the home where she lived much of her short life – is well worth the crowds and necessity of booking your specifically timed tickets a month or more in advance. I believe these reports, and the museum welcomes around half a million visitors a year, yet I’ve stared at the website’s calendar on several occasions, trying to discern if I really am available at 2.15pm six weeks from this Wednesday, then given up. It feels somehow wrong to pre-plan an encounter with the life of a woman who prized her freedom and spontaneity; I remain uninitiated. 

However, it was easy enough to stop by Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art on a whim one recent Saturday, and I was soon faced with The Two Fridas 1939, one of Kahlo’s most recognisable and affecting works, which she painted during her brief divorce from Diego Rivera. (They later remarried). Standing there, I felt that familiar fizzy, sacred overwhelm in the presence of Frida’s defiant stare, her pain, and her passionate refusal to be subsumed by that pain. It is sometimes hard to process how much power she could fit into a single canvas, a triumph that has captivated us for nearly a century. The frenzied fandom around Kahlo in recent decades has sometimes felt disheartening, because the paintings themselves – and the challenging ideas inside them – often seem lost in the adoration. Returning to her work, it’s easy to feel the ferocity of her vision where all that mania began. With The Two Fridas in particular, I can sense something of the probing, unfinished love that led a bereft Rivera, at his brilliant wife’s funeral, to eat a handful of her ashes. 

Once, when some friends visited from Los Angeles, they took me with them to Coyoacán in the hope of somehow finding a way into the museum, after failing to get tickets online. A nice woman at the front door admitted it was hopeless. Vendors of myriad Frida Kahlo trinkets huddled around the tourists lined up around the block, almost all foreigners, and I found the scene depressing for reasons I couldn’t entirely articulate. 

We embarked on our alternative plan to visit the Leon Trotsky House Museum, just around the corner from La Casa Azul. Kahlo and Rivera used their considerable influence to secure political asylum for Trotsky in Mexico in 1937, years after he was expelled from the Communist party and deported from the Soviet Union for opposing Stalin’s government. The dispossessed politician and his wife lived with the great painters in La Casa Azul for their first two years in Mexico; Leon and Frida soon had a brief affair, and she made a painting for him, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky 1937, before the Trotskys moved to their own home in 1939. A little over a year later, Trotsky was assassinated there by an undercover Soviet agent wielding an ice pick. The home, now a museum, has been preserved almost exactly as it was at the time of his death, and is often half empty. 

In my estimation, the site of Trotsky’s assassination should be a requisite stop for any Frida Kahlo fan, though it seems precious few are even aware of its existence. Kahlo was a card-carrying communist for most of her life, and it’s clear that her connection to the former Soviet leader was not capricious or shallow. She believed passionately that a better world was both possible and imperative. She believed in social and political revolution, and the dire necessity to destroy the classist, racist, sexist systems of control that entrap so many in unnecessary pain and suffering; life itself, it was clear to Kahlo, gives us plenty of pain and suffering as it is. 

The potency of those beliefs cannot be divorced from her paintings; they are intractable. What’s more, her politics and art-making were not only radical for the times she lived in but remain radical today – perhaps even more so. A more sceptical part of me fears that Kahlo’s popularity sometimes has a way of sanitising her work in the public imagination. Her wild imagery is reduced to mere whimsy or filed under surrealism. Her beauty and unapologetic bisexuality turns her into a sex symbol. Kahlo’s deepest beliefs and habits might alienate many of her fans (or at least her fans from the United States) if they were ever considered in earnest. 

It’s clear to me that to love an artist’s work, and yet to accuse that artist of suffering from an excess of popularity is an inherently hypocritical position to take. It is the turgid province of teenagers trying to stake a special claim on their favourite band. What gives anyone the right to say that an artist one personally enjoys should not also be enjoyed by too many others? How many is too many? And yet it’s also true that once an audience is large enough, it can have a warping effect on its object. On the far end of the spectrum, the Louvre estimates that 30,000 people look at the Mona Lisa every day, and yet I’m not sure if anyone has really seen the Mona Lisa in many decades. 

A quick search online reveals there are several varieties of Frida Kahlo blankets, bath towels and tea towels for sale. There are also Frida Kahlo notebooks, notecards, throw pillows, figurines, coffee mugs, at least one toiletry travel bag, many tote bags, hair scrunchies, keychains, enamelled pins, earrings and silk scarves. You can buy Frida Kahlo’s head as an indoor plant pot. There’s a chopping board available for sale etched with the image of Frida Kahlo smoking a cigarette, and a clock face decorated with Frida Kahlo and a parrot. Frida Kahlo’s eyes are available for purchase on a silk sleeping mask, and if none of that is enough, you can take Frida apart and put her back together again as a jigsaw puzzle. 

There have been several films and documentaries about Kahlo’s life, dozens of biographies, at least one opera and a musical, and she has appeared as a character in many works of fiction. Friends of mine with children in Brooklyn report that due to the inclusion of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits in the art curriculum for public elementary students, scores of mini Fridas flood the streets of Park Slope every Halloween. No one, not even the children, seems capable of resisting either the character or caricature of Kahlo. 

This rabid souvenir-ification could be understood as the chiral result of the way she was first glamorised as a symbol and belittled as an artist in American news media. In 1933, while travelling with Rivera to Detroit, she was written up in The Detroit News under the headline ‘Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art’. During that interview, Kahlo had the confidence to say that her husband did ‘pretty well for a little boy’, but that it was she, herself, who was ‘the big artist’. The journalist notes that she made this claim between bouts of laughter, and while the article strikes a mostly rueful tone, it’s also acknowledged that Kahlo has ‘a very skilful and beautiful style’. 

Four years later, a photograph of Kahlo posing beside an agave plant in an outfit reminiscent of Las Soldaderas (the female soldiers who fought alongside Emiliano Zapata in the Mexican Revolution) was used as the lead image in a heroically condescending piece for Vogue titled ‘Señoras of Mexico’ . ‘Not all Mexicans are picturesque Indians in big straw hats’, it opens. ‘There is actually a group of what, for want of a more pleasing term, must be called “society”.’ The piece is mainly concerned with how the elites of post-Revolution Mexico are faring in terms of social events, drawing-room chatter, and ‘good’ marriages. Towards the end of the piece, Rivera’s studio is noted as ‘the Mecca of foreign visitors, who all want to meet the great mural painter and see his beautiful wife, Frieda [sic], in the native costumes she affects.’ The caption beneath the portrait of the young artist reads: ‘Señora Diego Rivera’. 

As I was writing this essay, I noticed that the actors Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep, while on an international press tour for the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, had taken over La Casa Azul for some kind of publicity event. With all due respect to these talented women, one simply has to wonder what Frida Kahlo – an artist of true vision and consequence who forever changed painting, and an avowed communist discomfited with the materialism of the United States during her era – has to do with a film valourising the high materialism of a 21st-century fashion magazine. In what sense is her name being evoked to sell or elevate a film that’s about a powerful and wealthy woman ensuring that certain massive corporations sell more mass-produced stuff? Kahlo’s name, visage and general vibe are almost constantly taken out of context in order to signify something, instead of being allowed to possess its own significance. Perhaps for Streep and Hathaway’s event, Kahlo’s home was simply being used as a backdrop of wholesale popularity, while also making it clear that the actors were giving this press conference in Mexico. 

This objectification differs, though only slightly, from the way that other 20th-century cultural heroines have been commodified. When American writer and journalist Joan Didion’s image started being used as a shorthand for ‘literary it girl’, or when I noticed a wildly expensive leather jacket emblazoned with her portrait across the back, or when Didion herself was used as a model for a haute couture advertising campaign towards the end of her life, I felt a familiar, vexed exasperation. Of course, Didion was a cool and fashionable person, who wrote cool and fashionable prose, yet the question remains why a female artist or writer is so often transformed into a symbol or projection as a prerequisite for her work to be taken seriously on a large scale. 

The ostensible justification for why Kahlo’s image is embossed on all those fridge magnets and cross-stitched on pillowcases is, of course, a bit different from Didion’s case, as Kahlo’s image features prominently in her work itself. Just a year after the ‘Señoras of Mexico’ article, Vogue published another concerning Kahlo, this time to mark the occasion of her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky appeared in full colour, on a whole page, but the dedication to the famous, exiled Soviet leader was omitted. The majority of the piece focuses on her childhood and marriage to Rivera instead of her art. What strikes me about this article, however, is not the sexism or the avoidance of the concept of communism (unsurprising in 1938), but rather the suggestion that her work is frequently ‘an expression of a personal experience. Even when she does not herself appear in a canvas she somehow pervades the picture.’ 

Kahlo’s physical presence (her disabled body, her striking beauty, those incomprehensible eyes) does indeed seem to permeate her work, even when she is not a subject of the painting. The more I look at her paintings now, in 2026, and think about them in the context in which they were created, the more it seems that, given the fact that her appearance – as a mixed-race woman, as the tiny wife of a giant painter – was being used to keep her down, she understood that her ability to reverse this fate was to use that very same image as a way to transcend the limits being forced on her. Perhaps Kahlo understood something about the image of a female artist and its relation to her success long before the rest of us caught on. Perhaps that was why she laughed through that interview with the journalist in Detroit, and could easily quip that she, at 25, was the greater artist in comparison with her wildly famous and much older husband. 

In La Roma Sur in Mexico City, I often pass by a restaurant with a fair amount of Frida Kahlo paraphernalia on display. I’ve never set foot in the place, though the waiters seem friendly enough. After walking past it for the umpteenth time, I asked my husband, who was born here, if we should maybe give it a try. He immediately said what I had already been thinking: we simply couldn’t trust them with all that Frida Kahlo stuff everywhere – not because we don’t love Kahlo, but because we do. 

It’s hard not to wonder what the artist herself would make of all of this, and even though it’s a ridiculous question, and impossible to answer, I keep wondering. What would she think of all these permutations of her self-portraits turned into infinite trinkets? Would she ever be able to dine in a restaurant that was built like a shrine to her? How would she feel to know that her painting The Dream (The Bed) 1940 sold for nearly 55 million dollars in 2025? It was the highest recorded price for any female artist, and outperformed Rivera’s highest grossing painting by nearly a factor of four. While certainly the art market has its own system of value that matters little to me, something tells me that the very idea of a painting this expensive would possibly inflame Kahlo. There, too, her work signifies something – a non-fungible asset, a storage system for a billionaire’s cash – instead of possessing its own significance. 

At its heart, I know it isn’t really possible for the distorting lens of infamy to rob a body of artwork of its original meaning, but it still pains me to see her work, which feels so intensely personal, so viscerally penetrating, slapped on so many coffee mugs as if it were all merely decorative. 

I’ve still never been to La Casa Azul, but I did, some years ago now, visit the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo House-Studio Museum, the famous Juan O’Gorman houses connected by a bridge in San Ángel, where the two lived and painted for many years. For reasons unknown to me, there’s no need to pre-purchase a ticket to this very special place, and there’s no agonising line to get in. At least the day that I went, there were no Frida Kahlo fridge magnets for sale on the street outside either. 

San Ángel, as a neighbourhood, caters less to tourists than Coyoacán, and I suppose Kahlo’s fans feel there’s nothing to see in her studio – that it was just a place where she lived and painted. But the calm inside that house is so powerful to feel nearly spiritual. It’s easy to imagine having a few clear thoughts, and accomplishing some serious work, inside such a refuge.

^{Frida: The Making of an Icon, 25 June 2026 – 3 January 2027} 

^{Catherine Lacey is an American writer who lives in Mexico City. She is the author of seven books including Biography of X (2023), published in the UK by Granta.} 

^{Organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in collaboration with Tate Modern. The exhibition is in partnership with Lead Global Supporter, Bank of America. Supported by John J. Studzinski CBE. Further support from The Dyers’ Company. With additional support from the Frida: The Making of an Icon Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate International Council, Tate Patrons, Tate Members and Tate Americas Foundation. The media partner is The Times and The Sunday Times.}