Fridamania: Notes on a Frida Kahlo Exhibition as a Perfect Crime Scene

Frida Kahlo: Representation of the Accident (undated) 

 tate.org.uk [1]

 

I. 

 

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of Frida Kahlo and wouldn't have gone to Tate Modern's current exhibition Frida: The Making of an Icon (25 June 2026 - 3 Jan 2027) if it wasn't top of the Little Greek's list of things she wanted to do on her birthday ... 

 

And so, despite certain reservations - not so much about the artist and her work, but the highly commercial, punter-pleasing nature of the exhibition itself - off we set on a grey and drizzly Tuesday morning to Bankside, only stopping first for coffee and croissants at the Royal Exchange (as you do) ... 

 

 

II.

 

There's a combination of reasons why I have never been entirely taken with Frida Kahlo and her work. 

 

Firstly, there are those elements of dreamy surrealism and folksy magical realism that seduced André Breton, but which I find irritating after a while; too many symbols, Mozart. 

 

Secondly, her concerns to do with gender, postcolonial identity, the female body and its experience of pain, revolutionary Mexican politics, etc., are ultimately not mine and whilst I'm vaguely interested in what she has to say about these things, I don't want them forced upon me in painting after painting. 

 

Also, how many self-portraits by the same artist can one reasonably be expected to find interesting: at what point does it all become a wee bit repetitive and reveal both technical limitation and narrow thematic focus [2] when an artist simply paints her own boat? 

 

Kahlo only produced around 150 works and of these over a third feature her own monobrowed likeness and whilst she certainly had a distinctive (and not unattractive) look, it's not one I find as endlessly fascinating as many people today clearly do [3].    

 

 

III. 

 

The exhibition was spread over ten rooms, each with a different title and theme. A standard adult ticket was priced at £25—or £64 if you wanted a two-course lunch in the Level 6 restaurant (where I highly recommend the grilled octopus, even if the onglet steak left me underwhelmed).

 

Writing in The Guardian, art critic Jonathan Jones is quick to point out that the exhibition only features thirty-six works by Kahlo herself and that it is supplemented not only with photographs and archival materials (including several Tehuana dresses), but by a wide range of works produced by contemporaries and those who have since been influenced by her art, image, and legend, helping to manufacture the Frida Kahlo myth-cum-global-commercial-brand.        

 

Actually, Jones says the show is "padded out with responses by lesser artists" [4], but that's a bit unfair in its sweeping dismissiveness of artists that include monumental figures like Diego Rivera and influential contemporaries like Judy Chicago. To be honest, I enjoyed seeing some of their works more than I did looking at Kahlo's own. 

 

In fact, unlike Jones - and unlike The Observer's art critic Laura Cumming, who also argues that the Tate exhibition woefully sells Kahlo short [5] - I was pleased to discover that this was not merely an exhibition by Kahlo, but an exhibition about her and, in particular, about how the world succumbed to Fridamania.    

 

Ms Cumming complains that the artist's own work is singularly missing from the show, but I think she's missing the point. 

 

The clue to the exhibition is right there in the title: The Making of an Icon. The curators [6] aren't trying to give us a pure and predictable retrospective; they are documenting the exact process by which Kahlo has disappeared beneath multiple interpretations and mass-produced merchandise - it's le crime parfait, as Baudrillard would say [7]. 

 

Since Kahlo is now present everywhere, her ringing absence in the galleries is no longer an issue. 

  

 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] As is well-known, Kahlo was severely injured in a bus crash when she was eighteen (1925). And perhaps my favourite image in the Tate exhibition discussed here is this one in which she restages the accident with a rag doll and toy horse-and-cart. As Jonathan Jones says, there's a primal quality to Kahlo's memories of this devastating event and this picture suggests it marked the end of childhood innocence and pain-free joy. Photo by Stephen Alexander (20 Oct 2026). 

 

[2] To be honest, I'm not overly concerned by these things. That is to say, I don't much care about so-called technical deficiencies in her work or even if her range of external reference was narrow and this led to repetition and self-obsessiveness. 

      But ultimately, unlike Madonna, I just wouldn't want one of her works hanging on my wall - they simply don't hold my interest for very long, with one or two exceptions, such as the miniature oil on tin plate painting titled in English 'Girl with a Death Mask' (1938), that really charmed me at the exhibition (a print is available in the Tate shop). 

 

[3] It is worth recalling that Kahlo remained a relatively unknown figure until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and an assortment of feminists, queers, political activists, etc., all began to see themselves reflected in her life and work. 

 

[4] Jonathan Jones, 'Frida: The Making of an Icon review', The Guardian (22 June, 2026). 

 

[5] Laura Cumming, 'Frida: The Making of an Icon sells a great artist short', The Observer (25 June 2026).

      Among several criticisms - mostly aimed at the cack-handed portraits by other artists on display and members of the viewing public who dared hold up smartphones in order to record their own Instagram homages - Ms Cumming complains that "what is singularly missing from this show, first to last, is the artist's own work". I will address this point in the main text. 

 

[6] The exhibition was curated by Tobias Ostrander and Beatriz García-Velasco. The show was organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

 

[7] I'm thinking here of Jean Baudrillard's argument in The Perfect Crime (Verso, 1996), where he refers to the extermination and vanishing of reality. 

      Interestingly, Jonathan Jones notices how, in the Tate show, Kahlo as "a real person who made intensely autobiographical work" suddenly disappears only to be replaced by "homages, restagings, deconstructions and, finally, merchandise", but he fails to understand why this is symptomatic of the times in which we live and ends his review by simply defending her true greatness. 

 

 

For a sister post to this one on accidentally becoming a Ballardian angel, click here.

      

 

Reflections on Milo Moiré's PlopEgg Painting (With a Note on Heide Hatry's Expectations)

Milo Moiré: PlopEgg (2014)

Photo by Peter Palm

milomoire.com

 

 

I. 

 

British art critic Jonathan Jones really doesn't like performance art and he wants the world - or at any rate his Guardian readership - to know it:  

"Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or lying." [1]

Obviously - and by his own admission - he's overstating things for polemic effect. But still it's clear that he's not a fan of contemporary performance art which, in his view, lacks power, fails to take any real risk, and reveals the extent to which today's practitioners are distanced from "real aesthetic values or real human life". 

 

Practitioners, for example, such as Swiss artist Milo Moiré, whom followers of Torpedo the Ark will recall I have discussed in earlier posts which can be found here and here. 

 

 

II. 

 

Performed at Art Cologne 2014, Moiré's PlopEgg, involved the expelling of paint filled eggs from her vagina on to a canvas, thus creating an instant abstract work of art. At the end of the performance, the canvas was folded, smoothed, and then unfolded to create a symmetrical image resembling one used in a Rorschach test.    

 

Dismissing Moiré as simply "the latest nude egg layer from Germany" [2], Jones denies that PlopEgg is an interesting feminist statement about female nudity, fertility and creativity; it is, rather, "absurd, gratuitous, trite and desperate". 

 

The thing is, even if Jones is right, and Moiré's conceptual work uniting painting and performance is all these things and succeeds only in perfectly capturing "the cultural inanity of our time", what's wrong with that?            

 

And, actually, Jones is not right: PlopEgg resonates in many ways on many levels for many of us; we think, for example, not just of female genitalia as represented in the history of art and of relatively recent contributions to this tradition by Judy Chicago, Annie Sprinkle, Jamie McCartney, et al, but also of Bataille's astonishing novella L'histoire de l'œil (1928) and the famous scene in which Simone inserts a soft-boiled egg into her cunt (as she does later with a raw bull's testicle and, finally, a priest's eyeball). 

 

We think also of Leda, the Aetolian princess, who was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan; the union resulting in an egg plopping out of her vagina, from which the beautiful Helen was hatched. And we even recall with a smile the beautiful jade eggs that Gwyneth Paltrow encourages women to insert in order that they may gain a greater experience of ther own bodies and increase their feminine energy [click here].      

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Jonathan Jones, 'The artist who lays eggs with her vagina - or why performance art is so silly', The Guardian (22 April, 2014): click here to read the article in full online. All quotes that follow from Jones are taken from this piece.  

 

[2] Jones doesn't specify who else he is thinking of when he refers to these egg layers from Germany, but one possible candidate might be Heide Hatry and her ambiguous performance piece entitled Expectations (2006-08), in which she too squeezes an egg out of her vagina. 

      In one variation of the work, Hatry, dressed as a businesswoman and carrying a laptop, throws the egg directly at the lens of the camera which is filming her, almost as if she wants the viewer to look foolish or feel embarrassed by what they're waching (i.e. to know what it's like to have egg on their face). To discover more about this work, click here. 

 

  

In Memory of Hypatia

Rachel Weisz as Hypatia in the 2009 film  

Agora (dir. Alejandro Amenábar)

I. Hypatia: The Spirit of Plato and the Body of Aphrodite

Whether we choose to think of her romantically as the last of the Hellenes, or as the first early-medieval woman to be murdered for practising the pagan arts of science, mathematics, and philosophy (things regarded as suspiciously close to heresy and to witchcraft within the Christian imagination), Hypatia was an astonishing figure; virtuous, tolerant, and highly intelligent. Whilst no ancient depictions of her have survived, she was also said by Damascius to be exceedingly beautiful and fair of form.


II. Hypatia: From Philosophical Martyr to Feminist Icon 

Born in 4th century Alexandria, Hypatia was a prominent Neoplatonist and renowned teacher, who, in her later life, advised the Roman prefect Orestes, who was then feuding with the anti-Semitic Christian bishop of Alexandria, Cyril.

This would prove to be fatal: for - as we shall discuss in more detail below - Hypatia was accused by Cyril's supporters of deliberately sowing discord and preventing any reconciliation between the latter and Orestes. In March 415, she was murdered by a brotherhood of fanatic monks known as the parabalani, under Cyril's command.

The particularly brutal nature of her death - Hypatia was flayed alive by the monks who scraped the flesh from her bones using razor sharp oyster shells - caused shock waves throughout Byzantium and she was honoured, like Socrates, as a martyr by her fellow philosophers who became increasingly dismayed by the moral fanaticism that characterised early Christianity.

Many centuries later, Hypatia was celebrated as an embodiment of reason and freedom of thought; Voltaire declaring her to be a universal genius. In the 20th century, she was also regarded as a feminist icon; Judy Chicago giving her a prominent place at the triangular table in her famous installation The Dinner Party (1974-79).

And still, today, in the 21st century, Hypatia's life continues to fascinate many scholars, writers, and artists. Most recently, for example, we were treated to the 2009 film, Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Rachel Weisz. Despite its numerous historical inaccuracies, the film should be commended for identifying religious fundamentalism as the great curse or blemish upon mankind, then as now.     


III. Hypatia Versus the Crucified

When Cyril succeeded his uncle, Theophilus, as the bishop of Alexandria, it was obvious there was trouble ahead for Hypatia. For whilst Theophilus was strongly opposed to Neoplatonism, he was prepared to tolerate Hypatia, whom he admired. But not so Cyril - a man happy to persecute his enemies and put his prejudices into practice. In 414, for example, he closed all the synagogues in Alexandria and confiscated all property belonging to the Jews before expelling them from the city.

This action appalled Orestes and he sent a scathing report to the emperor. The conflict between these two men quickly escalated and the parabalani made an attempt on the life of the Roman prefect who, as noted, frequently consulted Hypatia for advice - much to Cyril's irritation. Thus, despite her universal popularity, Cyril set out to discredit Hypatia and undermine her reputation; he alleged, for example, that she had engaged in occultism and beguiled people through her Satanic wiles.       

Things came to a bloody head when, during the Christian period of Lent, the parabalani attacked Hypatia's carriage as she was travelling home. She was dragged into a nearby church, stripped, tortured, and killed. Not only was she flayed alive, as previously mentioned, but her body was dismembered and the limbs burnt.

So much, then, for the religion of Love ... Hypatia's vain hope that Neoplatonism and Christianity might peacefully coexist and cooperate was now seen as an impossibility by philosophers, who now regarded the followers of Jesus with contempt and proudly emphasised the noble Greek origins of their ideas.

As Nietzsche would say, the battle lines were drawn: Dionysus versus the Crucified ...